I’ve Got Two Turntables And A Laser Engraver

Digital media provides us with a lot of advantages. For something like recording and playing back music, digital copies don’t degrade, they can have arbitrarily high quality, and they can be …

Rope Core Drum Machine

One of our favorite musical hackers, [Look Mum No Computer] is getting dangerously close to building a computer. His quest was to create a unique drum machine, inspired by a Soviet auto-dialer that…

The Commodordion Turns Two C64s Into A Single Instrument

One of the main reasons the Commodore 64 became an icon of the 1980s was its MOS 6581 “SID” sound chip that gave it audio capabilities well beyond those of other microcomputers of the 8…

Lego Plays Electronic Drums

The ability to quickly try out an idea, and then expand and develop it, is what rapid prototyping is all about. Although we tend to think of 3D printing when rapid prototyping is mentioned, [Brick …

Reverse-Engineering A Display Protocol To Repair A Roland Synthesizer

Repairing electronic devices isn’t as hard as it used to be. Thanks to the internet, it’s easy to find datasheets and application notes for any standard component inside your gadget, an…

Lo-Fi Orchestra Learns Tubular Bells

Hardware projects often fall into three categories: Those that flash lights, those that make sounds and those that move. This virtuoso performance by [Kevin]’s “Lo-Fi Orchestra” m…

Fixing A 30-year Old Roland Bug

The Roland CM-500 is a digital synthesizer sound module released in 1991 that combines two incredibly powerful engines into one unit. However, in 2005 enthusiasts of the Roland MT-25 (one of the en…

Trombone Controls Virtual Trombone

Guitar Hero was a cultural phenomenon a little over a decade ago, and showed that there was a real fun time to be had playing a virtual instrument on a controller. There are several other similar g…

3D Printing The Key To A Bass Clarinet

Playing music as part of a group typically requires that not only are all of the instruments tuned to each other, but also that the musicians play in a specific key. For some musicians, like pianis…

Building An Old Guitar From A New One

Anyone who’s ever played guitar to at least the skill level required to form a terrible garage band knows the names of the most legendary guitars. The driving sound of the Gibson Les Paul pla…

The Sensory Bridge Is Your Path To A Desktop Rave

[Lixie Labs] are no strangers to creating many projects with LEDs or other displays. Now they’ve created a low latency music visualizer, called the Sensory Bridge, that creates gorgeous light…

This Found-Sound Organ Was Made With Python And A Laser Cutter

Certain among our readership will no doubt remember attaching a playing card to the front fork of one’s bicycle so that the spokes flapped the card as the wheel rotated. It was supposed to so…

CMOS Oscillator Circuit Gets An Eatable Input

In interaction designer [Leonardo Amico]’s work Processing Decay, lettuce is used as an input to produce sound as an element within a CMOS circuit.  We’ve all seen lemons and potatoes doubling in s…

The Sound Of Nails On Black Vinyl Records

[Victoria Shen] modifies glue-on nails to give her the ability to play vinyl records with her fingers. Details are light but from the many glamour pictures, it looks like she pushes record player n…

Mechanical Relay Percussion In A Eurorack Format

There are plenty of analog and digital synthesis modules available in Eurorack format. But how about one that actually does physical percussion while capturing the output at the same time? The VU P…

This Simple Light-Controlled Synth Has A Surprisingly Rich Sound

Audio synthesizers can range from vast racks of equipment with modules stitched together by a web of patch cords to a couple of 555s wired together in an Atari punk arrangement. This light-controll…

Making A Tape Echo The Traditional Way

[Juan Nicola] has taken inspiration from the musician hackers of old and re-purposed a reel-to-reel tape recorder into a tape-echo for his guitar with a built-in valve amplifier (video in Spanish).…

Big Noise From A 555 And A Little Embroidery

[Sam Topley] specializes in making textile based, electronic instruments and sculptures using embroidery, and this little hoop packs some serious sound (Nitter). The circuit is a riff on a classic …

ADSL Router As Effects Pedal

Moore’s law might not be as immutable as we once though thought it was, as chip makers struggle to fit more and more transistors on a given area of silicon. But over the past few decades it&#…

Improve CD Sound By Shaving?

We always enjoy the odd things that people do to try to get better audio reproduction. Exotic cables, special amplifiers, and higher resolution digitization come to mind.  Most of this is dubious, …