The Macintosh Plus Sounds Great If You Do Exactly This With It

August 26, 2024 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

The Macintosh Plus is not exactly known as particularly relevant in the worlds of chiptune or electronic music more broadly. That’s not to say it can’t do anything that sounds cool, however. As [Action Retro] demonstrates, it’s got some really impressive tricks up its sleeve if you know what you’re doing.

The video centers around “Music Mouse”, a piece of software created by Laurie Spiegel for the Macintosh Plus all the way back in 1986. Spiegel saw the Macintosh Plus as a potential instrument for musical expression, with the then-innovative mouse as the key human interface.

[Action Retro] shows off the software, which is able to create rather pleasing little melodies with little more than a swish and a swash across the mousepad. The software makes smart use of scales so you’re not forever dodging around dissonant notes, so it’s quite easy to play something beautiful. He then makes things more interesting by pairing the Macintosh Plus with his favorite guitar pedal—the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Sunlight. It’s a dynamic reverb that really opens up the sonic landscape when paired with the Mac Plus. If you’re looking for a weird avant-garde setup to take on stage at your next noise show, this has to be it.

We’re usually used to seeing Nintendo and Commodore products in the retro computer music space. The Mac makes a nice change. Video after the break.

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Get More Freedom With This Guitar Pedal

August 19, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Since this was more than a decade before the invention of the transistor, it would have been hard then to imagine the possibilities that a musician nowadays would have with modern technology to shape the sound of an instrument like this. People are still innovating in this space as well as new technology appears, like [Gary Rigg] who has added a few extra degrees of freedom to a guitar effects pedal.

A traditional expression pedal, like a wah-wah pedal, uses a single motion to change an aspect of the sound of the guitar, and is generally controlled with the musician’s foot. [Gary]’s pedal, on the other hand, can be manipulated in three different ways to control separate elements of the instrument’s sound. It can be pitched forward and back like a normal effects pedal, but also rolled side-to-side and twisted around its yaw axis. The pedal has a built-in IMU to measure the various position changes of the pedal, which is then translated by an RP2040 microcontroller to a MIDI signal which controls the three different aspects of the sound digitally.

While the yaw motion might be difficult for a guitarist to create with their foot while playing, the idea for this pedal is still excellent. Adding in a few more degrees of freedom gives the musician more immediate control over the sound of their instrument and opens up ways of playing that might not be possible or easy with multiple pedals, with the MIDI allowing for versatility that might not be available in many analog effects pedals. Not every pedal needs MIDI though; with the help of a Teensy this digital guitar pedal has all its effects built into a self-contained package.

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The Luminiferous Theremin

August 9, 2024 by Al Williams 4 Comments

[Extreme Kits] asks the question: “What the hell is a luminiferous theremin?” We have to admit, we know what a thermin is, but that’s as far as we got. You’ve surely seen and heard a theremin, the musical instrument developed by Leon Theremin that makes swoopy music often associated with science fiction movies. The luminiferous variation is a similar instrument that uses modern time of flight sensors to pick up your hand positions.

The traditional instrument uses coils, and your hands alter the frequency of oscillators. Some versions use light sensors to avoid the problems associated with coils. While the time of flight sensors also use light, they are immune to many false readings caused by stray light.

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MIDI Controller In A Cubic Inch

July 27, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

MIDI as a standard has opened up a huge world to any musician willing to use a computer to generate or enhance their playing and recording. Since the 80s, it has it has revolutionized the way music is produced and performed, allowing for seamless integration of digital instruments, automation of complex sequences, and unprecedented control over everything from production to editing. It has also resulted in a number of musical instruments that probably wouldn’t be possible without electronic help, like this MIDI instrument which might be the world’s smallest.

Fitting into a cubic inch of space, the tiny instrument’s volume is mostly taken up by the MIDI connector itself which was perhaps an acceptable size by 1980s standards but seems rather bulky today. A two-layer PCB split into three sections sandwiches the connector in place and boasts an ATtiny85 microcontroller and all the associated electronics needed to implement MIDI. Small threaded screws hold the platform together and provide each layer with a common ground. Four small pushbuttons at the top of the device act as the instrument’s keys.

The project’s creator (and Hackaday alum!) [Jeremy Cook] has it set up to play notes from a piano right now, but has also made the source code available so that any musical action can be programmed onto these buttons. Flexibility is perhaps MIDI’s greatest strength and why the standard has lasted for decades now, as it makes it fairly straightforward to build more comprehensive, easy-to-learn musical instruments or even musical instruments out of retro video game systems.

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A tuna fish with several probes sticking out of it.

So You Can Tuna Fish

July 19, 2024 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

You know what they say. But it’s 2024, after all. Shouldn’t you be able to tune a fish by now? As [ChromaLock] shows us in the video below, it’s absolutely possible, and has been all along.

Of course, you can’t possibly put a rainbow trout (or any other fish) under tension until it produces audible tones. So, how does it work? [ChromaLock] turned to the skin, which functions electrically much like ours does with different resistance values in different areas.

From there, it was a matter of hunting around for spots that produced different notes that sounded good, and marking them for later so it can be played like a potentiometer. But there were problems with this setup, mostly screeching between notes from stray voltages in the environment.

After a brief detour using a PS/2 keyboard with spray-painted keycaps, [ChromaLock] said to hell with it and unearthed a regular MIDI keyboard. Armed with a 3D printed jig to hold the probes, [ChromaLock] tested everything with a cucumber, and then out came the trout for its musical debut. Be sure to check it out after the break.

What else can you do with canned tuna and other fish? Cook up some pyrolized bread, and you’ve got yourself a foundry and crucible.

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Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable

June 30, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

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2024 Business Card Challenge: Tiny MIDI Keyboard

June 6, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

The progress for electronics over the past seven decades or so has always trended towards smaller or more dense components. Moore’s Law is the famous example of this, but even when we’re not talking about transistors specifically, technology tends to get either more power efficient or smaller. This MIDI keyboard, for example, is small enough that it will fit in the space of a standard business card which would have been an impossibility with the technology available when MIDI first became standardized, and as such is the latest entry in our Business Card Challenge.

[Alana] originally built this tiny musical instrument to always have a keyboard available on the go, and the amount of features packed into this tiny board definitely fits that design goal. It has 18 keys with additional buttons to change the octave and volume, and has additional support for sustain and modulation as well. The buttons and diodes are multiplexed in order to fit the IO for the microcontroller, a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, and it also meets the USB-C standards so it will work with essentially any modern computer available including most smartphones and tablets so [Alana] can easily interface it with Finale, a popular music notation software.

Additionally, the project’s GitHub page has much more detail including all of the Arduino code needed to build a MIDI controller like this one. This particular project has perhaps the best size-to-usefulness ratio we’ve seen for compact MIDI controllers thanks to the USB-C and extremely small components used on the PCB, although the Starshine controller or these high-resolution controllers are also worth investigating if you’re in the market for compact MIDI devices like this one.

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