How To Make A Whamola

June 1, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 15 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to combine the extreme note-bending capability of a trombone with the obvious awesomeness of a bass guitar, maybe a whamola like this one could be for you! I’d never heard of one until recently, and haven’t picked up my bass in years, but my much more musically inclined cousin and I decided to build one.

It should be noted that this instrument is quite prone to string breakage if the handle is used too forcefully, so caution should be used both when building and playing. As with many hacks an old piece of equipment, a bass guitar in this case, was partially sacrificed to make it.

The build itself, outlined here for the main assembly, or this post for mounting the electronics, was quite simple. It took an afternoon of milling machine and miter saw work to get the 1 3/8 inch square piece of wood cut to size. Cavities for the electronics and a slot for the handle axis (components for a screen repair tool and a bolt) were cut with the milling machine – a router could also be used. It turned out to be a ton of fun to play, especially with an amp and distortion pedal. Check out the video after the break to see us playing it, as well as one of the whamola going together! Continue reading “How To Make A Whamola” →

The Dronitar; A Scrap Made Motorized Sitar

June 1, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

This peculiar instrument, called the Dronitar, is completely made from scrap. Interestingly, it sounds pretty good. You can hear the dronitar in action in the video after the break.The call this a “2 stringed” instrument,and most who are instrumentally savvy will find a bit of confusion here. They are referring to the string that you play as well as a small string that is struck against the other by a motor to create the droning effect. The result sounds very much like a sitar mixed with a bit of surfer rock styling. You’ll note that they’re even using a second motor as the pickup!

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Moppy Lets You Play Your Floppy Drives

May 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Get ready to join a band. Just follow the guide over at the Moppy project page and you’ll have your very own floppy drive instrument.

The name is a mashup between Musical and Floppy. By using an Arduino UNO as a translator, you can command an array of floppy drives with a musical keyboard (think piano). The head on each floppy drive is controlled by a stepper motor which will put out some sweet sounds if driven at just the right frequency. The lower notes tend to fair a bit better than the high range. One great example of this is the Imperial March theme as heard after the break.

Once you get the base system up and running, it’s time to think of some alternate interfaces. Sure, you can obvious things like toy keyboards. But wouldn’t it be more fun to make it fruit controlled?

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Making A Digital Delay From A Simple Microcontroller

May 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

If you’d like to start experimenting in DSP, or just want to build a guitar pedal, here’s the project for you. It’s an audio echo using just a microcontroller from the fruitful workshop of [Vinod].

For his circuit, [Vinod] fed the output of a small electret microphone into a small amplifier, and then into the ADC of an ATMega32. Inside the microcontroller, [Vinod] set up a circular array which writes the voltage from the microphone and sends it out to a speaker. Because the array is circular (i.e. it loops around when it gets to the end), [Vinod] has a digital version of a loop of magnetic tape, perfect for recording sounds and playing back echos.

Because [Vinod] is using an ATMega32, he only has a limited amount of RAM to record audio samples. The delay time could be lengthened with a more capable microcontroller, or even the addition of a large RAM chip. With his setup, [Vinod] can do some really interesting experiments with audio and DSP, so we wouldn’t be surprised if an enterprising musician used this project as the basis for a digital delay stomp box.

You can check out [Vinod]’s demo of his echo machine after the break.

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Making Music With Radiation

May 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[Jeff Keyser] from mightyohm.com got a chance to show off this interesting take on ambient music. He’s using his geiger counter kit to detect beta and gamma radiation. This then sends a pulse down the line to an Arduino to turn it into a musical note. The geiger counters put out a 1.ms 3v pulse though, so he first has to run this through a 74Ls04, which spits out the 5V the arduino wants. He’s admittedly no musician, but you can hear in the video it sounds fine. Especially considering they are all just C in different octaves. Those of us that are musicians probably would have gone with a B#.

The ambient noise is interesting, but when you realize it is due to radioactive decay, it becomes somehow more attention getting. We often forget about the invisible world around us. He even drops a few Uranium marbles onto the geiger counters to spice things up.

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Fisher-Price Record Player Plays Stairway To Heaven

May 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

[Fred Murphy] has an old Fisher-Price music box/record player that has lost many of its disks over the last 40 years. It’s a very simple device – concentric grooves in a plastic disk have plastic bumps that are picked up by the tines of the record player ‘cartridge.’ Seeing as how this toy is basically a music box, [Fred] figured making his own records would be well within his grasp; he did the reasonable thing and made a Stairway to Heaven disk for a toy music box.

To figure out where to place the ‘bumps’ for the musical tines, [Fred] built a small tool in Visual C# 2010 that allowed him to place notes on a scale and generate the requisite GCode for the disk. After sending this file to his CNC mill, [Fred] had an acrylic disk that played Led Zeppelin on a child’s music box.

Of course, this Instructable wouldn’t be complete without a video demo of Stairway blasting out of this record player. You can check that out after the break.

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Player Guitar Sounds Wonderful; Makes Us Drool Because Of The Complexity

May 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

It becomes obvious when you listen to this player guitar that it’s not a human being playing. But the only reason for that is the unrelenting precision with which the songs are played. In addition to that accuracy, it’s interesting to note that this tune is normally played by a group of guitarists but here the machine manages to do it on one instrument. And we think it sounds fantastic!

This comes from [Vladimir Demin], a maker who previously built an automatic Bayan (like an accordion but with buttons where the keyboard is normally found). This time around it’s the six strings and many frets of a guitar that have been outfitted with one solenoid each. In the image above you can see the strumming mechanism mounted near the tone hole. Six picks are held in place, and it appears that each has two solenoids. From what we can observe in the video, one of the solenoids is used to strum the sting, the other tilts the pick mount so that there won’t be a second strumming when the pick is returned to its starting position.

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