Take your creations beyond the workshop and onto the stage with diy music instruments! Let us show you how these creations range from simple, basic setups that produce beautiful sounds to more complex projects that require a greater level of engineering knowledge. With these tutorials and examples, we’ll guide you on this journey to make your own musical instrument for experimental, artistic or everyday use – so whether you’re starting out new or a seasoned sound creator, come explore the wonderful world of making your own music.
The Multichord musical instrument is an acoustic stringed instrument with a single string, constructed from wood, a hard drive, 20-lb monofilament, and assorted electronic components. It was the culmination of a project to build an acoustic instrument capable of playing multiple notes without fretting or manual, time-consuming retuning. The Multichord achieves this by attaching a […]
Randy Sarafan made a cigar box style guitar from an old NES, and shows us how to add a pickup to amplify the sound in his Instructable. He uses a NES controller cable for the audio, so classy!
Daniel Park describes his approach to controlling circuit bent Alesis QSR Quadrasynth through MIDI data, simplifying control for musicians – With this design I wanted the entire bent interface under MIDI control. Any MIDI source: MIDI cc’s, program changes, tempo synch, MIDI machine commands, notation can be routed to any destination on the circuit bent interface via sysex programming. […] The […]
This music visualizer project combines two of my favorite things, Arduino’s & BlinkM’s, with another one of my favorite things, music! In the video above, all the BlinkM’s are mapped to display the same value, but they can be controlled individually with some code modifications. Check out the link for complete build instructions and the Arduino code.
Trimpin in his studio, with his kinetic sculpture “SHHH.” Photo (c) by Susanna Howe/Corbis In response to my posting about Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, the sweet-looking documentary about engineer, inventor, and sound artist, Trimpin, the PR folks for the film emailed to let us know that it will be showing in San Francisco and […]
Here are three trailers (two more after the jump) for Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, a documentary film about engineer, sound artist, and inventor, Trimpin. The film is currently making its way around the festival circuit. Has anyone here seen it? It looks awesome. [Thanks, Patrick Reilly!] Trimpin: The Sound of Invention
When thinking up a way to promote the awesomeness of engineering, IBM Fellow John Cohn did what came naturally – a music video parody of a Coolio track, of course! [via Adafruit Industries]
