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, weโll 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.
Here’s an lecture by acoustic archaeologist Paul Devereux detailing some of his research into the sound made by the rocks of ancient cave-dwellings. Interesting info – I wasn’t aware of the sonic potential of “rock on rock” percussion.
The Mucky Wheel electronic instrument turns out the blips, bleeps, and bloops with a satisfyingly sea-going motif. Design and construction photos available here. [via Synthtopia]
Frostedminipete kicked his PT-100 keyboard up quite a several dozen notches by adding the following very effective circuit-bends – Starve pot [simulates dying batteries…low pitch, etc] Lead distortion pot Snare/hihat/bass distortion pot Bass drum distortion pot Chord distortion pot Warbly/wahwah switch Pulse 1 (fast) switch Pulse 2 (warbly/slow) switch added 1/4″ output w/ speaker on […]
Mechatronics writes – This is a set of musical bells which are driven by solenoids and controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. There are 8 bells covering one octave. The bells are controllable from a PC, or the tower can stand alone and play pre-programmed melodies.
This Guitar Hero mod posted by Youtube user Egyokeo blew my mind. A MIDI drum kit and some custom software on a PC send button-press input via the Xbox Input Machine (XIM) hardware to an Xbox running Guitar Hero. Since I injured my middle left finger playing Guitar Hero 2 way too much when it […]
Nick Lally made this simple noise box using an Arduino and just a few other parts. The website doesn’t have the schematics, but the source code is well documented and it’s easy to figure out what he used and where. Make sure to check out the audio clip on the site, it sounds really cool. […]
From the MAKE Flickr photo pool While visiting family over Thanksgiving I witnessed this device in use – “Mark’s Magic Box” displays song lyrics and note changes to simplify band rehearsals. The setup uses a laptop + LCD for storage and display – controlled via foot-pedal which was built from a mouse and housed in […]
