Making One Fender From Another

October 17, 2026 by Jenny List 8 Comments

There’s a tendency among cherished brands to licence their name and logo onto all sorts of novelty items in order to make a quick buck. Joining this trend is the guitar maker Fender, who have lent their name to a chopping board in the shape of their famous Telecaster. The existence of such a product seems to have been a direct challenge to [Not A Luthier], who promptly bought one and turned it into a real guitar. It’s a genuine Fender, but is it a genuine Fender guitar? Not really, but it’s an entertaining build.

The chopping board isn’t made of great material, instead it’s a set of strips of wood, we’re guessing probably bamboo or rubberwood, glued together. It’s robust, but noticeably thinner than the guitar whose shape it takes, and with a not-great finish. The build is not too different from any other electric guitar build we’ve seen, with the main challenge being that the bridge and pickups need spacers underneath them to compensate for the reduced thickness of the wood.

The video is below the break and makes for a soothing watch as an in-depth guitar build, complete with a moment of drilling all the way through the board and fabricating a plug to hide the evidence. The final guitar seems to sound alright, but we’re not guitarists so maybe a more practiced ear should judge. The genuine Fender logo is still proudly on it so it’s a Fender of sorts, but just like with the chopping board, it’s best value is in novelty.

Meanwhile if guitar builds are a thing, we’ve had a few in the past.

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2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: USBSID-Pico Has Two SIDs, Many Inputs

October 13, 2026 by Tyler August 12 Comments

We’ll give you three guesses what the most important bits of silicon in [LouD]’s USBSID-Pico are, and two don’t count. Yes, there’s a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a pair of the unforgettable SID chips from MOS– the sound chip of the C64, the die that launched a thousand chiptunes. Well, unless you build it with a hardware SID replacement, but the goal of this device is to get SIDs hooked up to modern hardware.

To that end, USBSID-Pico can be controlled via USB– obviously– in the form of CDC/WebUSB/WebSerial but also MIDI, and even ASID, which is a specific protocol for streaming SID register data over MIDI. You might be wondering the point, since surely you can get cycle-accurate SID emulation on an RP2040, right? Well, not everyone agrees that cycle-accurate emulation is accurate enough; like the people who swear by the subtle distortions tube amplifiers introduce into the sound, some say the chip’s own inaccuracies give the sound out of the physical device a unique vibe emulators don’t match. That’s a fight for others to litigate; we just appreciate the work that went into getting these old sound chips talking to modern hardware, and getting the project certified as Open Source Hardware.

This combination of old sound and new microcontroller makes the USBSID-Pico a good entry for our ongoing retrocomputing contest, particularly the retro-modern category. Just be aware of PAL and NTSC differences with these old chips, or your beeps and boops might be out of tune. They haven’t made them in decades, but there are more than a few modern replacements for the MOS 6581.

Drum Machina Go! As A New Music Tool For The Game Boy

October 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 7 Comments

The Nintendo Game Boy is quite possibly the most popular console in the international chiptune community. You might have seen musicians cranking out tunes with LSDJ or Nanoloop, but now there’s a new option for writing bangers on the DMG. It’s Drum Machina Go!, put together by [audiowanderer].

The original Game Boy has a four-bit audio engine with two pulse channels, one waveform channel, and a noise channel. To that end, DMGo! gives you those four channels to play with, each with a 16-step sequencer. There’s also an FX section, ADSR controls, and various filtering options to make your sound juicier, richer, or grainier, depending on your taste.

There are also helpful sync options via the link port, such as for use with other Game Boys, or you can use PULSE OUT sync to hook up to your Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators or KORG Volcas if you have them. There are also fun features like the MANGLING FX which lets you decay and destroy your musical creations live by playing with the D-pad and buttons.

If you’re eager to try a new way to compose on the Game Boy, you can throw it on a flash cart or in an emulator and start tinkering away. We’ve featured other fun Game Boy music hacks before, too, like this nifty project that turns it into a MIDI sequencer.

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Standalone DJ System Runs On ESP32

September 24, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 25 Comments

There are plenty of ways to DJ with a laptop and various controller setups. However, if you find hauling around an entire computer can be a bit much, you might like this lighter system from [Daniel Vučinović].

It’s called Pajoniiir, and it’s intended to replace a laptop in the DJ booth. In its place stands an ESP32-P4 microcontroller, hooked up to a 4.3-inch touchscreen display in an off-the-shelf combo from Guition. The ESP32’s twin USB interfaces are hooked up in turn to a Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 controller, and a USB stick carrying a Rekordbox music library. The microcontroller is then also hooked up to a PCM5102A DAC module for audio output.

The ESP32 reads and plays tracks in MP3, WAV, and FLAC formats, responds to commands from the DJ controller, and displays the waveforms and other controls on the touchscreen. It’s doing most of what a laptop would do in this case, only it costs $50 and won’t get stuck in a bootloop for a Windows update 10 minutes before you’re due to go on.

We’ve featured a few good DJ controller hacks over the years, like this Hercules rig that was modded for better scratching.

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Audio Spectrum Analyzer On An ESP32 Display Board

September 23, 2026 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

A slick spectrum analyzer used to be the kind of thing that would have been tricky to include in a DIY project, but as [Mirko “mircemk” Pavleski] demonstrates, a modern microcontroller like the ESP32 can handle the task with nothing more than a display panel and a few passives.

This particular example is built around the CrowPanel 3.5, which combines the powerful microcontroller with a 480×320 touch screen LCD. But there’s nothing inherently special about the CrowPanel, and you could get similar results with whatever display you might have kicking around the parts bin — albeit potentially with some code changes to account for the different hardware.

Beyond the microcontroller and the display, all you need to recreate what [mircemk] has done here is a handful of passives to tame the incoming analog audio signal so it can be piped into one of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) pins on the MCU.

This project is fairly simple, but if you’re looking for something a little more advanced from [mircemk], don’t worry. The more daring home players can try their hand at recreating this high-voltage X-ray machine made from an old TV vacuum tube.

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A Tiny Toy Synth For Smaller Computers

September 23, 2026 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Even for the non-musical among us there is a lot of fun to be had with a simple synthesiser and sequencer, as the different controls can be manipulated to show their effect on the sound. Beeper, from [Valentyn Danylchuk] is just such a synth, and with only built-in loops, it has a focus on the instrument rather than the arrangement. What you get are a simple set of controls, from which you can modify the sound to your liking. We’ve been playing with it here, and it’s surprisingly addictive.

The target for Beeper is ESP32 microcontrollers, with builds for the S3 and P4, but there’s also a web version and one for the Mac. It’s operated using the arrow keys on your keyboard, and the web one at least isn’t the most responsive piece of software. Below the break you can see (and hear) it on a Tanmatsu ESP32-P4 based handheld computer.

It’s certain that there are more accomplished synthesisers and sequencers to be found, but there’s still a place for one that’s simply a musical toy like this. Sometimes playing with something is more important than achieving something with it.

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The Concertina Goes Electronic

September 18, 2026 by Jenny List 14 Comments

The concertina is an instrument that features heavily in European folk music, of which there are a variety of types. [Xcott Craver] has built one, an anglo concertina of the type you may recognise accompanying sea shanties, but this is no ordinary squeezebox. Instead it’s an electronic concertina, and it’s a project with a significant attention to detail.

Perhaps the most obvious thing most of us know about a concertina is that it’s an instrument with two ends separated by a set of bellows, and manipulation of the bellows lends a lot to the music it produces. This instrument doesn’t have bellows, but its innovation is to simulate them through means of a load cell. The two sides of the wooden chassis are fixed, but the force exerted on them is measured.

The keys are Cherry MX switches with custom keycaps, mounted on a pair of PCBs. Driving the whole thing is a Teensy 4.0, and to avoid unfortunate accidents with ripped-out connectors there’s a USB extension lead as a bit of strain relief. You can hear the result in the video below.

This is like no other instrument we’ve seen here, though we’ve had a few electronically enhanced conventional concertinas and accordions. We like it for its interesting design.

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