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.
From the MAKE Flickr pool Another compelling artifact from Ranjit’s adventures in musical instrument making – Instrument-a-day 24: Mobius Music It’s a familiar tune played upside-down and backwards, and then just backwards, and then upside-down and backwards again. Over and over, forever. Looks like he’s using a DIY music box kit. Hmmm, anyone decipher the […]
Make subscriber Nic used Arduino plus Parallax RFID reader/tags to make his Squeezebox network music player a bit more physically intuitive/interactive. I’m not the first to think of controlling music with RFID, somebody made a pretty neat player called PlayStand way back in 2002. But its RFID reader was plugged directly into the PC. I […]
Phil Clandillon sends this music video of The Mentalists playing Kids, originally by MGMT. The Mentalists are an all female act based here in London. They’ve done this unusual cover of MGMT‘s “Kids” played entirely on their iPhones and iPod Touches, using apps from the application store. What kinds of great music can you play […]
After scoring some bargain-priced touch screens, James set to work on building the Touchduino – I used two analog pins and one digital pin for this project. I wired the touch screen to the 3v pin, the Gnd pin and the analog pins 0 and 1 set to input. In the code (digital) Pin 3 […]
Pascal completed this amazing 250+ hour mod combining an unassuming upright piano with a KORG Triton synthesizer keyboard. It’s a surefire way to spice up those holiday sing-alongs! [via Matrixsynth]
Behold the cardboardy-retro-nessKamil‘s BeatSequencer v1.0. Though the front panel may have some mechanical stability issues, It reminds me of a miniaturized vintage computing giant. FYI – Those 24 LEDs are handled via Arduino’s shift function and the handy 74HC595 shift register chip.
Trumpeter Clark Terry talked about how he learned to listen and play music on a re-broadcast of the Billy Taylor Jazz program on NPR, which I caught a portion of in my car. Terry said that he and his friends built crystal radios to pick up music over the air. The radios were cheap and […]
