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.
At last year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, Nathan Johnstone of Abney Park debuted a violin at the Saturday night show modded by artisan (and MAKE contributor) Molly Friedrich. Later in the year, at the Steampowered convention, Nathan debuted the Von Slatt Strat, a guitar modded by MAKE, Volume 17 cover maker Jake von Slatt. This […]
This week’s flashback installation comes from lucky MAKE Volume 13: the R-Tronic 8-Bit Toy Music Sequencer by Brian McNamara. Phil Torrone originally blogged this sequencer about 2 years ago. He had seen it on Etsy, made by seller RareBeasts (Brian’s shop). Brian shared this how-to with us about a year later in Volume 13. As […]
Another round of good stuff fills out the lineup for this month’s Handmade Music @ 3rd Ward, Brooklyn. Peter of CDM provides details – Robotic gamelan instruments with the Gamelatron, created by Zemi17 and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) – check the video above! Rescued PDAs and iPods making music, with the […]
In the mid-90s a book of homebrew musical instrument projects was published called Sound Designs, by John Scoville. Amongst the scores of awesome ideas within, the book suggests making hanging bells by cutting apart discarded gas bottles. There’s surprisingly little information about this trick on the web. This page, though an oldie, is still a […]
In Bb 2.0 is collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon. People are encouraged to participate and send in their own videos. The videos can be played simultaneously — the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.
Denkitribe posted this rather sweet demo of Tinker.it!‘s Arduino based sound synthesizer project, appropriately titled “Auduino”. While some delay/reverb+accompaniment have definitely been added, the sweet sounds of granular synthesis still shine through – I built one and plugged a stylus controller which was ripped from Gakken SX-150. It works very well. Its sound is dry […]
Debuting at the Volt Festival in Uppsala, Sweden, the latest incarnation of Bacterial Orchestra – Public Epidemic No 1 – will be unleashed on a participating public. Organizers speculate impending world-wide sound pandemic.
