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 Flickr member rarebeasts put together this sweet little beat machine using a PicAxe microcontroller. Dubbed the “GrooveAxe“, it’s a relatively simple build that produces some rather musical squarewave loops. Instructions and source code are available on Gadget Gangster and the parts for the project are also available in kit form. […]
Joel Veitch and his pals from Rathergood made “gigantic, nightmarish” kazoos out of gas masks. I have acquired some old Soviet gas masks, sent over from Berlin. They are absolutely nightmarish, as you can see from this photo. The Soviets weren’t happy with simply making them functional, they made them look like something from depths […]
Youtuber ffoitl shares this refreshing take on the MIDI synthesizer, utilizing the acoustic side effects of a relay switch – a musical instrument inspired by elisha gray’s “musical telgraph” one of the first electric/electronic musical instruments ever. it’s basically a relay oscillator than be “tuned” to various frequencies via midi controlled capacitors. in the video […]
Also from Chung Da Lam, this cool, innovative ways of folding paper to create CD cases. While you’re on his site, also check out his wonderful papercraft projects on his Paper Art page. Chung Da Packaging Design
The Milwaukee servo electric guitar requires no fretting or even tuning – that work is left to a team of servo motors mounting prominently on the bridge area – A servoelectric guitar is a fretless guitar that is played by controlling servomotors that change the tension of the strings over an octave or more on […]
Frostedminipete gears up for a proper day of learning with this enhanced backpack – Bet you’ve never seen anything like this before though, huh? Side pouches on my bookbag were a bit dull… so, the one I keep my water in now has a switch to make the water glow, and the other side has […]
Patching out an instrument for easy experimentation is a great idea – but drilling an array of holes and installing the appropriate hardware can be a bit of a hurdle to overcome. Experimentalists Anonymous points out this inventive use of a breadboard as a simple patchbay [scoll to bottom of page]. No need for banana […]
