Musical Hacks

1369 Articles

The Commodordion Gets A Big Usability Upgrade

August 28, 2024 by 14 Comments

The chiptune scene is dominated by Game Boys and other Nintendo hardware, but one should never forget the gorgeous, beautiful tones that come from the hallowed Commodore 64. [Linus Åkesson] knows this well, and it’s at the heart of his work on the Commodordion. Now, he’s built an even better version.

The original idea he had was to build an accordion-like control surface for the SID chip in a Commodore 64. The device is capable of creating beautiful accordion-like music with a simple 8-bit flair. He has since dubbed the original Commodordion the “bass Commodordion,” while the new version is classified as a tenor instrument.

The prime upgrades are ergonomic. The previous instrument was too heavy, with the left hand having to carry an entire Commodore 64 on its own. It was also hard to reach the keys. The new version is much lighter, with one of the two C64s of the original having been removed. The supporting electronics have been redesigned to more neatly fit into a space behind the bellows.

The result is a machine that’s far easier to play, and one that won’t injure the user in extended play sessions. “It’s now a pleasure, not a pain,” says [Linus]. The payoff in usability is obvious, and the tunes themselves are hauntingly beautiful.

We first covered the Commordordion back in 2022, but it wasn’t the first time we saw one of [Linus]’s impressive creations.

Continue reading “The Commodordion Gets A Big Usability Upgrade” →

Jangle Box Plucks Strings At The Press Of A Button

August 21, 2024 by 4 Comments

There are some that enjoy the human element of a musical performance, delighting in the unique way an artist teases the desired sound from their instruments. Then there are those of us who listen to random bleeps, bloops, and buzzes tortured out of some crusty sound chip pulled from an 8-bit computer. It’s all very subjective.

It seems to us that the Jangle Box, created by [Rich Bernett], lands somewhere in the middle. A human is still playing the instrument, but they aren’t directly touching the strings. Instead, buttons and a potentiometer on the front of the device are used to control four small hobby motors that slap their respective strings with what appears to be the remnants of plastic propellers — we’d guess these motors were pulled from cheap personal fans. Standard guitar tuner knobs can be used to adjust the tension of each string, providing further control over the sounds produced by the device.

In the video below, [Rich] briefly explains the operation of the Jangle Box, and then launches into a performance of sorts. The goal here really isn’t to “play” the instrument in the traditional sense. Rather, he records the various noises it produces, normalizes them, and sorts them into a full octave of notes so he can use them in future compositions. The last few minutes of the video contain some electronic beats made up of the samples created from the Jangle Box.

If you’re one of his Patreon supporters you can download the sample pack yourself, otherwise, you’ll have to make your own version of the instrument to get your hands on that electro-tangy sound.

This isn’t the first original [Rich Bernett] musical creation to grace these pages, back in 2020 we covered his Cassettone synth.

Continue reading “Jangle Box Plucks Strings At The Press Of A Button” →

Get More Freedom With This Guitar Pedal

August 19, 2024 by 13 Comments

When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Since this was more than a decade before the invention of the transistor, it would have been hard then to imagine the possibilities that a musician nowadays would have with modern technology to shape the sound of an instrument like this. People are still innovating in this space as well as new technology appears, like [Gary Rigg] who has added a few extra degrees of freedom to a guitar effects pedal.

A traditional expression pedal, like a wah-wah pedal, uses a single motion to change an aspect of the sound of the guitar, and is generally controlled with the musician’s foot. [Gary]’s pedal, on the other hand, can be manipulated in three different ways to control separate elements of the instrument’s sound. It can be pitched forward and back like a normal effects pedal, but also rolled side-to-side and twisted around its yaw axis. The pedal has a built-in IMU to measure the various position changes of the pedal, which is then translated by an RP2040 microcontroller to a MIDI signal which controls the three different aspects of the sound digitally.

While the yaw motion might be difficult for a guitarist to create with their foot while playing, the idea for this pedal is still excellent. Adding in a few more degrees of freedom gives the musician more immediate control over the sound of their instrument and opens up ways of playing that might not be possible or easy with multiple pedals, with the MIDI allowing for versatility that might not be available in many analog effects pedals. Not every pedal needs MIDI though; with the help of a Teensy this digital guitar pedal has all its effects built into a self-contained package.

Continue reading “Get More Freedom With This Guitar Pedal” →

Moonbounce Music

August 11, 2024 by 7 Comments

There’s something inspiring about echos. Who among us hasn’t called out or clapped hands in a large space just to hear the sound reflected back? Radio takes this to a whole new level. You can bounce signals from buildings, aircraft, the ionisphere, or even the Moon itself. Humans have been bouncing radio waves from the moon for decades. It’s been used at war, and in peacetime. But [Hainbach] might be the first to use it for music.

Earth Moon Earth or EME communication is quite popular with amateur radio operators. With the right equipment, you can bounce a signal off the moon and hear the echo around 2.5 seconds later. The echo isn’t quite normal though. The moon and the earth are both rotating and moving in relation to each other. This causes Doppler shifts. At higher frequencies, even the craters and surface features of the moon can be heard in the echo.

[Hainbach] spent some time learning about moonbounce at a large radio telescope, and wanted to share this strange audio effect with the world. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the large microwave dish required for this. The next best thing was to create an application which emulates the sound of a moon bounce. To this end, [Hainbach] created a Moon Echo, an audio plugin that emulates a moonbounce.

Moon Echo was created using sounds from a soprano signer and a double bass. [Hainbach] had to be careful not to be too musical, as ham operators are not allowed to broadcast music. This meant all the tests had to be broken into short non-musical clips. Rolling all this empirical data into a model took quite a bit of work, but the end result is worth it.

If you’d like to learn how to moonbounce yourself, check this article out.
Continue reading “Moonbounce Music” →

The Luminiferous Theremin

August 9, 2024 by 4 Comments

[Extreme Kits] asks the question: “What the hell is a luminiferous theremin?” We have to admit, we know what a thermin is, but that’s as far as we got. You’ve surely seen and heard a theremin, the musical instrument developed by Leon Theremin that makes swoopy music often associated with science fiction movies. The luminiferous variation is a similar instrument that uses modern time of flight sensors to pick up your hand positions.

The traditional instrument uses coils, and your hands alter the frequency of oscillators. Some versions use light sensors to avoid the problems associated with coils. While the time of flight sensors also use light, they are immune to many false readings caused by stray light.

Continue reading “The Luminiferous Theremin” →

Tulip Is A Micropython Synth Workstation, In An ESP32

August 8, 2024 by 6 Comments

We’re not sure exactly what Tulip is, because it’s so many things all at once. It’s a music-making environment that’s programmable in Python, runs on your big computer or on an ESP32-S3, and comes complete with some nice sounding synth engines, a sequencer, and a drum machine all built in. It’s like your dream late-1980s synthesizer workstation, but running on a dev board that you can get for a song.

And because Tulip is made of open-source software and hardware, you can extend the heck out of it. For instance, as demonstrated in this video by [Floyd Steinberg], you can turn it into a fully contained portable device by adding a touchscreen. That incarnation is available from Makerfabs, and it’s a bargain, especially considering that the developer [Brian Whitman] gets some of the proceeds. Or, because it’s written in portable Python, you can run it on your desktop computer for free.

The most interesting part of Tulip for us, as programmer-musicians, is that it boots up into a Micrypython REPL. This is a synth workstation with a command-line prompt as its primary interface. It has an always-running main loop, and you make music by writing functions that register as callbacks with the main loop. If you were fast, you could probably live-code up something pretty interesting. Or maybe it wants to be extended into a physical musical instrument by taking in triggers from the ESP32’s GPIOs? Oh, and did we mention it sends MIDI out just as happily as it takes it in? What can’t Tulip do?

We’ve seen some pretty neat minimalist music-making devices lately, but in a sense Tulip takes the cake: it’s essentially almost entirely software. The various hardware incarnations are just possibilities, and because it’s all open and extremely portable, you can freely choose among them. We really like the design and sound of the AMY software synthesizer engine that powers the Tulip, and we’re sure that more synthesizer models will be written for it. This is a music project that you want to keep your eyes on in the future.

A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

Continue reading “1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar” →