$30 Guitar Build Shows What You Can Do With Amazon Parts

Most guitarists buy their axes fully assembled from big names like Fender, Gibson, and… maybe Yamaha? Sure. But there are a dedicated set that relish in mixing and matching parts and even bui…

Making A Guitar Go To Eleven, The Hard Way

At the end of the day, all it takes to make a guitar go to eleven is a new knob. Making the knob is another thing — that takes a shop full of machine tools, the expertise to use them, and a w…

Arduino Auto-Glockenspiel Looks Proper In Copper

What is it about solenoids that makes people want to make music with them? Whatever it is, we hope that solenoids never stop inspiring people to make instruments like [CamsLab]’s copper pipe …

The Small And Silly Synth Now Even Smaller (But Just As Silly)

What do you do when you’ve carved out a niche for yourself as a builder of small and useless synthesizers? Why, build an even smaller and less useful synthesizer, of course! If you’ve b…

It’s A Microphone And A Spring Reverb All In One

We’re so used to reverb effects being simply another software plugin that it’s easy to forget the electromechanical roots of the effect. Decades ago, a reverb would have been a metal sp…

A Tube Guitar Amp For A Modest Budget

There’s a mystique among both audiophiles and musicians about vacuum technology, thus having a tube amp still carries a bit of a cachet. New ones can be bought for eye-watering prices and old…

A Yamaha DX7 On A USB Dongle

The Yamaha DX7 was released in 1983, with its FM synthesis engine completely revolutionizing the electronic music world at the time. It didn’t come cheap, and still doesn’t today, but w…

Turning A Saxophone Into A MIDI Controller

Most of the time, if you’re looking for a MIDI controller, you’re going to end up with some kind of keyboard or a fancy button pad. The saxophone is an altogether more beguiling instrum…

Two-Channel Guitar Stomp Box Makes Momentary Switches Latching

When we first saw [Maarten Tromp]’s article about a “momentary latching switch” for guitar effects pedals, we have to admit to being a bit confused. When it comes to push-button s…

Lessons In Mass Production From An Atari Punk Console

Sometimes the most interesting part of a project isn’t the widget itself, but what it teaches you about the manufacturing process. The story of the manufacturing scale-up of this Atari Punk C…

Virginia Cave Is The Largest Musical Instrument In The World

Hit something with a hammer, and it makes a sound. If you’re lucky, it might even make a pleasant sound, which is the idea behind the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns, Virginia. The or…

Oh, The Places You’ll Go With Stop Motion Animation

Robots made of broken toy parts, stop-motion animation, and a great song to tie it all together were not on our bingo card for 2023, but the results are perfect. [Mootroidxproductions] recently rel…

Pour One Out For This Bottle-Playing Robot

If you have an iota of musicality, you’ve no doubt noticed that you can play music using glass bottles, especially if you have several of different sizes and fill them with varying levels of …

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Organ-playing Skeleton Livens Up Halloween

Every hacker appreciates how off-the-shelf parts can be combined into something greater, and [bryan.lowder] demonstrates this beautifully with his organ-playing skeleton, a wonderful entry to our 2…

Rotating Necked Guitar Looks Difficult To Play

Have you ever looked at a guitar and thought “Nah, that’s way too easy to play.”[Mattias Kranz] seems to have done, so he built the 360 Guitar, a new instrument with a circular, r…

Upgraded Toy Guitar Plays Music

Getting the finishing details on a Halloween costume completed is the key to impressing friends and strangers alike on the trick-or-treat rounds. Especially when it comes to things like props, thes…

Commodore Datassette Does Barbershop Quartet

Okay, now this is just plain fun. [Linus Åkesson] modified a Commodore Datassette player to move its “mouth” and, when quadrupled, sing a clever barbershop tune called “Sweet End …

Low-Cost Electret Microphone Preamplifiers

Before the invention of microelectromechanical system (MEMS) microphones, almost all microphones in cell phones and other electronics were a type of condenser microphone called the electret microph…

Screech Owl Is A Tribute To The Eowave Persephone

The Eowave Persephone was a beautiful thing—a monophonic ribbon synth capable of producing clean, smoothly varying tones. [Ben Glover] used to own a nice example that formerly belonged to Peter Chr…

Dial Up A Tune On The Jukephone

What do you do when you find a nice corded phone with giant buttons out in the wild? You could pay $80/month for a landline, use a VOIP or Bluetooth solution instead, or do something a million time…