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.
Fabien Cappello’s “Typing the Sound” does just that by triggering individual notes with each typewriter keystroke – a simple idea with pleasantly whimsical results. Build info is scarce on this one, but the basics come across in the photos here (tactile switches placed beneath each key are presumably trigerring MIDI).
Tom Phillipson, an Australian electronic musician, sent us a link to this YouTube video of his portable performance rig, housed in a Pelican case. The setup consists of a modified Pelican case that enables the rack mounting of equipment. This means I can be setup and ready to play in under 4 minutes. Hardware includes […]
Handmade Music NYC is back at it with an awesome lineup for tonight, complete with unusual sounds, instruments, and interfaces. Have a look at a couple of the projects in attendance – The Crudbox Sequencer – CrudBox is a hardware step sequencer which replaces digitally created or analog synthesized sounds typically associated with sequencers and […]
Qs wrote up an instructable for his “Musicator Jr.”, an LED light organ about the size of a 9V battery – The ‘brains’ of this project is a LM358 general-purpose op-amp which costs under 30-cents. The first half of the circuit is an amplifier which boosts the 500-micro-volts from an electret mic to about 1-volt. […]
Instructables is looking for more awesome projects for its Art of Sound contest, where you can win lots of audio goodies including handcrafted speakers and bzzt-boop toys from Bleep Labs. The competition is steep, but hopefully inspirational!
Every other week, MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next. By Meara O’Reilly, projects intern I’d been wanting to make a Chladni plate for years, and testing out Edwin Wise’s Chladni plate project for MAKE, Volume 16, was just […]
MAKE subscriber Jeff made this really sweet laser synth-guitar that he calls The Prism. The Prism is a laser guitar, with four laser beams acting as “strings” that can be held to produce a tone. A Sharp IR range finder detects the musician’s hand on the fretboard to change the pitch. You can select sine, […]
