Long Arms Required, Electronic Trombone

July 26, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 23 Comments

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sX4Dleqz_0&feature=player_embedded%5D

Sadly, the video above is the only information we were able to find on the “Double Slide Controller” trombone, built by composer Tomás Henriques. As well as, the instrument took first place in the Georgia Tech Center Guthman Musical Instruments Competition. Right in front of a Bluetooth bow for violins, and a circuit bending group from New York, and…wait; it beat out our favorite modified didgeridoo? Better luck next year.

Hackaday Links: January 17th, 2010

January 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Apple Magic Mouse on Windows

Looks like some folks snooped around the latest Bluetooth update from Apple and managed to extract the Magic Mouse drivers. Now you can use them to take this complex peripheral for a spin on Windows. [Thanks Juan]

Component jewelry: From geeky to gross

[Nikolaus] made a pair of 300k Ohm earrings for his wife. That’s three Brown-Black-Yellow resistors per ear. It’s geeky but in a subtle way. Much more refined than the gross outcome of this other guy’s crass nipple experiments. Need to get the image of nipple-jewelry out of your head? [Nikolaus] has you covered with some 3d printed earrings.

GTK GPS

Need your GPS data to be accurate within a centimeter? We don’t either but if you ever do, Real Time Kinematic GPS is what you need. Now you can build one yourself using the RTLIB package. This is based around the powerful and powerfully-inexpensive Beagleboard. [Thanks Jan]

Messy music

It warmed up here a bit this week and things got slushy. Our Galoshes are nice and water-tight but [David’s] have a big hole in the side and are filled with a mini-keyboard. He’s chosen a rubber boot as the housing for a circuit-bending project. It’s a nice touch that the hidden keys are still playable through the flexible rubber.

Circuit Board Instrument

September 1, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 9 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8UzSVFUIc0]

[Moldover] decided to change up the way CDs are packaged for his album release. Yes, you still get a CD with some pretty sweet music, but the case can also play sounds. He custom printed a circuit board containing some LEDs, buttons, photoresistors, and what looks to be a piezo transducer which all combine to produce a strange whine like noise. But with the included headphone jack, he shows it can be used to produce some very interesting music – reminds us of circuit bending.

[Thanks Ferdinand]

Gameboy Foot Controller

August 31, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQdqudTzyBs]

[Joey] sent us a link to the newest version of his Gameboy foot controller. In the video above, you can see how he uses it to control the loops in the background while he plays his guitar through an 8-bit filter. That is an old video, using the previous version. He tells us that several gameboys were used in the construction. At one point, he had to replace the guts because the music was so loud it knocked his equipment over and destroyed it. We can’t help but feel just a tiny bit of excitement as memories of renting a NES cartridge for the weekend fill our heads when we hear these riffs. His music isn’t too bad either. There is a growing crowd of people that support “chip music”. You can see what looks like a decent sized gathering enjoying a show with a little bit of a history lesson after the break.

[This video, and the original version of the controler were posted about a year ago, good catch commenters]

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Pikachu Circuit Bent Goggles

June 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 40 Comments

pikachu_goggle1 (Custom)

These nifty looking goggles are actually an instrument. The guts of a pikachu doll have been splayed and mounted to the goggles. The controller is an external box that allows you to make all kinds of changes to the pitch and sample section. You can see a video of it after the break. We don’t really find this to be great music, but find watching the guy fairly amusing.

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WTPA Bendable Sampler

May 3, 2009 by Eliot 23 Comments

wtpa

Where’s the Party At is an open source bendable 8-bit sampler kit created by [Todd Bailey]. The initial design started about a year ago when he was instructing circuit benders how to transition to circuit design. He designed the kit to show how simply you could build a sampler. It demonstrates both clear analog and digital design. It’s meant to be a unique instrument though and features a lot of glitchy/quirky characteristics while being fairly reliable. You can read more about the device on his site. It has comprehensive parts and assembly manuals available and the kit is $75.

[via Create Digital Music]

Bent Festival Begins Tonight

April 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 48 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Pbyg_kcEk]

The Bent festival, which begins tonight in New York City, is a celebration of DIY musical instruments. Artists from all over converge to beep, blip, and strum for your pleasure. With a heavy emphasis on hacking your own instruments, this is definitely something we’re interested in. If you’ve only heard a little bit of circuit bending and didn’t like it, you may want to give it a try anyway. The musical genres are extremely diverse, it’s not all just random noise.