Making Karaoke Worse

February 6, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

kaoss belt

Karaoke just isn’t fair. Not only do you have people who can’t sing choosing to belt out extremely difficult to sing songs, but the variety of songs generally isn’t that great. In an effort to make the karaoke situation at the pubs he frequents better – or worse, depending on how you look at it – [cosmic blooper] is now bringing a vocal effects processor to karaoke. Yes, now he’s got pitch shifting that takes him into [Bieber] territory, and auto tune to emulate the [T-Pain] and the Black Eyed Peas.

To bring the world of synths and effects to a karaoke party, [cosmic blooper] took a battery-powered Kaoss Pad and attached it to his belt with the help of some sheet metal. An RCA to XLR adapter connects the Kaoss Pad to the karaoke microphone, while a mic of questionable quality takes [blooper]’s voice to be transmuted into a horrifying display of effects and pitch shifters.

There’s no video of [cosmic blooper]’s karaoke machine in action, but he tells us he’ll be getting one up soon.

Music Challenge Has You Flapping Your Wrist To Make Sounds

February 2, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

glove-based-music-challenge

This glove controller let you play a musical game. The challenge is to perform the correct wrist motions at the right tempo to play the intro to the song Where is my Mind by the Pixies. This is demonstrated in the video clip after the break.

We often see flex sensors used on the fingers of glove projects, but this one does it all with an accelerometer. That module, along with the Piezo buzzer used for playback are affixed to the small breadboard on the back side of his hand. Rubber bands connect the Arduino to his third and forth fingers. The tempo and rhythm are pre-programmed but the tone generated is based on the gravity reading at the start of each note. If you don’t have your hand positioned correctly the wrong tone will be played.

The code was published in link at the top. It would be fun to see this altered as a hacked Simon Says game.

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Building A Velocity Sensitive Keyboard

January 29, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

keys

Cheap toy pianos don’t usually have MIDI, and getting a velocity-sensitive keyboard from something out of the toy aisle at Walmart is nearly out of the question. If you’re willing to tear one of these toy pianos apart and build your own control electronics, though, the sky is the limit, as [JenShen] shows us with his home built velocity sensitive keyboard.

Usually, velocity-sensitive keyboards have two buttons underneath each key. By having a microcontroller measure the time difference between when each button is pressed, it’s possible to sense how fast each key was pressed. [JenShen] took the idea of a velocity-sensitive keyboard in another direction and instead used a force sensitive resistor strip, cut up into many pieces to provide velocity and aftertouch data.

[JenShen]’s keyboard adds these resistive buttons to the button matrix he already made. The result is a very inexpensive velocity sensitive keyboard with aftertouch, an impressive feat for an Arduino and only a few components.

You can check out the keyboard in action after the break.

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Duct Tape Bagpipes

January 29, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 37 Comments

Looking to build your own instrument out of plumbing and tape? [Scott] made his own set of Membrane Bagpipes out of PVC pipes, a plastic bag, and duct tape.

Bagpipes are made out of a few parts. The drones are pipes that are tuned to play a single note. They are tuned by the fixed length of the pipe. The chanter is a tube with finger holes. This lets you play various notes depending on which holes you cover. The blowpipe is used to fill the bag with air that will pass through the membranes on the drones and chanter. Finally, there’s the bag which stores air.

[Scott]’s build uses PVC for the drones and chanter. The membranes are made out of cut up bits of plastic bags. Some crafty duct tape work makes up the bag, and seals it on to the various parts. A check valve is used to stop warm, duct tape flavoured air from blowing back into your mouth.

It’s pretty amazing what people can do with a few rolls of duct tape. The pipes aren’t exactly in tune, but they certainly work. Check out a video of them in action after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Becomes A Guitar Effects Processor

January 28, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

One of the more interesting use cases for the Raspberry Pi is exploiting its DSP capabilities in interesting ways. There’s a lot of horsepower inside the Raspberry Pi, more than enough to do some very interesting things with audio, all while being powered by a small wall wart adapter. [Pierre] over on the Pure Data mailing list has a proof-of-concept working that uses the Raspi as a guitar effects processor. The results are very encouraging – [Pierre] is able to use his Raspi as a delay, pitch shifter, and of course a classic flanger, phaser, and chorus with a latency of about 16 ms.

There are a few steps necessary to get low latency with the Raspi’s audio interface. [Pierre] is running his Pi headless, and allocated more RAM to the CPU.

If you’d like to try this out for yourself, [Pierre] has a tutorial for setting up Pure Data with the Raspberry Pi. He’ll be updating his blog soon with more tutorials and verified USB audio interfaces later.

Check out the processor in action after the break.

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Tired Of Playing The MacBook? Play The Raspberry Pi!

January 21, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

pithingy

Hit up any club, party, or get together where musicians are present and you’ll probably find a DJ booth stacked to the gills with faders, various MIDI devices, and a MacBook. However abundant an OS X-based DJ platform is, we haven’t heard hide nor hare of a Raspberry Pi being used as a sequencer, MIDI device, or MaxMSP box.

[James] over at Illuminated Sound put together a great tutorial for making all those cool electronic music devices play nice with a Raspberry Pi. He used a Novation Launchpad, an 8×8 MIDI controller that can act as faders, a keyboard, or even a functional equivalent to the pads on an MPC.

Hardware is nothing without software, so [James] used Puredata and libusb to turn the MIDI data into notes and audio effects.

[James] added a download that includes the Launchpad driver and a Puredata sketch to test everything out. You can see how it all fits together in the video after the break.

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Turning A Broken Bass Into A Headless Bass

January 11, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

bass

A while back [Michael] inherited a broken bass guitar from a friend. The headstock for this bass was cracked right down the middle, and the friend attempted a repair with a bolt and a couple of washers. After trying to figure out what the addition of a bolt was trying to accomplish, [Michael] set to work repairing this bass and ended up doing a headless conversion.

A headless bass, just as the name implies, does away with the headstock and moves the tuners to the other side of the guitar – in [Michael]’s case, right below the bridge. After sawing off the broken headstock above the truss rod, [Michael] made a string retainer and bolted it on to the remainder of the neck.

The tuners had to be moved, of course, so [Michael] routed out a section of the body below the bridge. Four holes were drilled and the original tuners slipped right in. The result is a perfectly functional bass that would fit right in to the tour van of an 80’s metal band.

You can check out [Michael]’s bass down in the pocket.

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