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.

Etch-a-Sketch turntables!

MAKE Flickr photo pool member Pete Hidle posted up his amazing Etch-a-Sketch turntable project, he writes “Dualing Etch-a-sketch makes music by taking information from the Etch-a-sketch dials and translating it into digital information. That information could be used for anything, but in this example it turns it into techno music, using the Max/MSP software from www.cycling74.com. It was presented as part of Platform05, a review of live art in the North-East of England. Further information can be found [here] and some pictures from the opening night can be found at flickrmeets UK.” Link.

Continue Reading November 7th, 2005 Phillip Torrone2

DIY Record Cleaner

Handy DIY project before you make digital versions of those vinyl’s…“Build your own high quality, easy to use record cleaner. This design can be built for less than $50 and will remove at least as much grunge as the expensive VPI record cleaners. The original concept was developed by Jay Amble.” [via] Link.

Continue Reading November 7th, 2005 Phillip Torrone

The “iTunes Speaker Thingy”

Dale writes “This is an enclosure which holds and powers an Airport Express and a set of attached speakers to wirelessly stream music from iTunes. It also incorporates a Palm T|X which acts as an LCD wirelessly remote for iTunes using the Salling Clicker remote control software. The setup provides a nice set of compact wireless speakers for any spot with AC power that’s in Wi-Fi range of your home network.” Link.

Continue Reading November 4th, 2005 Phillip Torrone

HOW TO – Create a Bluetooth music store

Images-32 Bruce writes “There’s been some hype about Nokia offering music downloads over Bluetooth to phones. This article shows you how to make your own MP3 file server, called the Bluetooth Music Store, that pushes MP3 to any Bluetooth device that supports OBEX.” Link.

Continue Reading November 3rd, 2005 Phillip Torrone2

Mint-Tin Amp PDF

In MAKE 04 we show you how to make a rocking pocket amp from a mint tin (Penguin, Altoids, etc). You can preview the PDF here, or you can subscribe to our iTunes feed and have all our new audio shows, videos and PDFs delivered to your iPod. Click here and click subscribe in iTunes.

Continue Reading November 2nd, 2005 Phillip Torrone2

Make speakers from hard drives…

Sven writes “About a year ago, inspired by other projects like Afrotech’s Hard-disk Sound System, I built a first version of my harddisk speaker. The first one was just a very quick hack to see if it would work and was destroyed due to too much power melting the coils and cables. We hooked it up to a 50W guitar amp and pushed the volume a bit to far… Since it sounded really great, I decided to build a second one.” Link.

Continue Reading November 2nd, 2005 Phillip Torrone2

Cigar box guitar Maker – Ben Prestage

Doug writes “Just was reading the latest issue (of MAKE) and was looking at the guitar article. A guy that plays here in Florida named Ben Prestage plays a home made cigar box also. He makes his using broom sticks for the neck and the pick ups are made out of sewing bobs wound with copper wire, it is then all grounded to bottle caps stuck on to the end on the broom sticks. He is a one man blues band playing all the instruments himself. Here is one of his tracks where he is playing the cigar box Giver.” In volume 04 we show you how to make your own cigar box guitar.