Over at MAKE: Japan, Takumi Funada found this fun-looking open source hardware instrument called RakuChord Mobile. Instead of just generating simple tones, this project by Japanese Arduino enthusiast Ina is polyphonic, and allows a user to play both a chord backup line and melody at the same time. Google translate didn’t seem to work on the XML project page, however both the source code and schematic are available there.
[via Make:Japan]
2 thoughts on “RakuChord Mobile like a pocket electric accordian”
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A question first: the tones appear to have quite a few harmonics in them. I haven’t looked at the code, but at an extremely rough guess, I think they might be sawtooth in form. Anyone have any ideas?
Of course, having the schematic and the code are wonderful – obviously it would be possible to build the device in a plane that echos the schematic more-or-less exactly. HOWEVER, the way he has boxed everything up, the positioning of the switches (particularly the chord bend buttons underneath) are all ingenious. Would it be possible for the author/creator to (even though he’d have to take apart what he has made) come up with basically “exploded views” of how things are arranged inside? One thought is that the individual note buttons (on the left side of the box in the video) are somewhat close together: true accordions and bandoneons [(A Very Interesting Argentine instrument that is vaguely related to accordions and is used a lot for Tango music… but has the strange characteristic of any key playing a different note on air intake (pulling the bellows open) vs output (closing the bellows)] have keys that are quite a bit like standard keyboard keys: they are definitely large enough to fit a full pad at the tip of a finger; the ones shown here seem rather narrow and might make for rather uncomfortable playing fairly quickly.
Nonetheless, what an amazing device!