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.

Auto-recorder project

Auto-recorder project

Amin Rahimi’s recorder project… Being the huge band geek that I am, I decided that my project should involve some kind of musical instrument. Given the limited time that I had to complete the project, I decided to have my computer play a simple Yamaha recorder that was sitting in one of my drawers. Because […]

Dipping duck orchestra

Kittclark writes in – Music randomly generated by dipping ducks (AKA happy birds, drinking birds, dippy birds, happy ducks… etc). Using the basic parts of a keyboard, each duck is hooked up to a note of the octave. As their beak touches the water in the glass the circuit is completed and the sound is […]

Junk yard yields parts for odd organ

Junk yard yields parts for odd organ

Here’s a wonderful junkyard organ from Popular Science 1939 – Discarded bottles, an old vacuum-cleaner motor, sections of inner tubing, and other objects salvaged from the scrap heap comprise the parts of a unique junk-yard organ recently exhibited at Atlantic City, N.J. Individual notes are sounded by air from the cleaner motor blowing across small […]

Mr. EQ – DIY equalizer

Mr. EQ – DIY equalizer

Meet Mr. EQ – a nice DIY equalizer – While use of a graphic equalizer is often recommended for fine-tuning the tone of your instrument, no feasible DIY versions exist. However, a seven-band equalizer is not necessary to drastically shape the response of an instrument of effect. Adding peaks at certain frequencies can provide a […]

Doublet amplifier

Doublet amplifier

Octopart’s hardware blog has a dual channel music player amp (in an Altoids tin, of course)… Have you ever seen a couple sharing a single pair of ipod buds, each listening with only one ear? That was the problem I wanted to solve when I started building dual channel headphone amplifiers while I was back […]