Giant-sized VU meters
Narwhalbot built a couple of monster VU meters for use at live shows, wall-mounting them at home between gigs – awesome, awesome.
Music
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.
Musical makers at Maker Faire ’09
Scottish sound designer, the Amazing Rolo, traveled to Maker Faire this year especially to see what sorts of cool musical technologies people were cooking up. He made a series of videos of makers demoing their wares. Of the three videos above, he writes: First up is Elly Jessop, a Masters Student at the uber-cool MIT […]
Spinner synth
Matt Mets made a rotation-based MIDI controller using a motor, disc, webcam, and OpenCV. Source code included.
Tangible drum machine
Here are instructions for building a drum machine with a tangible visual interface. A camera above the paper drum board reads the positions of physical objects and translates them into sounds, as indicated on the labels on the objects. It looks fairly easy to make, with most of the components from paper and card. The […]
Beat-slicing with OTTO
CDM points out this very sweet beat manipulator interface by Luca De Rosso. The project, better known as OTTO, makes use of an Arduino board, MAX/MSP software, and an array of LEDs + switches to create a very intuitive and approachable experience for musicians. – OTTO is a new musical instrument for beat-slicing, the technique […]
Etched-brass modular synth
This supremely cool analog synth with a gorgeous etched-brass faceplace showed up on Steampunk Workshop, via the German synth site Synthesizer Database. The builder is Moritz Wolpert. Apparently, from the Google translation, all the knobs and handles were turned by hand on a lathe and the faceplace was hand-lettered, decorated and etched. The project took […]
Handmade instrument exhibition in LA
Los Angeles art gallery SolwayJones is currently showing a collection of unique acoustic and electronic musical instruments by Reed Ghazala, Nam June Paik and others. Definitely worth checking out if you’re in the area – press release + photos on the gallery’s site. [via GetLoFi]