MIDI Man-in-the-middle Hack Lets You Add Pedal To The Mix

September 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Sebastian] has a friend who would like to use a pedal with his MIDI setup, but his keyboard doesn’t support one. Some might interpret that as a sign you need to buy a new keyboard. But [Sebastian] has already done a lot of work with the MIDI protocol. He knew it should be possible to create a MIDI pass-through which adds support for a pedal.

You can see the two MIDI cables connected to the box above. One is the input from the keyboard, the other is the output to the synthesizer. There is also a jack for a pedal input to the left. The chip inside intercepts each packet, rolling in values based from the pedal input and passing on the altered packets to the synthesizer. As you can hear in the video after the break, this works like a charm.

Catch more of [Sebastian’s] midi work by following his keyboard sensor replacement projects.

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BaceMaker Weds Organ Foot Pedals With Guitar Whammy Effects

September 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Jon Ferwerda] managed to fry the analog electronics on an old electric organ while conducting some circuit bending experiments. It’s a loss, but he’s still left with some cool equipment to play with. Recently he got to work generating tones using the organ’s foot pedals.

There were two types of foot pedal included with this organ, the set that is arranged like a keyboard, and a rocker pedal similar to what you might use with an electric sewing machine. Since the music generation was handled by those fried bits of organ [Jon] got to work interfacing the foot keyboard with a 555 timer. He used a fairly large capacitor to get the frequency into the bass range and wired individual pedals to different parts of a resistor network. But he didn’t stop with that. The rocker pedal has its own variable resistor hardware which lets him bend the pitches are they are being generated which sounds alike like a guitar whammy effect. He shows his work in the clip after the break. We think he nailed it! This is a perfect supplement to any type of electronic music setup.

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How To Make Your Own Piezoelectric Speaker

September 15, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Piezoelectric speakers are found all around you, from musical greeting cards to the tweeters in your car stereo setup. Making your own piezo speakers is actually very easy, as [Steven] shows us after replacing the speaker in a clock radio.

Piezo speakers require a small crystal with piezoelectric properties, so this build is the perfect followup to [Steven]’s tutorial for making Rochelle salt crystals. After attaching two strips of aluminum foil to his Rochelle salt crystal, [Steven] took the wires that previously went to the clock radio speaker, connected them to the crystal, and turned on the radio. When attached to a tin can, the newly created piezo speaker created a little bit of sound, but the results weren’t very impressive.

To boost the sound output of his homemade speaker, [Steven] needed to increase the voltage across his piezo speaker. At first he tried a doorbell transformer with somewhat better results, but much more sound was produced when he used a transformer taken from a microwave oven.

After experimenting with his microwave transformer and Rochelle salt, [Steven] moved on to piezo elements found in BBQ and cigarette lighters. These homemade speakers were much clearer than the chunk of Rochelle salt he was using previously, and surprisingly produced about the same audio quality as a commercially made piezo speaker [Steven] picked up at Radio Shack.

You can check out the build video for [Steven]’s crystal speaker after the break.

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Log Guitar Uses Tube As A Bridge, Actually Is The Blues

September 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

In the never ending quest to replicate the tone of depression-era blues records, [Valve Child] managed to build the most backwoods guitar ever seen.

The body of [Valve Child]’s slide guitar was taken from the limb of a red gum tree felled during a wind storm. After taking a chainsaw, router, and sander to the guitar, [Valve] sealed it with linseed oil.

The real beauty of this build comes from the bridge and electronics: the pickup is made from six stacks of magnets encased in hot glue and wound with enamel wire. The bridge of the guitar is actually made from a 6GM8 dual triode. Not only does this provide the guitar with a wonderful brassy sound, the tube serves as a wonderful low-tech preamp when powered by a 6 volt battery.

The three strings on the guitar are tuned DAD, perfect for the likes of [Robert Johnson], or, for the younger kids, [Jack White]. Surprisingly, [Valve Child]’s guitar actually sounds really good. as heard in the video demo after the break.

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Adding A Sound Synthesizer To A ‘don’t-touch-the-sides’ Maze Game

September 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

Part of the fun of the classic game of Operation is the jump you get from the loud buzzer which sounds if you touch the sides. This exhibit piece uses the same principle of lining the edges of a track with metal, but instead of an annoying buzz, each touch will issue a bit of music. That’s because the maze has been paired with a synthesizer. Instead of one sound wherever the stylus touches the sides, different parts of the maze act as one of 94 keys for the synthesizer.

There’s a lot more built into the base of the device than just a maze game. The knobs are used to alter the audio effects and the buttons work in conjunction with they stylus to sequence audio samples. There’s even a graphic LCD screen which shows the currently playing wave form. You can get a better look at the project in the video after the break.

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ProtoSynth, The Prototyping Synthesizer

September 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This project isn’t really a prototype, but a tool for prototyping. [Tymkrs] came up with a unique way to build this synthesizer prototyping tool. They actually patched into the underside of the breadboards in order to keep all of the permanent bits nice and tidy.

In the clip after the break you’ll see all of the build photos that lead up to this point. After cutting out and assembling the wooden pieces for the case they grab a soldering iron and get to work. Two octaves worth of keys were pulled out of an electric keyboard. Ribbon cable is soldered onto each key’s electrical connection, with an SIL pin header as a connector. This mates with another ribbon cable with a SIL socket on one end, and an IDC connector on the other. The real trick is getting that IDC connected to the breadboard. They cut back the adhesive tape on the underside of the board and soldered a surface mount pin header onto it. This way the inputs from the keys, as well as a few 1/4″ jacks from the back of the case are always available in a tidy way on the breadboards. The video goes on to show preliminary synthesizer work on the device.

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Propeller Turned Into Chiptune Player With A Software SID

August 31, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

If there wasn’t reason enough to love the Parallax Propeller, now you can listen to chiptunes with your own pocket SID audio player.

This chiptune audio player uses the very unusual and very cool eight-core Parallax Propeller microcontroller. After soldering a few caps and resistors to a Propeller dev board to allow for audio out, the only thing necessary to play SID music files is a bit of code and an SD card breakout.

The key piece of code for this build would be the SIDcog object written by [Johannes Ahlebrand] this piece of code turns one of the eight cores in the Propeller into a virtual version of the classic Commodore 64 sound chip.

Since the SIDcog object only takes up one core on the eight core Propeller, it could be possible to turn this SID player into an all-inclusive chiptune audio source; the addition of an Atari POKEY or FM synthesis cog would allow for just about any conceivable chiptune sound to be carried around in a pocket.

No Hackaday post about chiptunes or SIDs would be complete without an audio demo, so you can check out the Propeller-powered SID after the break.

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