Musical Hacks

1490 Articles

Illuminated 3D Printed Guitar Is Ready To Rock

November 14, 2020 by 6 Comments

When we think of 3D printed parts for our projects, most of us imagine little bits like brackets and mounting plates. Perhaps the occasional printed project enclosure. But if you’ve got a big custom printer as [Joshendy] does, plus plenty of time, it opens up a whole new world of large scale projects. Take for example the gorgeous RGB LED guitar body he recently completed.

Despite the considerable 300 x 300 mm build area of his custom 3D printer, [Joshendy] still had to design the guitar body in sections that could be bolted together after being printed in ABS. It took around 60 hours to run off all the parts, with the large central section taking the longest to print at 28 hours. With the generous application of heat-set inserts, the assembled guitar should be plenty strong.

The white ABS of the guitar body helps diffuse the LEDs.

While the skeletal plastic body of the guitar is certainly visually interesting in itself, it only makes up for half of the final look. Inside the central cavity, [Joshendy] has embedded two strips of RGB LEDs, a 128×64 OLED screen, and a custom PCB that plays host to a STM32L4 microcontroller the appropriate voltage regulators necessary to run it all on a battery pack.

The board taps into the audio being produced by the guitar and uses a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to get the LEDs reacting to the beat. As demonstrated in the video after the break, you can use the screen to navigate through the different lighting modes in real-time right on the instrument itself.

We covered the equally impressive large-format 3D printer that [Joshendy] used to produce this guitar earlier in the month, and it’s quite exciting to see the sort of things he’s printing on it already. This project has already set the bar very high, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Continue reading “Illuminated 3D Printed Guitar Is Ready To Rock” →

Infinity Mirror Guitar Shreds Forever

November 9, 2020 by 5 Comments

Just when we thought there was nothing left to make into an infinity mirror, [Burls Art] goes and builds something that seems obvious now that it exists — an infinity mirror guitar. Check out the build video after the break, where [Burls Art] gets right to it without wasting any time.

He started by making a 3/4″ wood frame for the body and the one-piece neck and headstock. The acrylic on the top has two-way mirror film, and the back piece is painted with mirror paint to get the infinity effect going. [Burls Art] also fashioned acrylic boxes for the pickup and the electronics. Those are both buffed to be frosty, so the lights reflect nicely off of them.

There’s nothing super-fancy going on with the electronics, just some app-controlled RGB LEDs. We would love to see a version where the LEDs respond in real time to the music. The effect is still quite cool, so if you don’t want to watch the whole build, at least check out the demo at the end where [Burls Art] plays a riff. Never has a delay pedal been so appropriate.

If you’re not much of a luthier, don’t fret about not being able to make a cover version. We’ve seen plenty of infinity mirrors, but if you want something useful, whip up some infinity drink coasters.

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Rockin’ Out In LTSpice: Simulating Classic Guitar Pedals

October 29, 2020 by 9 Comments

Musicians have a fantastic language to describe signals. A sound can be fat, dark, crunchy, punchy — the list goes on. These aren’t very technical terms, but they get the job done. After all, it’s much easier to ask to guitarist for a crisper sound than to ask them to sharpen the edges of the waveform, while amplifying the high-frequency components and attenuating the low-frequency components. Of course, it’s fun to look at signals this way as well, especially when you can correlate shifts in sound quality to changes in the waveform and, ideally, the circuit that produces it.

To undergo such an investigation, [Nash Reilly] has been simulating guitar effects pedals in LTSpice. Able to find most of the schematics he needs online, [Nash] breaks down the function of each part of the circuit and builds a simulation of the entire system. His write-up clearly explains, and often demonstrates, what’s going on inside the box. On the surface, it’s an interesting tour of the inner workings of your favorite effects pedals. Beyond that, it’s an excellent survey of analog design that is well-worth the read for anybody interested in audio, electronics, or audio electronics.

For those interested in taking the physical route rather than the simulated one, we’ve taken a look at pedal design before. Anybody who wants to try their hand at creating simulations can grab a copy of LTSpice, or check out a package called LiveSpice, which lets you simulate circuits in realtime and use them to process live audio — pretty useful for prototyping guitar effects.

When Only The Tiniest Of Violins Will Do

October 25, 2020 by 4 Comments

Playing the tiniest of violins may be a phrase to encapsulate the complete lack of sympathy as someone unpleasant receives their just deserts, but have any of you ever considered how such a feat might be achieved? Unless you’re an unusually talented virtuoso with the bow, it’s difficult to believe that such a small instrument could be played with ease, even if it were to be available in the first place.

Happily a solution is at hand to all those minuscule stringed instrument woes, courtesy of [Alexandra Covor], who has created a miniature PCB violin that is after a fashion playable. It may not be a conventional instrument with a horsehair bow and traditional sounding mechanism, but its electronic voice should still deliver enough to delight.

At the heart of the violin-shaped PCB is an ATtiny85 and a piezoelectric buzzer, and just where you might expect them are a set of strings made from wire attached to the PCB. The instrument can play stored tunes, but since the strings are hooked up to an analogue input on the microcontroller, it can be played as a touch instrument. Finally a pair of LEDs behind the translucent FR4-only F-holes complete the look. It’s fair to say that Itzhak Perlman and his ilk are safe from challengers bearing this instrument, but it’s still an eye-catching piece of PCB art.

This isn’t the first tiny violin that’s been featured here, some others are much smaller.

A Transistor-less Sound Synthesizer

October 24, 2020 by 34 Comments

A synthesizer without transistors could almost be the basis of a trick question, surely without transistors it must be using a vacuum tube or similar. Not [Dr. Cockroach]’s synth though, instead of transistors it uses coupled pairs of LEDs and light-dependent resistors as its active components. Its oscillator circuit comes courtesy of [Patrick Flett], and uses a pair of LED/LDR combinations to alternately charge and discharge a capacitor. This feeds another LDR/LED pair that appears to act as a buffer to drive a bridge rectifier, with a final amplifier following it.

The result oscillates, though at frequencies in the low audio range with a cluster of harmonics thrown in. Its sound is best described as something akin to a small single-cylinder motorcycle engine at the lower frequencies, and is something we see could have all sorts of interesting possibilities.

This approach of using LDR-based active devices may be something of a dead end that could have had its day back in the 1930s, but it’s nevertheless an entertaining field to explore. It’s not the first time we’ve followed [Dr. Cockroach] at it, in the past we’ve seen the same technique applied to logic gates.

Have a listen to the synth in the video below the break. Continue reading “A Transistor-less Sound Synthesizer” →

Axe Hacks: Spinning Knobs And Flipping Switches

October 15, 2020 by 15 Comments

From a guitar hacking point of view, the two major parts that are interesting to us are the pickups and the volume/tone control circuit that lets you adjust the sound while playing. Today, I’ll get into the latter part and take a close look at the components involved — potentiometers, switches, and a few other passive components — and show how they function, what alternative options we have, and how we can re-purpose them altogether.

In that sense, it’s time to heat up the soldering iron, get out the screwdriver, and take off that pick guard / open up that back cover and continue our quest for new electric guitar sounds. And if the thought of that sounds uncomfortable, skip the soldering iron and grab some alligator clips and a breadboard. It may not be the ideal environment, but it’ll work.

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Fail Of The Week: Putting Guitar Strings On A Piano

October 12, 2020 by 35 Comments

The piano is a bit of an oddball within the string instrument family. Apart from rarely seeing people carry one around on the bus or use its case to discretely conceal a Tommy Gun, the way the strings are engaged in the first place — by having little hammers attached to each key knock the sound of of them — is rather unique compared to the usual finger or bow movement. Still, it is a string instrument, so it’s only natural to wonder what a piano would sound like if it was equipped with guitar strings instead of piano wire. Well, [Mattias Krantz] went on to actually find out the hard way, and shows the results in this video.

After a brief encounter with a bolt cutter, the point of no return was reached soon on. Now, the average piano has 88 keys, and depending on the note, a single key might have up to three strings involved at once. In case of [Mattias]’ piano — which, in his defense, has certainly seen better days — a total of 210 strings had to be replaced for the experiment. Guitars on the other hand have only six, so not only did he need 35 packs of guitar strings, the gauge and length variety is quite limited on top. What may sound like a futile endeavor from the beginning didn’t get much better over time, and at some point, the strings weren’t long enough anymore and he had to tie them together. Along with some inevitable breakage, he unfortunately ran out of strings and couldn’t finish the entire piano, though it seems he still managed to roughly cover a guitar’s frequency range, so that’s an appropriate result.

We’re not sure if [Mattias] ever expected this to actually work, but it kinda does — there is at least some real sound. Are the results more than questionable though? Oh absolutely, but we have to admire the audacity and perseverance he showed to actually pull through with this. It took him 28 hours just to get the guitar strings on, and another good amount of time to actually get them all in tune. Did it pay off? Well, that depends how you look at it. It definitely satisfied his and other’s curiosity, and the piano produces some really unique and interesting sounds now — but check for yourself in the video after the break. But that might not be for everyone, so luckily there are less final ways to change a piano’s sound. And worst case, you can always just turn it into a workbench.

(Thanks for the tip, [Keith])

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Putting Guitar Strings On A Piano” →