music

441 Articles

Modern Features In Classic Radio

December 7, 2021 by 53 Comments

As consumer electronics companies chase profits on tighter and tighter margins, it seems like quality is continually harder to find for most average consumer-grade products. Luckily, we don’t have to hunt through product reviews to find well-built merchandise since we have the benefit of survivorship bias to help us identify quality products from the past that have already withstood the test of time. [Tom] has forever been fond of this particular Sony TV/radio combo from the ’70s so he finally found one and set about modernizing it in a few key ways.

Among the modifications to this 1978 Sony FX-300 include the addition of a modern color display, Bluetooth, an upgraded FM radio, and a microphone. At the center of all of this new hardware is a Teensy 4 which [Tom] has found to be quite powerful and has enough capabilities to process the audio that’s being played in order to make visual representations of the sound on the screen. He also implemented a bitcrusher filter and integrated it into the controls on the original hardware. He’s using an optimized version of this library to cram all of that processing ability into such a small chip, and the integration of all this new hardware is so polished that it looks like it could be an original Sony stereo from the modern era.

While some may complain about restomod-type builds like this, we don’t really see any need to be arbitrarily or absolutely faithful to bygone eras even if the original hardware was working properly in the first place. What works is taking the proven technology of the past and augmenting it with modern features to enjoy the best of both worlds. Much like this hi-fi stereo which blends the styles and technology of the 90s with that of the 60s in an equally impressive way.

Guitar Pickguard Adds MIDI Capabilities

December 6, 2021 by 1 Comment

For a standard that has been in use since the 1980s, MIDI is still one of the most dominant forces on the musical scene even today. It’s fast, flexible, and offers a standard recognized industry-wide over many different types of electronic instruments. Even things which aren’t instruments can be turned into musical devices like the infamous banana keyboard via the magic of MIDI, and it also allows augmentation of standard instruments with other capabilities like this guitar with a MIDI interface built into the pick guard.

[Ezra] is the creator of this unique musical instrument which adds quite a few capabilities to his guitar. The setup is fairly straightforward: twelve wires run to the pick guard which are set up as capacitive sensors and correspond with a note on the chromatic scale. Instead of using touchpads, using wires allows him to bend away the “notes” that he doesn’t need for any particular piece of music. The wires are tied back to an Adafruit Feather 32u4 microcontroller behind the neck of the guitar which also has a few selectors for changing the way that the device creates tones. He can set the interface to emit single notes or continuously play notes, change the style, can change their octave, and plenty of other features as well.

One of the goals of this project was to increase a guitar player’s versatility when doing live performances, and we would have to agree that this gives a musician a much wider range of abilities without otherwise needing a lot of complex or expensive equipment on stage. We’ve seen a few other MIDI-based builds focused on live performances lately, too, like this one which allows a band to stay in sync with each other.

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Bass Guitar Gets Shapeshifting Pickups

December 5, 2021 by 19 Comments

Electric guitars were the hip new thing back in the mid-century. The electrification of the common and portable guitar opened up a lot of avenues in terms of sound and technique. Specifically, the use of the pickup, an electromagnetic device which converts the vibrations of the guitar strings into electrical signals, increased the number of ways that a musician can alter the guitar’s sound on-the-fly. Some guitars have several rows of pickups which can be used in any number of ways, but this custom guitar has a single pickup which can be moved around the guitar’s body instead.

[Breno] was gifted this Dolphin bass guitar to start learning after years of playing a regular guitar, and while they aren’t known for high-quality instruments this guitar seemed to play and sound well enough to attempt this modification. First, a hole had to be cut all the way through the guitar’s body in order to accommodate the build. The pickup for this guitar is then mounted on two rods which allow it to move in various positions along the strings, and a second set of adjustments can be made to bring the pickups closer or further away from the strings. Some additional custom circuitry was added to control it and also to handle the volume and tone knobs, and while this was being added [Breno] and his friend [Arthur] decided this would be a great time to build some effects into the guitar’s now-custom electronics as well.

While this was largely a project for [Breno] to understand in greater depth the effect of moving the pickups around an electric guitar, the finished product looks ready to play some live shows. The addition of some extras like the effects really adds some punch to this guitar and it looks to be completely original. The nearest thing we could find is this guitar which uses hot-swappable pickups but even those are mounted in fixed locations.

Ken Shirriff Breaks Open The Yamaha DX7

November 25, 2021 by 23 Comments

For better or worse, this synthesizer was king in the 1980s music scene. Sure, there had been synthesizers before, but none acheived the sudden popularity of Yamaha’s DX7. “Take on Me?” “Highway to the Dangerzone”?  That harmonica solo in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”  All DX7. This synth was everywhere in pop music at the time, and now we can all get some insight from taking a look at this de-capped chip from [Ken Shirriff].

To be clear, by “look” that’s exactly what we mean in this case, as [Ken] is reverse-engineering the YM21280 — the waveform generator of the DX7 — from photos. He took around 100 photos of the de-capped chip with a microscope, composited them, and then analyzed them painstakingly. The detail in his report is remarkable as he is able to show individual logic gates thanks to his powerful microscope. From there he can show exactly how the chip works down to each individual adder and array of memory.

[Ken]’s hope is that this work improves the understanding of the Yamaha DX7 chips enough to build more accurate emulators. Yamaha stopped producing the synthesizer in 1989 but its ubiquity makes it a popular, if niche, platform for music even today. Of course you don’t need a synthesizer to make excellent music. The next pop culture trend, grunge, essentially was a rebellion to the 80s explosion of synths and neon colors and we’ve seen some unique ways of exploring this era of music as well.

Thanks to [Folkert] for the tip!

Mechanical Musical Sculpture Recalls The Four Muses

November 24, 2021 by 8 Comments

Music was created by humans, but often we find ourselves creating performances with machines. [Alana Balagot] and [Federico Tobon] did just that, constructing the stunning 4 Muses musical sculpture with their combined talents.

4 Muses is made up of four individual instruments, under the command of a single keyboard controller. The keyboard can be used to play the instruments live, or alternatively, can learn from the player or be used as a sequencer. It can also act as a simple device to play back music using the four instruments.

The pipe instrument uses servo-controlled valves, which allow air from a blower fan to reach several wood pipes. The xylophone instead uses solenoids to play its 13 tines. Percussion is provided by a mechanized cajón drum, using motors to actuate mallets that strike the various sections of the box. Meanwhile, hackers will be familiar with the concept of the motor-noise instrument, which drives stepper motors at different frequencies to generate tones.

Inside, a cavalcade of microcontrollers make everything work, from Arduino Megas and Teensys to NRF24s sending wireless packets from the controller to the instruments. [Alana] and [Federico] go in-depth with their documentation, highlighting the challenges they faced putting together the various instruments and showing how the final build came together.

Built with and brass hardware and sporting a variety of exquisite wood finishes, the final result is a quartet of machines that play beautiful music composed by [Alana] herself. Musical sculptures are often a great example of the artistry possible when putting electrons to work. Video after the break.

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Live Jam Kit Helps Electronic Musicians Stay In Sync

November 23, 2021 by 2 Comments

Jamming live with synths and drum machines can be fun, but for [Christian], there was a little something missing. He was looking for a way to keep everyone in the group on the beat and rocking out, and decided to build something to help.

The ethos of the build was to put one person ultimately in charge of the mix using Ableton. This stops the volume race, as each musician turns their own volume up and the jam devolves into a noisy mess. Each musician also gets a sync button they can hit if their instrument has drifted out of time. Everyone in the jam also gets their own monitor signal in their headphones, as well as a looper as well.

Individual players in the electronic jam can whip up a cool little loop, and spit it out to the main controller running Ableton using the looper. Then, they can mix up something else in their headphones without disrupting the main mix, before spitting it out as a loop again.

[Christian]’s demo video does a great job of showing how it all works. We particularly like the sync button, which gets rid of the usual frustrations when a sequencer in the jam trips over the tempo signal.

It’s all built with a Teensy, and seems like a great way to organize a jam with a bunch of different synths and drum machines. We’d certainly love to join in the fun.

We’ve seen other fun jam kits too, like this neat networked solution. Video after the break.

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Cheap DIY Mic Sounds (And Looks) Damn Good

November 6, 2021 by 30 Comments

As any musician, podcaster, or youtuber will be quick to tell you, there’s no substitute for a good microphone. They’ll also be quick to tell you all about their favorite microphone, why it’s better than all the others, and how much it cost (oh, and how round it sounds, whatever that means). But what if you could build your own that sounds as good, if not better, and do it for only $30?

That’s what [Matt] from DIY Perks set out to discover when he built his DIY USB-C Microphone. He was able to source the same microphone capsule that can be found in his high-end, $600 CAD E100S, and built a simple pre-amplifier that bumps its quiet output up to line-level. He even connected it to the mic module with some custom cable made from two tiny enameled wires that won’t transmit bumps and vibrations, wrapped inside desoldering braiding which acts as a shield. He fed the output from the pre-amp into a cheap USB audio interface and voilà! — top-notch sound for next to nothing. Make sure you check out the video below to hear a comparison between the mic and its professional counterparts.

Of course, sounding good isn’t quite enough. [Matt] wasn’t satisfied until the piece looked the part as well, which is why he encased the mic module in custom-bent brass mesh shielding and tubing (which also helps to reduce electrical interference). The brass cage sits suspended via rubber o-rings on a beautiful bent brass mount, which sits atop an articulated brass arm of [Matt]’s own design. Finally, the arm is mounted to a wood and brass enclosure that also serves to house the electronics.

And, in true open-source fashion, the video description is full of links to parts, schematics, and templates in case you want to build one of these beauties for yourself. Between this fantastic build and this other, super-overkill scratch-built USB microphone we featured earlier in the year, there has never been a better time to make yourself a mic you won’t have to trade your car for.

Thanks to [RichV] and [BaldPower] for the tip!

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