Music

Brian Moore has taken their excellent iGuitar line of digitally-equipped guitars, and added class-compliant USB, via the new iGuitar.USB model. Plug it into a USB jack, and you have instant access to your sound in recording and effects software, no drivers required. Fully bus-powered, so you don’t even need a power brick. Unlike Gibson’s so-called “digital guitar,” what’s great about the iGuitar.USB is that you can connect a single USB cable between your guitar and your computer for audio: no breakout boxes or multiple cabling required. [via] Link.

Rob writes “The Phongraph makers’ pages – A meeting place for makers of modern phonographs, i.e. cylinder players that give an electric output.” …when browsing through the entries, no two phonographs are alike, in fact they are very different, an expression of the creativity of their respective makers. Link.

Fantastic timeline with instrument, inventor, country, date and information page – This site charts the development of electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990. For the purposes of this project electronic musical instruments are defined as instruments that synthesise sounds from an electronic source. The main focus of the site is on instruments developed from the beginning of the century until the 1960’s. Link.

Bob writes “Cornell student Levi Lorenzo wanted to do a project about MIDI music technology, so the project he came up with was to build a hamster controlled music generator. The hamster controller uses 6 hamsters to control 3 rythmic tones. One hamster controls the “rythmic qualities of the melodies”, and the other controls the note sequence. As the hamsters wander back and forth in their passages, the music created changes according to their position. The music is actually not bad!” [via] Link.