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.
Here’s an excellent “open” hardware project for controlling lighting/effects systems – you can build your own, buy an assembled kit or improve the design and modify source code – “This DMX USB interface is based on the FTDI 232BM chip, it’s a USB to serial converter. Using a simple application on a PC you can send and receive DMX512.” Thanks Ladyada! Link.
This is a great, use an old Palm to control your PC’s music. JT writes “After using several mp3 player thin-clients and other Palm-based Winamp interfaces, I decided to write my own. Basic requirements: Must not require using (and losing) a stylus – Edits playlist order with a single touch/drag – Direct searching Winamp media library and server directory browsing.” Link.
Peter is looking for some Makers out there, he writes “Basically, the folks at National Instruments have added DSP (digital signal processing, useful for lots of audio applications — both industrial and musical), to LabVIEW, their high-end development platform for creating test / measurement / control applications. Here’s the cool part: they designed a free synth (as in musical synth) to run on the platform. Somewhere out there, there’s a scientist or engineer who’s going to love fiddling with this thing. It’s electronic music for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. Know anyone in those communities (blogosphere or printosphere) who might be interested in this?” Link.
IBM has some great articles lately – “Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that’s yesterday’s news. What’s the next step in creating an easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers? Imagine adding a user-oriented LCD touchscreen. A touchscreen facade can make back-end Linux applications very usable in such devices as custom digital media centers (either in the home or in automobiles), DVRs and PVRs, and even control interfaces for household robots. The potential uses are limited only by the imagination. In this article, get an overview for installing an LCD taken from a Sony PSOne, creating a modeline, and installing a touchscreen — all for Linux.” Thanks Donald! Link.
Handy open source app (Mac) – “I wanted to be able to listen to the songs on my iPod for some time now. This is because I don’t want to fill up the hard-drive of my iBook with music, but be able to access my Music when I’m on the way. I found some solutions but none really made me happy. Then I found mt-daapd which did exactly what I wanted except for one thing. mt-daapd can export any folder as an iTunes-music-share. The missing piece was, that it doesn’t detect if an iPod is connected. So I wrote a simple programm that detects if an iPod is connected and then automatically shares it with mt-daapd.” Link.
Last week was Doppler’s birthday, Creative Digital Music has a tribute featuring where to learn more about the Doppler effect, and how it applies to astrophysics (but NOT the expansion of the universe), and how to reproduce it in software like Pro Tools. Now if someone can just come up with a good recipe for the Dopplertini. Definitely shaken. Link.
Very cool how-to, the Maker writes “I first thought electrostatic headphones were a joke. It didn’t sound safe to strap high voltage transducers to your head. But after my work with electrostatic loudspeakers I had the skill and knowledge to try building a pair and listening to them.” [