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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s a really neat project that plays audio out of a PC serial port running Linux. It works by resampling audio to the baudrate of the serial port. Some comments on the site point out that this is a lot like the old days of TRS-80s, TI-85’s and Sinclair ZX’s when you wanted to get audio out of them. [via] Link.
