music

459 Articles

Strumbot: The Guitar That Strums Itself

January 31, 2018 by 13 Comments

[Clare] isn’t the most musically inclined person, but she can strum a guitar. Thanks to a little help from an Arduino, she doesn’t even have to do that.

She built the strumbot, which handles the strumming hand duties of playing the guitar. While [Claire] does believe in her strumbot, she didn’t want to drill holes in her guitar, so hot glue and double-sided foam tape were the order of the day.

The business end of the strumbot is a micro servo. The servo moves two chopsticks and draws the pick across the strings. The tiny servo surprisingly does a great job getting the strings ringing. The only downside is the noise from the plastic gears when it’s really rocking out.

Strumbot’s user interface is a 3D-printed case with three buttons and three LEDs. Each button activates a different strum pattern in the Arduino’s programming. The LEDs indicate the currently active pattern. Everything is powered by a USB power pack, making this a self-contained hack.

[Clare] was able to code up some complex strum patterns, but the strumbot is still a bit limited in that it only holds three patterns. It’s good enough for her rendition of “Call Me Maybe”, which you can see in the video after the break. Sure, this is a simple project, not nearly as complex as some of the robotic guitar mods we’ve seen in the past. Still, it’s just the ticket for a fun evening or weekend project – especially if you’re introducing the Arduino to young coders. Music, hacking, and modding – what more could you ask for?

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The Majesty Of Saturn’s Rings Lighting Your Abode

January 8, 2018 by 4 Comments

[Modustrial Maker] is at it again with another seriously cool LED visualizer. This time around, he’s built pair of pendant lights inspired by the rings of Saturn.

The rings are made mostly of walnut plywood using a circle router jig to make the cut easier. If you are inspired to make these for yourself, [Modustrial Maker] is clear — the order in which you cut out the pieces of the rings is absolutely critical. The pieces are glued together — with any edges sanded smooth — and edgebanding applied using a hot air gun due to the curved surface before staining. Duplicate for the second (or more if you so choose!) rings. Be forewarned — a little geometry will be needed to find anchor points that will keep the rings properly balanced.

[Modustrial Maker] suggests an off-the shelf LED controller to handle the visualizations and lighting effects, but he used an Arduino Mega clone as the brains — code available here, a MonkeyJack MAX9814 electret mic, and a four-channel RF remote/transceiver to control the different modes. Pulsing along to the music, these rings make for sleek lighting indeed.

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The Tiniest Of 555 Pianos

December 13, 2017 by 23 Comments

The 555 timer is one of that special club of integrated circuits that has achieved silicon immortality. Despite its advanced age and having had its functionality replicated and superceded in almost every way, it remains in production and is still extremely popular because it’s simply so useful. If you are of A Certain Age a 555 might well have been the first integrated circuit you touched, and in turn there is a very good chance that your project with it would have been a simple electric organ.

If you’d like to relive that project, perhaps [Alexander Ryzhkov] has the answer with his 555 piano. It’s an entry in our coin cell challenge, and thus uses a CMOS low voltage 555 rather than the power-hungry original, but it’s every bit the classic 555 oscillator with a switchable resistor ladder you know and love.

Physically the piano is a tiny PCB with surface-mount components and physical buttons rather than the stylus organs of yore, but as you can see in the video below the break it remains playable. We said it was tiny, but some might also use tinny.

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FrankenKorg: The Modern Remote Keyboard

December 9, 2017 by 7 Comments

On a dreary night in November, [Smecher] collected the instruments of electronic life around him to infuse a musical spark into FrankenKorg — a resurrected keytar.

This hack is a “re-braining” of a RK-100 Korg Keytar, replacing the original circuits with an ATMega32 — the original functionality and appearance are preserved allowing any restored version of the original boards to be seamlessly re-integrated. In light of that, the original boards were ditched after a brief investigation, and a haphazard building process on a protoboard began. Three LS138 3-8 demuxers that accompany the ATMega handle scanning the keys since there weren’t enough pins on the ATMega alone for all the Korg’s features. Check out [Smecher]’s breakdown of his process in the video after the break!

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Casein, Cello, Carrotinet, And Copper Oxide, Science Grab Bag

December 6, 2017 by 3 Comments

One of our favorite turnips, oops, citizen scientists [The Thought Emporium], has released his second Grab Bag video which can also be seen after the break. [The Thought Emporium] dips into a lot of different disciplines as most of us are prone to do. Maybe one of his passions will get your creative juices flowing and inspire your next project. Or maybe it will convince some clever folks to take better notes so they can share with the rest of the world.

Have you ever read a recipe and thought, “What if I did the complete opposite?” In chemistry lab books that’s frowned upon but it worked for the Reverse Crystal Garden. Casein proteins make cheese, glue, paint, and more so [The Thought Emporium] gave us a great resource for making our own and demonstrated a flexible conductive gel made from that resource. Since high school, [The Thought Emporium] has learned considerably more about acoustics and style as evidence by his updated cello. Maybe pulling old projects out of the closet and giving them the benefit of experience could revitalize some of our forgotten endeavors.

If any of these subjects whet your whistle, consider growing gorgeous metal crystals, mixing up some conductive paint or learning the magnetic cello. Remember to keep your lab journal tidy and share on Hackday.io.

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Bear McCreary's floppy music for Revolt

Floppy Drive Music By Emmy Winning Composer

December 6, 2017 by 25 Comments

We’ve featured a lot of awesome music made using floppy drives before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used as the main instrument in a movie score, and by Emmy winning composer [Bear McCreary]. The movie, in this case is alien invasion film, Revolt, but you’ve surely heard Bear’s amazing work in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (my favorite of his), or the one for which he won an Emmy, Da Vinci’s Demons wherein the main theme sounds the same backwards as forwards, to name just a few. So when someone of [Bear]’s abilities makes use of floppy drives, we listen.

[Bear] works with a team, and what they learned was that it’s a clicking sound which the drives make that we hear. It’s just so fast that it doesn’t come across as clicks. The speed at which the clicks are made determines the pitch. And so to control the sound, they control the floppy drives’ speed. They also found that older floppy drives had more of the type of sound they were looking for than newer ones, as if floppy drives weren’t getting hard to find as is. In the end, their floppy orchestra came out to around twelve drives. And the result is awesome, so be sure to check it out in the video below.

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Key-tar Lets You Jam At The Hackerspace

November 8, 2017 by 4 Comments

We’ve seen our share of stepper motors making music, but [Tanner Tech’s] key-tar takes it to a whole new level. Incorporating an acoustic drum to accentuate the stepper motor sounds and a preamp to feed a guitar amplifier, the key-tar is a fully playable instrument.

Moving the stepper via an Arduino at different speeds creates different notes. The user interface is an old PC keyboard. Apparently, [Tanner] recycled most of the parts in his model. The stepper came from an old printer and the keyboard was a dumpster rescue.

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