Electronic Bag Pipes Need No Bag And Use Only 1 Pipe

February 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

A lot of people might turn their noses up at an electronic version of bagpipes. But we see a definite need for them. After all, it’s pretty hard to take your bagpipes on a road trip, but this eChanter will have no trouble entertaining your fellow travelers.

The musical instrument is Arduino-based and the builder can decide between a headphone jack (use it with that FM transmitter when in the car!) or a speaker. The version seen above uses headphones with a piece of PVC pipe as the body, screw heads as touch sensors, and a project box to hold the electronics. But there are a lot of alternatives suggested, such as using automatic sprinkler parts. It sounds like a riser, connector, and pop-up sprinkler head body will do just as well hosting all of the components.

Want to hear what it sounds like? There’s an mp3 clip under the final steps section.

[audio http://www.echanter.com/marine-corps-hymn.mp3]

Arduino Saves You A Bundle When It Comes To Guitar Pedal Effects

February 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Deadbird] wanted to recreate some guitar pedal effects that he heard on a music video. The thing is, you can end up spending a bundle on hardware unless you’re crafty like he was. He grabbed a Whammy 4 pedal, but decided to forego using a $125 MIDI controller and sourced an Arduino to perform MIDI-based alterations instead.

The Whammy 4 was chosen for its ability to perform the sound processing he desired, but also because it can be MIDI controller. By hooking up the Arduino to that port (as seen in the diagram above) he’s able to program changes that would be difficult or impossible with just the pedal. For instance, [Deadbird] illustrates a command which jumps from the lowest to highest setting of an effect without hitting any of the values in the middle. With that under his belt he goes about programming loops of changes with delays in between them. The best part is, you’re only limited by your ability to craft the MIDI commands as Arduino code.

Get Tons Of MIDI Knobs And Buttons With The Chomp

February 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Although MIDI was originally designed for 1 MHz computers with 64 kB of RAM, it’s still an industry standard almost 30 years after its introduction. Even for electronic artists armed with a microcontroller, MIDI is old hat if you want to connect a few buttons up to a music workstation. What if you wanted to connect dozens of buttons and knobs to a bunch of MIDI hardware, though? Enter Chomp, the Configurable Hardware Open-source MIDI Platform.

[Max Justicz], an awesome pseudonym if we’ve ever heard one, built a MIDI controller that allows for 48 inputs for buttons, knobs, and any other electrical connection imaginable. The board is powered by an Arduino-fied ATMega328 and connects to your sensors through 2×5 ribbon cables.

If you’ve ever thought about building a monome MIDI controller, [Max Justicz] has started a Kickstarter campaign to put a few hundred Chomps out into the wild. It seems like a great way to build some controllers or simply to send stuff to MaxMSP. Either way, the Chomp is sure to be useful.

Self-tuning Piano Can Tune Itself, Can’t Tuna Fish

February 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 45 Comments

At Hack a Day, we don’t throw the term genius around lightly. We’re obligated to bestow that title on [Don Gilmore] for his amazingly simple self-tuning piano. To appreciate [Don]’s build, you need to realize that just because a piano has 88 keys, that doesn’t mean it has 88 strings. Treble notes have three strings per key while tenor and bass notes have one or two strings each. This usually comes out to more than 200 strings per piano, and [Don] can bring them all up to tune in under a minute.

[Don]’s system needs to perform two functions. The first one is sustaining the strings so the computer can ‘hear’ the strings. He does this with a magnetic sustainer that is a lot like an E-Bow. To bring the strings up to the right pitch, there are small heaters underneath the pin block. Running a little bit of current through these heaters allows [Don] to decrease the tension of each string and lower the pitch.

This tech reminds us of the Gibson Robot Guitar, a self-tuning guitar that does it’s trick with motors in the tuners. The Gibson didn’t do well on the sales floor, given that everybody and their mom can tune a guitar. Pianos, though, are another story. [Don] is looking for investors to bring his idea to market, and we hope to see it on the floor of a music shop sometime in the future.

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Adding Visuals To Chiptune Performances

January 30, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

If you’ve never been to a chiptune show – yes, they exist – you’ve noticed the awesome visuals behind the performers that are usually displayed with a glitching NES. If it’s a really good show, that 8-bit visualization will be in sync with the music and may actually serve as a lo-fi spectrum analyzer. [Andy] came up with his own visualization system for a Sega Genesis or Megadrive. With 16 bits behind his build, we’ll say if far surpasses the lowly NES.

For his visualization, [Andy] feeds audio into an ATMega328 and the ever-popular MSGEQ7 seven-band graphic equalizer IC. The output from the EQ goes straight to the second controller input of a Sega Nomad [Andy] had lying around that is running a custom ROM for his show. The ROM is programmed in tandem with the microcontroller project to serve as a spectrum analyzer for his shows.

You can check out [Andy]’s visualization with the chiptunes of Danimal Cannon after the break. We would prefer a demo featuring An0vA and the code for the microcontroller, but it’s still a very nice demo indeed.

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Synthesize With A Hard Drive

January 27, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

If you’d like a pseudo-mechanical way of producing a droning synthesizer sound, [gijs] is your man. He made a small synthesizer out of nothing but an old hard drive and a few components.

Whenever a disk platter is spun manually, the spindle motor inside the drive produces a few out of phase sine waves on its connections. [gijs]’ synthesizer compares and amplifies these sine waves and sends them out to a speaker. The result is a strange droning chiptune-esque arpeggio.

The circuit for the build is soldered directly to the hard drive enclosure Manhattan style. Because the output of the spindle motor produces out of phase sine waves, [gijs] thought it would be a good idea if he could capitalize on some phase interference to alter the timbre of his synth. The entire build is mounted to a wall with hinges to one side so the speaker can be moved around. It isn’t much of a change, but we can here some wave forms cancelling each other out.

Check out the video of the build after the break. There’s also a few audio samples available on the project page.

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Music Box Is Still Alive With Wavetable Synthesis

January 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

For all the wonder of dulcet tones coming from a century-old music box, we’ve got to admit that [Markus]’ wavetable synthesis build is still pretty impressive. Of course, the Internet cred gained by doing a demo of Still Alive helps too.

Wavetable synthesis stores a one cycle long waveform in RAM that can be played on a loop at varying frequencies. This technique has been around since the late 70s and can be found in a lot of the classic synths of the 80s and serves as the basis for Atari MOD music and the Game Boy chiptunes produced with Little Sound DJ

[Markus] found a pair of battery-powered laptop speakers and decided a music box would be a wonderful project. Inspired by [ChaN]’s ATtiny wavetable synthesizer, [Markus] decided to up the ante and use a PIC32 microcontroller to make the programming a little more digestable. The entire project (with an awesome dead bug soldering job) is nearly as large as the PIC itself.

[Markus] threw up the source code along with some Python scripts to convert waveforms and MIDI files into something the chip can understand. Before you check that out, be sure to look at the Still Alive demo.

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