Guitar Tube-amp From Junk Hi-fi

[Tristan Chambers] picked up an old speaker box some friends acquired at a yard sale. It didn’t have any inputs, and there weren’t any tuning knobs like a radio would have, so it’s a mystery what this was originally used for. [Tristan] traced out the circuit and figured out where he could input audio signals which allowed him to hook up an iPod, but it was mono and not very loud. He ended building his own vacuum tube preamp from a schematic he found on the Internet so that he could use it with an electric guitar. As the video after the break shows, the box not only puts out some pretty good sound but it’s nice and loud too.

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Building A Germanium Fuzz Face Guitar Pedal

Rock in the new year with a guitar pedal you built yourself. [Doug Kovach] took the time to share his project with us in the video after the break. He starts with a bit of history of the artists that have used fuzz pedals similar to this one. It seems great guitarists have been hacking since way back. [Doug’s] rendition uses the warm sounds of germanium transistors in a design that produces professional results. But if you need something a little bit less serious try the stomp-box.

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RGB Stroboscopic Guitar Tuning

This is [Michael Ossmann’s] RGB LED stroboscopic guitar tuner. If his name is familiar that’s because we mentioned he’d be giving a talk with [Travis Goodspeed] at ToorCon. But he went to DefCon as well and spent the weekend in his hotel room trying to win the badge hacking contest.

Despite adversity he did get his tuner working. It’s built into a toy guitar that he takes on road trips with him. By adding a row of RGB LEDs between two of the frets he can use the vibration frequency of an in-tune string to flash the three different colors. If the string is not in tune the three colors will dance around but matching it with the LED frequency produces a stable color. He then uses that big yellow button to advance to the next string. See his demonstration after the break.

This is basically a built-in plectrum tuner that uses one LED package instead of two.

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Single String Servo Electric Guitar

its a catchy tune!

Ah, we love musical hacks that actually play music.  [Mike Baxter] is back again with a new servo electric guitar. This one, called the physical string synthesizer, and has only one string.  He’s using two Arduinos to control the unit. One to change the midi file to a note within the string’s limits and the second to actually control the servo. It seems like that could be simplified a little bit, but we’re pretty sure his end goal was to build an instrument quickly, not learn to be a circuit ninja. Last time we saw Mike Baxter, he had built a servo electric guitar that used a keypad for control. You can see a video of the single string one after the break.

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Shovel…guitar?

We didn’t believe this hack at all when we saw it, or rather heard it. Surly a guitar made out of a shovel couldn’t sound decent. But the video (after the jump, skip to 2:40 for the jam) to our untrained ears sounded pretty rad. Could be the supremely well done wood work, proper use of tools, high tech pickups, or maybe Russian magic, we don’t know.

In fact, if you continue the video it doesn’t stop there. The creators also made a 2 string bass and a few other instruments from shovels. Do I smell a new shovel hero?

Related: Guitars made out of things that should not be guitars.

[Thanks Paul]

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Guitar Effect Shield For Maple

[Okie] designed this audio effect shield for Maple. You’ll remember that Maple is a prototyping system built around an ARM processor, so there’s plenty of power and speed under the hood. First and foremost, the shield provides input and output filters to keep noise out of the system. From there a set of potentiometers let you change the effect, with the manipulation like echo, distortion, and ring modulation happening in the firmware.

Shred Air With Theremin Hero

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBhOB7CfUoY%5D

Remember those Ebay auctions of air guitars going for several thousands of dollars? We don’t either, but Theremin Hero (more info in the YouTube description) is about as legit as you can get to actually rocking on nothing but air.

Much like using a theremin to control Mario, the vertical antenna acts as the fret board while the horizontal one detects strumming. Combine the output of the theremin with some custom software (yet to be released) and Guitar Hero and you have Theremin Hero Air Guitar.

[via Bob’s House of Video Games]