Fidget Spinner Shreds With Bass Guitar Pickup

Hackaday continues to embrace our implacable spinning overlords-of-the-heart.

[zazzazzero] posted a YouTube video showing him fidgeting one of those spinners that had been hooked up to a bass guitar pickup. It makes a rather awesome rumbling sound as the pickup registers the bearings rolling around, and when hooked up to a Digidelay effects pedal he moved it beyond the rumble to more of an industrial growl like a factory hum. He also got interesting sounds by tapping on the spinner with a screwdriver.

Then he switched up to using an iPad audio app called Shaper to modify the resulting sound far beyond what he had before, with more effects options available at the touch of a button. All of these sounds can be modulated into the analog synthesizer chain, making this spinner a for-reals musical instrument.

We’ve published more than a couple pieces on music hacking, including this ASDR envelope generator project and the Atom Smasher guitar pedal.

[thanks, km4yri]

11 thoughts on “Fidget Spinner Shreds With Bass Guitar Pickup

    1. Seriously, the only thing I can think of is it has something to do with that virtual fidget spinner they released a while ago. Maybe if you upload a video with tags about fidget spinners then YouTube automatically does this when you load the video on the embedded player.

    1. Yes i fail to see what is so magical here.
      A there’s nothing to this.. it sound awful… why is this posted on HAD?
      Where is the use or function?

      There is none.
      Where are the moderators… please…

      1. Hmm, items not immediately associated with each other combined in an interesting way. Sounds like a hack to me.

        As for the purpose, what happened to “just to see what happens”, the hacker motto. And if you can’t see a use for this in foley work, you aren’t even trying. Add some mechanical device to spin the spinner, with various speeds relating to the input frequency, and you might get some interesting tones. Or use that as an LFO for a reverb or delay (or anything else). And a mechanical LFO might spark other strange ideas for a musician. I could see Wintergatan adding this to one of their machines.

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