Mechanical Tremolo Does Things The Old-School Way

June 12, 2019 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

The word “tremolo” has a wide variety of meanings in the musical lexicon. A tremolo effect, in the guitar community at least, refers to a periodic variation in amplitude. This is often achieved with solid state electronics, but also recalls the sounds created by Hammond organs of years past with their rotating Leslie speakers. [HackaweekTV] decided to do things the old fashioned way, building a mechanical tremolo effect of his own (Youtube link, embedded below).

Electronically, the signal is simply passed through a linear audio potentiometer. The effect is generated by rapidly cycling this potentiometer up and down. The motion is achieved through a geared motor salvaged from a Roomba, which turns a cam. A sprung follower sits on top of the cam, and is attached to the potentiometer.

There were some challenges in development. Rigidity of the frame was an issue, and the follower had issues with snagging on the cam. However, with some careful iteration they were able to get everything up and running. The final project sounds great, and with the amplifier turned up, there’s no need to worry about the sound of the moving parts.

Naturally, you can always build a tremolo with a 555 instead. Video after the break.

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The Rhysonic Wheel Automates Live Music

May 18, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

Making waves in the music world is getting harder. Almost anyone who has access to the internet also has access to a few guitars and maybe knows a drummer or can program a drum machine. With all that competition it can be difficult to stand out. Rather than go with a typical band setup or self-producing mediocre rap tracks, though, you could build your own unique musical instrument from scratch and use it to make your music, and your live performances, one-of-a-kind.

[Pete O’Connell]’s instrument is known as the Rhysonic Wheel, which he created over the course of a year in his garage. The device consists of several wheels, all driven at the same speed and with a common shaft. At different locations on each of the wheels, there are pieces of either metal or rubber attached to strings. The metal and rubber bits fling around and can strike various other instruments at specified intervals. [Pete O’Connell] uses them to hit a series of percussion instruments, a set of bells, and even to play a guitar later on in the performance.

While it looks somewhat dangerous, we think that it adds a level of excitement to an already talented musical performance. After all, in skilled hands, any number of things can be used to create an engaging and unparalleled musical performance with all kinds of sounds most of us have never heard before.

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Thirty Six Frets For A 3D Printed Guitar

April 19, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Only 80s kids will remember actual hair metal with the meedley-mees way up high on the fret board, and in the 80s, fret boards got longer. Twenty one or twenty two frets on a guitar weren’t good enough, and you needed the full two octaves of twenty four frets. As with anything, more is better, so [Said Too Much] decided to add frets to his guitar. Yes, you can do that, and it actually doesn’t sound too bad, all things considering.

A few things to cover before going over this build. This did not start out as an experiment to extend the fretboard of a guitar. This started out as a soprano guitar build; this would be the inverse of a baritone guitar — instead of an extended scale length and heavier strings to play a fourth or fifth below a regular guitar, this soprano guitar would have a shorter scale length and lighter gauge strings to play a fourth or fifth above a regular guitar. After a few calculations and some calls to companies that make very, very thin guitar strings, this project morphed into a 3/4 scale guitar (a 23″ scale length, although I question that scale length being actually 3/4 scale) and a set of strings that used 0.07″ strings.

Since a soprano guitar is pretty much just like a normal guitar with more frets, this project also got an extended, 3D printed fretboard. Why? Because. The stock pick guard was modeled and printed out in PLA, removing the neck and middle pickups. Then, an ‘extended fret board adapter’ of sorts was slotted in behind the strings. This gives the guitar 38 frets, a full third of them being printed in PLA.

The burning question: does a 3D printed fret board work? Yes, kind of. If you can get your fingers in between the frets, you can absolutely play the 36th fret on this guitar. It’s not for everybody, obviously, and PLA printed frets will never be as good as polished metal frets. But it is an interesting experimental technique for stringed instruments we haven’t seen before. Check out the video below.

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This Is The Delay Pedal You Can Build Yourself

April 10, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

If you’re looking to make money in electronics, there’s no better market than guitar pedals and modular synths. The margins are high, and all the consumers are otakus who will spend outrageous amounts of money chasing the next big thing. The products are just one step above audiophile wank with zero oxygen cables, and if your opamp sounds ‘more transparent’, you’re going to make a fortune, never mind how something can sound more transparent, whatever that is to begin with.

If you want to do something really cool, build a delay, because everyone needs another delay. If you want to build the latest in delay technology, just grab a PT2399 chip. That’s what ElectroSmash did with their Open Source Time Manipulator delay. Everything’s right there, all the parts of the circuits are described, and you too can become an effects pedal engineer.

This pedal is based on the PT2399 chip from Princeton Technology, a digital delay chip that can be used with something that sounds like an old-school bucket brigade chip or something resembling a tape echo. As a digital chip, you’ve also got the clean, clear sounds of a digital delay, with just a few tweaks of the circuit. We’ve taken a look at the PT2399 before, but surprisingly not many people are sharing their secrets.

The circuit for the ElectroSmash Time Manipulator is built around the ATMega328, the same chip in the Arduino Uno, with two PT2399s that can be configured to operate in serial or parallel for everything from a slapback echo to a 600ms digital delay. If you set everything right, you can get choruses, reverbs, or some psychobilly flange-ish sounds.

The entire circuit is open, with a board designed in KiCad, the code is right there written in C, and the only hard-to-replicate tech is the PT2399 chip itself, which can be had from the usual vendors for less than a dollar a piece. It’s a great pedal, and be sure to check out the video below.

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LED-ifying A Guitar, Part Two

November 23, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

An electric guitar is all about stage presence. Need to be cooler than a single guitar? No problem — there are double neck guitars. Need to be cooler than that? No problem, the guy from Cheap Trick has a five-neck guitar. Need to be cooler than that? Robbie Robertson played a guitar with an extra mandolin neck on The Last Waltz. Where do you go from there? Obviously, the solution is putting a TV in your guitar with a boatload of individually addressable LEDs in a guitar. That’s what [Englandsaurus] is doing, and the build thread is now getting into how to turn a bunch of LEDs into a display.

In the first installment of this build thread, [Englandsaurus] went over the construction of the guitar itself and how a hundred individually addressable RGB LEDs were installed inside two pieces of plexiglass. When the guitar is displaying white at full brightness, the power draw is 500 W. This, in itself, is remarkable; no sane person would ever plug a guitar into a 500 W amp, and even 100 Watts is just too damn loud. There’s more power going to the lights here than the amplifier, and that’s awesome.

Simply sticking LEDs in a guitar does not a build log make, so how are these pixels addressed? How do you make a display out of a bunch of LEDs? This is a hell of a problem, but with Artnet and Resolume Arena 6 these pixels can be mapped into a cartesian grid, and from there it’s just putting video on the guitar.

While the first installment of this build is great and shows you how far you can take electronics in a guitar, this installment is a great demo of turning a bunch of LEDs into a display, something that applies to more than just a gigantic glowey guitar.

The 3D Printed Guitar

October 10, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and that means we’re sorting through a ton of inventive electronic musical instruments. For whatever reason we can’t seem to find many non-electronic instruments. Yes, MPCs are cool, but so are strings and vibrating columns of air. That’s what makes this entry special: it’s a 3D printed physical guitar. But it’s also got a hexaphonic pickup, there are lights in the fretboard, and it talks to a computer for PureData processing.

First, the construction of this guitar. It’s mostly 3D printed, with the ‘frame’ of the body made in a Creality 3D printer. It’s a bolt-on neck with a telecaster body, but the core of this guitar — where the pickups and bridge attach — are made out of aluminum extrusion. Another piece of aluminum extrusion runs down the neck, which is clad in a 3D-printed ‘back’ that looks ‘comfortable enough’. The headstock is bolted onto the end of this neck, and it seems reasonably tolerant of having a hundred pounds or so of strings pulling on it. The bridge is also 3D printed, with the saddles integrated into the print. Conventional wisdom says this would sound terrible, but nylon saddles were a thing back in the day, so we’re just going to roll with it.

The electronics are where this project really shines. The pickup is a salvaged Roland GK3 hexaphonic deal, with six outputs for each string. This is sent into a Teensy with an audio path for each individual string. Audio processing happens in the guitar, and latency is under five milliseconds, which is quick enough to not be a terrible distraction.

Except for synths and drum machines and computers, the last fifty or so years of technological progress hasn’t really made it to the world of musical instruments. Guitarists, especially, are technophobes who hate everything invented after 1963. While the neck of [Frank]’s ElektroCaster probably doesn’t feel great, this is a really interesting instrument and a great entry to the Hackaday Prize.

LED-ifying A Guitar

September 1, 2018 by Rich Hawkes 12 Comments

Say you have a guitar, an expensive guitar – one of only three like it. And say this guitar sounds great, but it’s missing something. It needs something, but something that won’t ruin the finish. Over at Sparkfun, [Englandsaurus] was asked to come up with a really cool looking mod to a three-of-a-kind guitar – covering the body with LED strips to create light patterns on the guitar.

In order not to damage or modify the guitar [Englandsaurus] sandwiched the body between two plexiglass sheets, connected together by 3D printed clips. The clips have a dual purpose – they hold the plexiglass pieces to the guitar and also act as conduits for a pair of fiber optic tubes that run around the edge of the body. In order that the color goes all the way around the guitar’s edge without a break in the light, the fiber optic cables are offset. At each clip light is fed into them. One cable runs between two clips, skipping one in between, and the second cable runs between the skipped clips. This allows light to flow around the guitar’s body.

At nearly 500W at full-white, these LEDs draw a lot of power, however, at full brightness they’re overpoweringly bright, so [Englandsaurus] used some WonderFlex, a moldable, diffuse plastic sheet, to cover them. Even with this, the LEDs aren’t run at full brightness. The fiber optic cables, though, need full brightness due to their covering.

Around 1600 LEDs went in to this mod and the guitar itself hasn’t been modified. Everything is removable, and the guitar would go back to its original self if the strips were taken off. Take a look at Strumbot, another project where the original guitar wasn’t modified, or a really cool scrap metal guitar.

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