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.
Summary Hack a day has an excellent “Intro to Circuit Bending”. Their article combined with some previous coverage and pages of MAKE will allow you to make incredible retro, blippy, noise :) Electronic musical instruments are a lot of fun for a hacker because, with a small palette of tools, know-how and curiosity, they are […]
In Volume 23, we featured Ross Hershberger’s Squelette, a see-through amplifier (“squelette” means skeleton in French). There has been some lively discussion happening on the Squelette article page, and among those contributing to the conversation is Brian J. Andonian, a design engineer at Ford. He built his own version of Squelette out of cherry and […]
The folks from the I3 Detroit hackerspace show how to re-purpose an old ammo box into speakers, using only $50 in parts.
This interesting project in process was found in the MAKE Flickr group. It’s a 12″ Macintosh G4 laptop, presumably without the screen, embedded in a guitar body. The creator, Flickr user feurig, has lots of interesting projects in his photostream, check it!
Luke Jerram, familiar for his earlier works Glass Microbiology and Portrait-Projecting Ring, has now produced Talking Ring , which is essentially a silver Edison cylinder, cut and played back using custom equipment, which records a 20-second message of affection for his partner Shelina. [via Hack a Day]
Ben from West Lafayette, IN, wrote in to share his amp project. A Class-D amplifier operates the output transistors as switches instead of as variable resistors, as in more traditional amplifiers. In doing so, nearly all conduction losses in the output power devices are eliminated, leading to a very efficient amplifier.
There’s something mesmerizing about a steel ball on a track. It’s the anticipation, I suppose. In Thinking Machine by Martin Riches and Masahiro Miwa the artists have cleverly implemented a ternary computer with levers and tracks that constantly cycle steel balls down internal structures towards three chimes that ring out a computed melody.
