[James] wrote in to show us his honors project for his fourth year at Victoria University of Wellington. He designed and built this robotic bass guitar. You can hear it performing “mass hysteria” by the band Muse after the break. It sounds great, but we’d love to hear it without the full accompaniment.
[James] doesn’t have a site up for the MechBass, so we’ve included details below.
Continue reading “MechBass: A Robotic Bass Guitar That Sounds Fantastic”
[Jon Ferwerda] managed to fry the analog electronics on an old electric organ while conducting some circuit bending experiments. It’s a loss, but he’s still left with some cool equipment to play with. Recently he got to work generating tones using the organ’s foot pedals.
There were two types of foot pedal included with this organ, the set that is arranged like a keyboard, and a rocker pedal similar to what you might use with an electric sewing machine. Since the music generation was handled by those fried bits of organ [Jon] got to work interfacing the foot keyboard with a 555 timer. He used a fairly large capacitor to get the frequency into the bass range and wired individual pedals to different parts of a resistor network. But he didn’t stop with that. The rocker pedal has its own variable resistor hardware which lets him bend the pitches are they are being generated which sounds alike like a guitar whammy effect. He shows his work in the clip after the break. We think he nailed it! This is a perfect supplement to any type of electronic music setup.
Continue reading “BaceMaker Weds Organ Foot Pedals With Guitar Whammy Effects”
[Jeri Ellsworth] finally set aside some time to talk about the build process for her Commodore 64 bass keytar. We think what started by taking a band saw to the guitar body ended up as a fantastic new instrument.
When she was showing off the project at Maker Faire we really only got a cursory look at what it could do. Her most recent video covers all that went into pulling off the project. Once the bulk of the guitar body was gone she tore the guts out of a dead c64 in order to mate the case with the guitar neck. Always the craftsman, she altered the computer’s badge to preserve the iconic look, then went to work adding pickups to each string using piezo sensors. This was done with Maker Faire in mind because magnetic pickups would have been unreliable around all of the tesla coils one might find at the event. These were amplified and filtered before being processed via an FPGA which connects to the original c64 SID 6581 chip.
Continue reading “[Jeri Ellsworth] On Making Her C64 Bass Keytar”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhp6P9Ygsoc]
[Diego Stocco] makes music with instruments he assembled. For instance, his Bassoforte uses piano keys, the neck and strings from an electric bass, and what look like some cymbals. Throw in a hammer from that piano and a double bass bow (plus heavy use of audio software) and he’s in business. Big business actually, his work has been in video games such as The Conduit and in feature films like Sherlock Holmes where he worked with Hans Zimmer. Bassoforte isn’t his only invention, he’s got several more including the Experibass string family on one instrument, the Light Controlled Oscillator, and sand music using the fine aggregate along with some piezoelectric film transducers.
[Thanks LuciusMare]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcqpxd0O6Mw]
We’ve been watching this project ever since [Dann] emailed us about the first prototype back in September. This bassline generator has a lot of functions we like, such as an adjustable melody seed, light-sensitive controls, and device interactivity. Line up a row of them and they’ll sync up the beat, building layers of sound on top of each other (see the first video after the break).
The system is built around an ATtiny84, putting its pulse width modulation channels to work for sound generation. [Dann] has some kits available but he’s also posted everything – the schematics, PCB layout, and code – if you want to throw one together on a breadboard.
Back in 2001, the Bigmouth billy bass was still relatively new. Hacking one to record and play back both audio and movement was quite a new feat. You can read all about how they pulled it off. Though most of us agree that this could be done easier now, with off the shelf microcontrollers, this is a great example of constructing your own system to fit the need. We’ve seen a similar hack done very recently with an mbed microcontroller.
[Ben Heck] the uber modder has posted a new project. He has made a breath controlled kick pedal for all of the Guitar Hero style games. Though the tutorial focuses on Guitar Hero World Tour, he does explain how it could be done for Rock Band at the end. This is intended for someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t actually use the kick pedal and needed their hands free to play the rest of the drums. He took apart the kick pedal that came with it to get the piezoelectric switch out of it. Then, he made a little chamber and placed the switch on a diaphragm at one end. When you blow, the diaphragm moves and triggers the switch. Pretty simple really. There is a video available of [Ben] trying it out as well.
