Musical Hacks

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Dude about to pull a fire alarm

Fire Alarm Disco Party

August 4, 2025 by 34 Comments

What should your first instinct be when the room catches on fire? Maybe get out of the room, pull an alarm, and have a disco party? Not your first instinct? Well, this seemed pretty obvious to [Flying-Toast], who retrofitted an old fire alarm to activate a personal disco party.

After finding a fire alarm being sold on eBay, [Flying-Toast] couldn’t resist the urge to purchase one to use for his own purposes. He immediately gutted the life-saving internals to fill the shell with his own concoction of ESP goodness to be activated by the usual fire alarm mechanism. This sends a signal to the next elements of the party system.

Every part of the party system receives this activation signal, including the most important part, the party lights. Using a generic crystal disco ball and its own ESP, the party lights are more than sufficient to create the proper panic party. Of course, what is a party without music? With another ESP board and salvaged speakers, the proper atmosphere can be set right before the venue burns to the ground. The final touch is the additional hacked WIFI relays to turn off the lights in the room.

Priorities are important in emergencies, and that is exactly what [Flying-Toast] gave us with this project. Learning from this expertise is important, but how about learning from the near misses? For some risky decision making, be sure to check out the near nuclear war that was almost caused by a false alarm!

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Keyboard Hero: A Barebones Alternative To The Guitar Version

August 3, 2025 by 8 Comments

Guitar Hero was all the rage for a few years, before the entire world apparently got sick of it overnight. Some diehards still remember the charms of rhythm games, though. Among them you might count [Joseph Valenti] and [Daniel Rodriguez], who built a Keyboard Hero game for their ECE 4760 class at Cornell.

Keyboard Hero differs quite fundamentally from Guitar Hero in one major way. Rather than having the player tackle a preset series of “notes,” the buttons to press are instead procedurally generated by the game based on incoming audio input. It only works with simple single-instrument piano music, but it does indeed work. A Raspberry Pi Pico is charged with analyzing incoming audio and assigning the proper notes. Another Pi Pico generates the VGA video output with the game graphics, which is kept in sync with the audio pumped out from the first Pico so the user can play the notes in time with the music. Rather than a guitar controller, Keyboard Hero instead relies on five plastic buttons assembled on a piece of wood. It works.

It’s obviously not as refined as the game that inspired it, but the procedural generation of “notes” reminds us of old-school rhythm game Audiosurf. Video after the break.

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Digital Guitar Of The Future Has No Strings

August 1, 2025 by 39 Comments

Electric guitars are great, but they’re just so 20th century. You’d think decades of musicians riffing on the instrument would mean there are no hacks left in the humble axe. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. [Michael], for one, has taken it upon himself to reinvent the electric guitar for the digital era.

Gone are the strings, and the frets have vanished as well. The neck of this guitar is one long custom PCB, looking very sleek with black solder mask. Gold pads serve as touch sensors to give tone data over i2c (from unspecified touch sensing chips) to the Amtel Mega 32u4 at the heart of the build.

With no strings, strumming won’t work, so a laptop-style touchpad serves instead. That means every user interaction with this guitar is with capacitive touch sensors talking i2c. The X and Y coordinates of the touch, along with pressure are sent to the processor over the i2c bus, triggering an interrupt and offering quite a bit of opportunity for sound control.

Said sound control is, of course, done in MIDI. This lets the guitar control a whole variety of synths and/or software, and of course [Michael] is using more futuristic-sounding synths than a pack of guitar samples. That said, what exactly goes on with the MIDI controls is left frustratingly vague. Obviously fretting provides note selection, but does the touchpad just send a “note start” command, or are the X, Y and pressure data used in interesting ways? Is there multitouch support? The video doesn’t say.

How, exactly, the obviously-plastic body of the guitar was manufactured is also left unsaid. Is it a large resin print? SLS? It looks injection-molded, but that makes no sense for a one-off prototype. On the other hand, it looks like he’s selling these, so it may very well be an injection-molded production case we’re seeing being assembled here, and not a prototype at all.

For all the video leaves us wanting more information, we can’t help but admit the end product both looks and sounds very cool. (Skip to the 4:50 mark in the embedded video to hear it in action.) The only thing that would improve it would be a hurdy-gurdy mode. Thanks to [Michael] for the tip, and remember  we want to hear tips about all the weird and wonderful hacked-together instruments you make or find on the web.

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Listening To Ethernet Via Eurorack

July 26, 2025 by 9 Comments

Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about listening to Ethernet signals, though? Well, you totally could, with the NSA selector from [wenzellabs].

The NSA selector is a Eurorack module, designed for use as part of a larger modular synthesizer. There are lots of fun jokes and references on the PCB, but the front panel really shows you what this module is all about. It’s got a pair of RJ45 jacks, ready to receive your Ethernet cables through which data is flowing. They’re paired with a single audio output jack. “Any bit on the network will be sent to the audio output,” [wenzellabs] explains.

The device operates in a relatively simple fashion. Network traffic from one jack is forwarded to the other, unmodified. However, it’s also spat out to a simple digital-to-analog converter and turned into audio. This thing doesn’t play digital audio formats or anything like that—it just turns raw Ethernet signalling into audible noise.

Raw signal noises might not sound very appealing, but let’s be real here. If you liked nice sounds, you wouldn’t be into Eurorack. Skip to 25:46 in the video below if you just want to hear the final product.

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A Modern Version Of Famous, Classic Speaker

July 25, 2025 by 12 Comments

Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time often had to go to great lengths to generate new types of sounds, and one of the most famous of these was the Leslie speaker, known for its unique tremolo and vibrato. Original Leslies could cost thousands now, though, so [Levi Graves] built a modern recreation.

The Leslie speaker itself got its characteristic sound by using two speakers. The top treble speaker was connected to a pair of horns (only one of which produced sound, the other was used for a counterweight) on a rotating platform. The second speaker in the bottom part of the cabinet faced a rotating drum. Both the horns and drum were rotated at a speed chosen by the musician and leading to its unique sound. [Levi] is actually using an original Leslie drum for his recreation but the sound is coming out of a 100-watt “mystery” speaker, with everything packaged neatly into a speaker enclosure. He’s using a single-speed Leslie motor but with a custom-built foot switch can employ more fine-tuned control over the speed that the drum rotates.

Even though modern technology allows us to recreate sounds like this, often the physical manipulation of soundwaves like this created a unique feeling of sound that can’t be replicated in any other way. That’s part of what’s driven the popularity of these speakers throughout the decades, as well as the Hammond organs they’re often paired with. The tone generators on these organs themselves are yet another example of physical hardware providing a unique, classic sound not easily replicated.

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Remembering Chiptunes, The Demoscene And The Illegal Music Of Keygens

July 20, 2025 by 39 Comments

We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on “The Internet’s Most Illegal Music” (embedded below).

After defining what he’s talking about for the younger set, who may never have seen a keygen in this degenerate era of software-by-subscription, [Patch] traces the history of the jaunty chiptunes that were so often embedded in this genre of program. He starts with the early demoscene and its relationship with cracker groups — those are coders who circulate “cracked” versions of games, with the copyright protection removed. In the old days, they’d embed an extra loading screen to take credit for the dastardly deeds that our lawyer says to disavow.

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Hurdy-posting Continues With The Balfolk Boombox, A Synth Gurdy

July 13, 2025 by 2 Comments

The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar — [Rory Scammell]’s Balfolk Boombox is the real deal.

It began life as MIDI-outputting SAMgurdy by [Sam Palmer], which we sadly missed covering (though we did feature a MIDI-gurdy a few years back) but this boombox does far more than just MIDI samples. In a sentence no one ever thought would be penned, this instrument puts a Eurorack on a Hurdy-Gurdy for the ultimate synthwave bardcore mashup. There’s an analog synth, there’s a drum machine, there’s modularity to do whatever [Rory] should desire. There are also sixteen sampled instruments available at the push of a button, including multiple analog Hurdy-Gurdies.

It is, as [Rory] says, “a gig in a box”. There’s no point trying to describe it all in words: it really must be heard to be believed, so check out the demo video embedded below, and if you’re hankering for more info, he produced a fifteen minute in-depth video and if you can’t get enough of the sound, here’s a demo with all 16 sampled instruments. We’re pretty sure one of them is the Sega soundfont, and the 8-bit samples are absolutely GameBoy.

How, exactly, we fell in love with the hurdy-gurdy has fallen into mystery, but we’ve been filling up the hurdy-gurdy tag lately, on your suggestions. This one is thanks to a tip from [Physics Dude] in a comment– thanks for that, by the way– and the tips line remains open if the internet has not finally been scoured of all content both hurdy and gurdy. 

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