Guitar Speaker Cabinet Actually Belongs In Garbage Can

April 5, 2015 by Rich Bremer 20 Comments

[Dano] builds a lot of guitar pedals and amps. He needed a speaker cabinet dedicated to this task in order to be a consistent reference when checking out his electronic creations. He ordered a couple of 10″ guitar speakers…. and they sat around for a while.

Then one day at the craft store, he stumbled on an inexpensive wooden trash can. It had a tapered design and came with a lid. As would any normal person, [Dano] immediately thought these would make a perfect speaker cabinet so he bought two of them.

The trash cans would be used in an upside-down orientation. The intended lid makes for a well fitting bottom of the cabinet. Holes were cut for the speaker and two terminal blocks. Since these cabinets would be used for testing a bunch of different amps, two different terminal blocks were used to permanently have multiple connector types available.

A pair of modern kitchen cabinet handles were used as carrying handles for each of the two cabinets. If a speaker cabinet one speaker tall is cool, a cabinet two speakers tall must be twice as cool. To get there, the two cabinets were bolted together using electrical conduit as an industrial looking spacer. Those brackets bolted to the sides of the bottom cabinet are actually Ikea shelf brackets that [Dano] had bought and never used. The Ikea brackets support casters making for easy moving around the studio.

Overall, [Dano] is happy with how his cabinets sound. They are very unique and interesting at the least. We’d be happy to play some riffs through them!

Logic Noise: Filters And Drums

March 25, 2015 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

Filters and Drums

Logic Noise is an exploration of building raw synthesizers with CMOS logic chips. This session, we continue to abuse the 4069UB as an amplifier. We’ll turn the simple unity-gain buffer of last session into a single-pole active lowpass filter with a single part. (Spoiler: it’s a capacitor.)

While totally useful, this simple filter is a bit boring and difficult to make dynamic. So we’ll look into an entirely different filter, the Twin-T notch filter, that turns out to be sharp enough to build a sine-wave oscillator on, and tweakable enough that we’ll make a damped-oscillator drum sound out of it.

Here’s a quick demo of where we’re heading. Read on to see how we get there.

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3D Spectrum Analyzer Uses 1280 LEDs

March 23, 2015 by Ethan Zonca 47 Comments

One of [Dooievriend]’s friends recently pressed him into service to write software for a 3d spectrum analyzer/VU that he made. The VU is a fairly complex build: it’s made up of 1280 LEDs in a 16x16x5 matrix controlled by a PIC32 clocked at 80MHz. [Dooievriend] wrote some firmware for the PIC that uses a variation on a discrete Fourier transform to create a 3D VU effect.

When [Dooievriend] set out to design the audio analyzing portion of the firmware, his mind jumped to the discrete Fourier transform. This transform calculates the amplitude in a series of frequency bins in the audio—seemingly perfect for a VU. However, after some more research, [Dooievriend] decided to implement a constant Q transform. This transform is very similar to a Fourier transform, but it takes into account the logarithmic way that the human ear interprets sound.

[Dooievriend] started implementing the constant Q transform using an interrupt-based sampler, but he quickly ran into issues with slow floating-point math on his PIC32 (which doesn’t have a hardware floating-point unit). Thankfully he rewrote his code using fixed-point math, and the transform runs nearly real-time. Check out the video after the break to see the VU in action, and a second video that gives some details on the hardware build.

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The Hard Drive MIDI Controller

March 2, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

[shantea] builds MIDI controllers, and after a successful first endeavor with a matrix of buttons and knobs, he decided to branch out to something a little bit cooler. It’s called Ceylon, and it’s effectively a turntable controller built from an old hard drive.

As a contrast to the first MIDI controller, this would be a stripped-down build, with just three faders, LEDs for eye candy, a pair of pots for gain control, and a hard disk surrounded by six anti-vandal buttons. The hard disk is the star of the show, acting as a rotary encoder.

When manually spun, the hard disk generates a few phases of sinusoidal waves. The faster you spin it, the higher the amplitude and frequency. These signals are far too weak to be sampled directly by a microcontroller, and for digital control – as in, MIDI – you don’t need to read the analog signals anyway. These signals were turned digital with the help of an LM339 quad comparator. With two of these comparators and signals out of the hard disk that are 90 degrees out of phase, quadrature encoding is pretty easy.

The software for this MIDI controller is based on the OpenDeck Platform, a neat system that allows anyone to create their own MIDI controllers and devices. It’s also a great looking board that seems to perform well. Video below.

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Arduino Synth Guitar Really Rocks

February 25, 2015 by Rick Osgood 18 Comments

[Gr4yhound] has been rocking out on his recently completed synth guitar. The guitar was built mostly from scratch using an Arduino, some harvested drum pads, and some ribbon potentiometers. The video below shows that not only does it sound good, but [Gr4yhound] obviously knows how to play it.

The physical portion of the build consists of two main components. The body of the guitar is made from a chunk of pine that was routed out by [Gr4yhound’s] own home-made CNC. Three circles were routed out to make room for the harvested Yamaha drum pads, some wiring, and a joystick shield. The other main component is the guitar neck. This was actually a Squire Affinity Strat neck with the frets removed.

For the electronics, [Gr4yhound] has released a series of schematics on Imgur. Three SoftPot membrane potentiometers were added to the neck to simulate strings. This setup allows [Gr4yhound] to adjust the finger position after the note has already been started. This results in a sliding sound that you can’t easily emulate on a keyboard. The three drum pads act as touch sensors for each of the three strings. [Gr4yhound] is able to play each string simultaneously, forming harmonies.

The joystick shield allows [Gr4yhound] to add additional effects to the overall sound. In one of his demo videos you can see him using the joystick to add an effect. An Arduino Micro acts as the primary controller and transmits the musical notes as MIDI commands. [Gr4yhound] is using a commercial MIDI to USB converter in order to play the music on a computer. The converter also allows him to power the Arduino via USB, eliminating the need for batteries.

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Kitsch-Instrument Pulls A Sonata Out Of Your Dishware

February 23, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 5 Comments

Remember those childhood memories of your grandmother telling you to stop hammering away at her pots and pans? Odds are pretty good that the last time you struck a beat with her dishware, you had a few more years to go before you understood tempo and rhythm. Now that we’re a bit older, [Jiffer Harriman] invites us to return to our kitchen armed not only with those childhood memories, but also a with the Kitsch-Instrument: a suite of solenoids, a controller, and a software pipeline to algorithmically turn your kitchen into a giant percussion instrument.

The Kitsch-Instrument is a modular music system that enables the user to pull a percussive pattern out of his or her everyday kitchen utensils. The percussion hits come from a series of mosfet-driven solenoids that can be fixed onto plates, cups, and other everyday items through a variety of clips. These solenoids are collectively driven by two stacked custom Arduino shields that are, in turn, driven either by hand with a button-interface, or algorithmically with a pattern generated by the graphical programming language, Pure Data.

In designing this project, [Jiffer] and his team intended to bring not just a musical tool to young tinkerers. They also aimed to help educate these young minds with multiple entry points into their project. For top-level users, adding buttons is almost as easy as plug-in-and-play. For experienced circuit designers and tinkerers, the entire project is open source with the board layout and software available for download. Overall the project can be explored from lower and lower levels while still retaining its functionality as a musical interface.

If you suspect that this project seems to have that same whimsical sense as the Auto-Meter-Reader Feeder, you’d be right! [Jiffer] and [Zack] hail from the same lab at the University of Colorado. We’re excited to see what upcoming beats will arise from a truly off-the-shelf symphony.

via the [Tangible Embedded and Embodied Conference]

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Play Music With Your Painting Using Teensy

February 21, 2015 by Theodora Fabio 5 Comments

[sab-art], a collaboration between [Sophia Brueckner] and [Eric Rosenbaum], has created a touch-sensitive musical painting. Initially, basic acrylic paint is used for the majority of the canvas. Once that is dry, conductive paint is used to make the shapes that will be used for the capacitive touch sensing. As an added step to increase the robustness, nails are hammered through each painted shape and connected with wiring in the back of the painting. These wires are then connected to the inputs of a Teensy++ 2.0, using Arduino code based on MaKey MaKey to output MIDI. The MIDI is then sent to a Mac Mini which then synthesizes the sound using Ableton Live. Any MIDI-processing software would work, though. For this particular painting, external speakers are used, but incorporating speakers into your own composition is certainly possible.

A nice aspect of this project is that it can be as simple or as complex as you choose. Multiple conductive shapes can be connected through the back to the same Teensy input so that they play the same sound. While [sab-art] went with a more abstract look, this can be used with any style. Imagine taking a painting of Dogs Playing Poker and having each dog bark in its respective breed’s manner when you touch it, or having spaceships make “pew pew” noises. For a truly meta moment, an interactive MIDI painting of a MIDI keyboard would be sublime. [sab-art] is refining the process with each new painting, so even more imaginative musical works of art are on the horizon. We can’t wait to see and hear them!

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