Cheap DIY Mic Sounds (And Looks) Damn Good

November 6, 2021 by Adam Zeloof 30 Comments

As any musician, podcaster, or youtuber will be quick to tell you, there’s no substitute for a good microphone. They’ll also be quick to tell you all about their favorite microphone, why it’s better than all the others, and how much it cost (oh, and how round it sounds, whatever that means). But what if you could build your own that sounds as good, if not better, and do it for only $30?

That’s what [Matt] from DIY Perks set out to discover when he built his DIY USB-C Microphone. He was able to source the same microphone capsule that can be found in his high-end, $600 CAD E100S, and built a simple pre-amplifier that bumps its quiet output up to line-level. He even connected it to the mic module with some custom cable made from two tiny enameled wires that won’t transmit bumps and vibrations, wrapped inside desoldering braiding which acts as a shield. He fed the output from the pre-amp into a cheap USB audio interface and voilà! — top-notch sound for next to nothing. Make sure you check out the video below to hear a comparison between the mic and its professional counterparts.

Of course, sounding good isn’t quite enough. [Matt] wasn’t satisfied until the piece looked the part as well, which is why he encased the mic module in custom-bent brass mesh shielding and tubing (which also helps to reduce electrical interference). The brass cage sits suspended via rubber o-rings on a beautiful bent brass mount, which sits atop an articulated brass arm of [Matt]’s own design. Finally, the arm is mounted to a wood and brass enclosure that also serves to house the electronics.

And, in true open-source fashion, the video description is full of links to parts, schematics, and templates in case you want to build one of these beauties for yourself. Between this fantastic build and this other, super-overkill scratch-built USB microphone we featured earlier in the year, there has never been a better time to make yourself a mic you won’t have to trade your car for.

Thanks to [RichV] and [BaldPower] for the tip!

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A one-string bass violin made from two washtubs, some plywood, a Louisville Slugger, and some weed whacker line.

Louisville Slugger Puts This Bass On Base

November 6, 2021 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

One of the most recognizable instruments in both jug band and American folk music has got to be the washtub bass. Also known as gutbuckets, these instruments tend to use an old broom for a neck and usually have a single string.

We would argue that the design of [goaly]’s single-string double gutbucket owes something to the double bass of the violin family as well, with its figure eight shape. On top of those tubs is a plywood soundboard, which is screwed into a series of wood blocks around the lip of the tubs.

For the combination neck and fretboard, [goaly] called up a vintage Louisville Slugger, which is way more interesting than some old broom handle. [goaly] extended the backbone through the body with scrap lengths of 2″x2″, and this spine runs through both tubs and acts as a peg on the bottom. In lieu of a tailpiece, the string is tied to a board that the player secures with their foot.

Although [goaly] experimented with steel cable, clothesline rope, nylon rope, and paracord first, the string is made from weed whacker trimmer line. At the top, the string is attached through the neck — it’s held down with a couple of bent fender washers and pulled taut with a wingnut. We love that [goaly] even fashioned a wooden tool to make it easy to turn the wingnut. And we also love the DIY bridge, which looks like a little person.

There are a couple of ways to make sounds with this thing. Fretting and plucking work, of course, but so does bending the whole thing backward to change the pitch. For a good time, do both. We think it sounds nice and thump-y, and it even makes great percussive sounds on the front and back. Check it out in action after the break.

Don’t have a washtub? A wheelbarrow works too, and it comes with its own stand.

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Know Audio: It All Depends On The DAC

October 20, 2021 by Jenny List 29 Comments

Our trip through the world of audio technology has taken us step-by step from your ears into a typical home Hi-Fi system. We’ve seen the speakers and the amplifier, now it’s time to take a look at what feeds that amplifier.

Here, we encounter the first digital component in our journey outwards from the ear, the Digital to Analogue Converter, or DAC. This circuit, which you’ll find as an integrated circuit, takes the digital information and turns it into the analogue voltage required by the amplifier.

There are many standards for digital audio, but in this context that used by the CD is most common. CDs sample audio at 44.1 kHz 16 bit, which is to say they express the level as a 16-bit number 44100 times per second for each of the stereo channels. There’s an electrical standard called i2s for communicating this data, consisting of a serial data line, a clock line, and an LRclock line that indicates whether the current data is for the left or the right channel. We covered i2s in detail back in 2019, and should you peer into almost any consumer digital audio product you’ll find it somewhere. Continue reading “Know Audio: It All Depends On The DAC” →

The Quadrivium EnsembleBot Is A Labour Of Love

October 19, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 5 Comments

The Quadrivium EnsembleBot project is a mashup between old school musical instruments and the modern MIDI controlled world. Built by a small team over several years, these hand crafted instruments look and sound really nice.

The electronics side of things is taken care of with a pile of Arduinos and off-the-shelf modules, but that doesn’t mean the design isn’t well thought through, if a little more complicated than it could be in places. Control is taken care of with a PC sending commands over the USB to an Arduino 2560. This first Arduino is referred to as the Master Controller and has the immediate job of driving the percussive instruments as well as other instruments that are struck with simple solenoids. All these inductive loads are switched via opto-isolators to keep any noise generated by switching away from the microcontroller. A chain of four sixteen-channel GPIO expander modules are hung off the I²C bus to give even more opto-isolated outputs, as even the Arduino 2560 doesn’t quite have enough GPIO pins available. The are a number of instruments that have more complex control requirements, and these are connected to dedicated slave Arduinos via an SPI-to-CAN module. These are in various states of development, which we’ll be keeping our beady eyes on.

One of the more complex instruments is the PipeDream61 which is their second attempt to build a robotic pipe organ. This is powered by a Teensy, as they considered the Arduino to be a little too tight on resources. This organ has a temperature controller using an ATTiny85, in order to further relieve the main controller of such a burden and simplify the development a little.

Another interesting instrument is Robro, which is a robotic resophonic guitar which as they say is still work in progress despite how long they have been trying to get it to work. There’s clearly a fair bit of control complexity here, which is why it is taking so much fiddling (heh!) to get it work.

This project is by no means unique, lately we’ve covered controlling a church organ with MIDI, as well as a neat Arduino Orchestra, but the EnsembleBot is just so much more.

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Nicolas Bras and his homemade musical instruments

Hacked Set Of Instruments Saves Musician’s Gigs

October 8, 2021 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

Most of the horror stories you hear about air travel seem to center around luggage. Airlines do an admirable job of getting people safely to their destinations, but checked baggage is a bit of a crapshoot — it could be there when you land, it could end up taking the scenic route, or it could just plain disappear. That’s bad enough when it contains your clothes, but when it contains your livelihood? Talk about stress!

This was the position musician [Nicolas Bras] found himself in after a recent trip. [Nicolas] was heading for a gig, but thanks to Brussels Airlines, his collection of musical instruments went somewhere else. There was nothing he could do to salvage that evening’s gig, but he needed to think about later engagements. Thankfully, [Nicolas] specializes in DIY musical instruments, made mostly with PVC tubes and salvaged parts from commercial instruments, so the solution to his problem was completely in his hands.

Fair warning to musical instrument aficionados — harvest the neck from a broken ukelele is pretty gruesome stuff. Attached to a piece of pallet wood and equipped with piezo pickups, the neck became part of a bizarre yet fascinating hybrid string instrument. A selection of improvised wind instruments came next, made from PVC pipes and sounding equally amazing; we especially liked the bass chromojara, sort of a flute with a didgeridoo sound to it. The bicycle pump beatbox was genius too, and really showed that music is less about the fanciness of your gear and more about the desire — and talent — to make it with whatever comes to hand.

Here’s hoping that [Nicolas] is eventually reunited with his gear, but hats off to him in the meantime for hacking up replacements. And if he looks familiar, that’s because we’ve seen some of his work before, like his sympathetic nail violin and “Popcorn” played on PVC pipes.

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Demonstrating ThermoAcoustics With The Rijke Tube

October 5, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 20 Comments

The Rijke tube is a very simple device that demonstrates the principle of thermoacoustics quite clearly. Construction is quite straightforward, simply place a metal gauze at the bottom end of a tube, approximately one quarter of the way up, apply a source of heat to the gauze, and instant sound. The heat produces convection, setting up a longitudinal standing wave. This is due to air passing over the hot gauze, suddenly expanding and causing a pressure change, which rushes out the tube. Next, the airflow cools and slows, and air starts to head back into the tube, and the cycle repeats. Adjusting the tube length by slipping a sleeve over it, adjusts the pitch of the note, simply because the air has a different distance to travel. If there is a flame aimed at the gauze from below, the sound will stop since the air is already hot when it hits the hot gauze, no pressure change occurs, and no oscillation.

As [Keith], the reader who sent in the tip, suggests it would be fun to attach a servo to a sleeve on the tube, build multiple units and hang the whole thing off a MIDI controller. This could make for some fun times, and we have to agree. The problem of keeping the gauze hot could be solved in a number of ways, direct resistive heating could work, but maybe inductive heating would be cleaner?

Now, we can’t find an instrument which works in this manner, which sounds like a hack in the making for someone out there so inclined.

There have been a few fire-orientated musical devices over the years, such as this Rijke Tube Organ, various variants on the pyrophone, including this neat one performing with a tesla coil, and while we’re talking about music fire, howsabout a two dimensional rubens’ tube variant?

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This Audio Mixer Is A Eurorack

October 4, 2021 by Jenny List 14 Comments

Music making and DJing have both become arts predominantly pursued in a computer, as the mighty USB interface has subsumed audio, MIDI, and even DJ turntable interface controllers. There was a time though when an indispensable part of any aspiring performer’s equipment would have been an analog mixer, a device for buffering and combining multiple analog audio signals into a single whole. A mixer is still a useful device though, and [Sam Kent] has produced a very nice one that takes the form of a set of Eurorack modules made from PCB material. There are two types of modules, the main channel module which you can think of as the master module, and a series of isolator modules that handle the individual inputs.

Mixer preferences are as individual as each user, so for example where we’d expect sliders he’s used rotary potentiometers, and for us placing the master channel on the left-hand side is unfamiliar. But that’s the beauty of a modular design, there’s nothing to stop anyone building one of these to simply configure it as they wish. We notice that for a mixer described as for DJs there’s no RIAA preamp for the turntable fans, but it’s not impossible to fix with an off-board preamp. Otherwise, we like it and have a sudden hankering for it to be 1992 again with a pair of Technics SL1200s and a room full of people.

Designing a mixer, even a simple one, isn’t easy. Our own [Lewin Day] wrote a retrospective of his experiences with one.