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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DIY Spring And Plate Reverb

May 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

If you’re running your own recording studio, you’re going to need a lot of gear that seems excessively esoteric to the non-musically inclined. A rack full of synth gear looks just like any other cabinet of technology you would find in a server room. Electronic music is, for the most part, very utilitarian looking, but there are a few pieces that add a very nice aesthetic touch to any studio. [Peter] made two great looking pieces of hardware – both reverbs – that significantly add to the decor of his studio. As a bonus, they also sound really good.

[Peter]’s spring reverb (Dutch, Google translate) works just the same as any other spring reverb; a speaker puts some music into a slightly stretched spring, and this sound is picked up by another transducer at the opposite end. For this build, [Peter] used a Slinky and a piece of PVC pipe left over from a bathroom remodel. Adding a few jacks, pots, and a preamp, [Peter] had a very nice and extremely large spring reverb.

The plate reverb (translation) is also a staple of pro recording studios around the globe. This reverb is somewhat similar to a spring reverb, except the spring is replaced with a tuned metal plate. [Peter] used a cymbal from a drum set for this piece of kit. Two speakers are attached to the back of the cymbal, one feeds a sound into the cymbal, the other speaker picks up those sounds and sends it to the mixing board.

There’s a lot of really cool musical DIY projects over on [Peter]’s site, along with a few audio demos for each of his DIY projects. We’ve included his reverb demos after the break, feel free to give those a listen.

Thanks go to [geekabit] for sending this one in.

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IPhone Wielding Guitar Adds Tip Of Your Finger Or Tip The Instrument Control

May 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Rob Morris] has been hard at working improving his guitar augmentation techniques. Here he’s demonstrating the use of an iPhone to control the effects while he plays. This builds on the work he shared a few years ago where he strapped a Wii remote to the body of his ax.

Just like the Wii remote, the iPhone includes an accelerometer. As you would expect the best parts of the older hack made it into this one, but the inclusion of the touch screen adds a lot more. In the clip after the break he starts by showing off the screen controlling a whammy bar functionality. But we really love the octave offset feature that comes next. This kind of sound manipulation simply can’t be done using a purely physical method (like the whammy bar can). But he’s not done yet. The demo finishes with a Theremin feature. You’ll notice he plucks a string but no sound comes out until he starts touching the screen. This turns it into an entirely different type of instrument.

The only info we have about putting this together is the list of packages he’s using: TouchOSC, Max/Msp, and GuitarRig

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Electromagnetic Harp With Home Made Ebows

May 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Fresh from the Arduino subreddit comes [dataplex]’s 26 string electromagnetic harp. It’s a very cool, ambient instrument that sounds simply phenomenal through the Space Echo and Fender Twin rig [dataplex] has.

There’s not much in the way of build details, but judging from this post [dataplex] made several months ago the instrument works on the same principles as an Ebow. There’s a great prototype video showing the hardware and software. One small voice coil reads each string. A tiny op-amp sends this to another voice coil and back into the string. There’s tons of feedback, but it’s great for an ethereal ambiance.

The prototype is controlled by an Arduino via a computer, but for the final build [dataplex] moved on to a copper/zinc touch interface on the front of the harp.

It’s a very, very cool instrument and we’re waiting patiently for the build details to be released. You can check out the videos of [dataplex]’s work after the break.

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