Musical Hacks

1401 Articles

A Parts Bin MIDI Controller In 24 Hours

October 20, 2024 by 9 Comments

Part of the reason MIDI has hung on as a standard in the musical world for so long is that it is incredibly versatile. Sure, standard instruments like pianos and drums can be interfaced with a computer fairly easily using this standard, but essentially anything can be converted to a MIDI instrument with the right wiring and a little bit of coding. [Jeremy] needed to build a MIDI controller in a single day, and with just a few off-the-shelf parts he was able to piece together a musical instrument from his parts bin.

The build is housed in an off-brand protective case from a favorite American discount tool store, but the more unique part of the project is the choice to use arcade buttons as the instrument’s inputs. [Jeremy] tied eight of these buttons to an Arduino Uno to provide a full octave’s worth of notes, and before you jump to the comments to explain that there are 12 notes in an octave, he also added a button to the side of the case to bend any note when pressed simultaneously. An emergency stop button serves as a master on/off switch and a MIDI dongle on the other side serves as the interface point to a computer.

After a slight bit of debugging, the interface is up and running within [Jeremy]’s required 24-hour window. He’s eventually planning to use it to control a custom MIDI-enabled drum kit, but for now it was fun to play around with it in some other ways. He’s also posted the project code on a GitHub page. And, if this looks a bit familiar, this was not [Jeremy]’s first MIDI project. He was also the creator of one of the smallest MIDI interfaces we’ve ever seen.

Continue reading “A Parts Bin MIDI Controller In 24 Hours” →

Module Makes Noisy Projects Easy

October 16, 2024 by 7 Comments

You want to add voice, music, or sound effects to your project. What do you do? Sure, it is easy enough to plug a Raspberry Pi or some other tiny computer, but that’s not always desirable from a power, space, or cost point of view. [Mellow_Labs] shows a module that makes it simple to add sound to any project. The little board is just big enough to house a speaker and doesn’t cost much. Check it out in the video below.

The device allows you to preload tracks as MP3 files. There are two ways to control it: via a serial port, or using a single pin that can accept commands like you might expect from a MP3 player, like play and next track.

Continue reading “Module Makes Noisy Projects Easy” →

Linus Live-Codes Music On The Commodore 64

October 16, 2024 by 12 Comments

In this tremendously educational video, [Linus Åkesson] takes us through how he develops a synthesizer and a sequencer and editor for it on the Commodore 64, all in BASIC. While this sounds easy, [Linus] is doing this in hard mode: all of the audio is generated by POKE, and it gets crazier from there. If you’re one of those people out there who think that BASIC is a limited language, you need to watch this video.

[Linus] can do anything with POKE. On a simple computer like the C64, the sound chip, the screen chips, and even the interrupts that control program flow are all accessible simply by writing to the right part of memory. So the main loop here simply runs through a lot of data, POKEing it into memory and turning the sound chip on and off. There’s also a counter running inside the C64 that he uses to point into a pitch lookup table in the code.

But the inception part comes when he designs the sequencer and editor. Because C64 BASIC already has an interactive code editor, he hijacks this for his music editor. The final sequencer interface exists inside the program itself, and he writes music in the code, in real time, using things like LIST and editing. (Code is data, and data is code.) Add in a noise drum hack, and you’ve got some classic chiptuney sounds by the end.

We love [Linus]’s minimal C64 exercises, and this one gets maximal effect out of a running C64 BASIC environment. But that’s so much code in comparison to his 256-byte “A Mind is Born” demo. But to get that done, he had to use assembly.

Thanks [zogzog] for the great tip!

Continue reading “Linus Live-Codes Music On The Commodore 64” →

The Greengate DS:3 Part 2: Putting A Retro Sampler To Use

October 14, 2024 by 2 Comments

The Greengate DS:3 had been re-created in the form of the Goodgreat. Now [Bea Thurman] had to put it to use. If the Greengate DS:3 card was rare,  the keyboard was nearly impossible to find. After a long search, [Bea] bought one all the way from Iceland.  The card of course came courtesy of [Eric]. 

It was time to connect the two together.  But there was a problem — a big problem. The GreenGate has a DB-25 connected via a ribbon cable to the board’s 2×10 connector. The keyboard that shipped with those cards would plug right in.  Unfortunately, [Bea’s] keyboard had a DIP-40 IDC connector crimped on its ribbon cable.  What’s more the connectors for the sustain and volume pedals were marked, but never drilled out. The GreenGate silk screen was still there though. 

Maybe it was a prototype or some sort of modified hardware. Either way, the 40-pin DIP connector had to go if the keyboard ever were to work with the card. What followed were a few hours of careful wire tracing 

Continue reading “The Greengate DS:3 Part 2: Putting A Retro Sampler To Use” →

Solving A Retrocomputing Mystery With An Album Cover: Greengate DS:3

October 14, 2024 by 10 Comments

[Bea Thurman] had a retro music conundrum. She loved the classic Greengate DS:3 sampler, but couldn’t buy one, and couldn’t find enough information to build her own. [Bea’s] plea for help caught the attention of [Eric Schlaepfer], aka  [TubeTime]. The collaboration that followed ultimately solved a decades-old mystery. 

In the 1980s, there were two types of musicians: Those who could afford a Fairlight CMI and everyone else. If you were an Apple II owner, the solution was a Greengate DS:3. The DS:3 was a music keyboard and a sampler card for the Apple II+ (or better). The plug-in card was a bit mysterious, though. The cards were not very well documented, and only a few survive today. To make matters worse, some chips had part numbers sanded off. It was a bit of a mystery until [Bea and Tubetime] got involved. 

Continue reading “Solving A Retrocomputing Mystery With An Album Cover: Greengate DS:3” →

Phoniebox: A Family-Friendly Simple Music Box

October 5, 2024 by 5 Comments

Ever hear of the Phoniebox project? If not – tune in, that’s a hacker’s project your entire family will appreciate. Phoniebox is a software suite and tutorial for building a jukebox controlled through RFID cards, and it can play audio from a wide variety of sources – music and playlists stored locally, online streams like internet radio stations, Spotify, podcasts of your choice, and so on. It’s super easy to build – get a Raspberry Pi board, connect an NFC reader to it, wire up a pair of speakers, and you’re set. You can assemble a PhonieBox together with your kids over the weekend – and many do.

Want some inspiration, or looking to see what makes Phoniebox so popular? Visit the Phoniebox gallery – it’s endearing to see just how many different versions have been built over the six years of project’s existence. Everyone’s Phoniebox build is different in its own special way – you bring the hardware, Phoniebox brings well-tested software and heaps of inspiration.

You already have a case to house a  Phoniebox setup – if you think you don’t, check the gallery, you’ll find that you do. Experiencing a problem? There’s a wealth of troubleshooting advice and tutorials, and a helpful community. Phoniebox is a mature project and its scale is genuinely impressive – build one for your living room, or your hacker’s lair, or your hackerspace. RFID-controlled jukeboxes are a mainstay on Hackaday, so it’s cool to see a project that gives you all the tools to build one.

Digital Audio Workstation In A Box

September 23, 2024 by 4 Comments

Although it’s still possible to grab a couple of friends, guitars, and a set of drums and start making analog music like it’s 1992 and there are vacant garages everywhere yearning for the sounds of power chords, the music scene almost demands the use of a computer now. There are a lot of benefits, largely that it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry since it greatly reduces the need for expensive analog instruments. It’s possible to get by with an impressively small computer and only a handful of other components too, as [BAussems] demonstrates with this tiny digital audio workstation (DAW).

The DAW is housed inside a small wooden box and is centered around a Behringer JT-4000 which does most of the heavy lifting in this project. It’s a synthesizer designed to be as small as possible, but [BAussems] has a few other things to add to this build to round out its musical capabilities. A digital reverb effects pedal was disassembled to reduce size and added to the DAW beneath the synthesizer. At its most basic level this DAW can be used with nothing but these components and a pair of headphones, but it’s also possible to add a smartphone to act as a sequencer and a stereo as well.

For a portable on-the-go rig, this digital audio workstation checks a lot of the boxes needed including MIDI and integration with a computer. It’s excellent inspiration for anyone else who needs a setup like this but doesn’t have access, space, or funds for a more traditional laptop- or desktop-centered version. For some other small on-the-go musical instruments we recently saw a MIDI-enabled keyboard not much larger than a credit card.