A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

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Rotating Necked Guitar Looks Difficult To Play

October 30, 2023 by Richard Baguley 20 Comments

Have you ever looked at a guitar and thought “Nah, that’s way too easy to play.”[Mattias Kranz] seems to have done, so he built the 360 Guitar, a new instrument with a circular, rotating neck. The rotating neck means that it can have more strings than most: we think that it has sixteen, but it’s hard to tell. Anyway, it has a lot of strings and looks utterly impractical, which makes it an exciting project.

The basic idea is intriguing: take a conventional guitar design and replace the fretboard with a rotating pillar. Perhaps even stick a motor in there to rotate it on command. Each of the strings is mounted along this pillar using standard string retainers and tuning pegs, with frets along the pillar. Because you can fit so many strings, you can use all of the standard strings for a bass and treble guitar, plus a few extra like the thickest bass string available and the thinnest guitar strings. It’s like a four-dimensional Chapman Stick.

[Mathias] is still working on the project as you can see in the video below the break, so we will be interested to see what new design aspects he comes up with, like the plan to use a motor to rotate the neck. [Mattias] has built a few instruments that we have featured before, like the Helium guitar, which replaces the resonant cavity with a helium balloon, and the Plasma Piano, a combination of piano and tuned plasma coil.

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Roboticized Zelda Ocarina Plays Itself

July 13, 2023 by Zoe Skyforest 10 Comments

[3DSage] has long been obsessed with a certain type of musical instrument after playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It spawned a project to robotically control an ocarina, which turned out beautifully.

The first step was to build an air blower that could excite the ocarina into making noise. With that completed, [3D Sage] then 3D scanned an ocarina so he could design a mechanism that would fit the instrument and let it be played. The final design uses a set of solenoids with rubber caps to plug the various holes of the ocarina to play different notes. The solenoids are actuated according to notes pressed on a printed keyboard. Alternatively, it can be programmed to play pre-stored songs by itself.

The results are charming, though the ocarina does sound a little off-pitch. Overall, though, the project is a great use case for a 3D scanner, since the instrument itself is such an odd irregular shape.

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A baguette sits diagonally across a wooden cutting board. Above it sits an Arduino and an electronics breadboard.

Theremin Baguette Brings New Meaning To Breadboarding

October 25, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 5 Comments

Theremins are a bit of an odd instrument to begin with, but [AphexHenry] decided to put one where no theremin has gone before: into a baguette.

The “baguetophone” is a theremin and piezo-percussion instrument inside a hollowed-out baguette. Starting with a DIY theremin tutorial from Academy of Media Arts Cologne, [AphexHenry] added some spice with a piezo pickup inside the baguette to function as a percussion instrument. One noted downside of squeezing the instrument into such an unusual enclosure is that the antenna doesn’t respond as well as it might with a more conventional arrangement. Outputs from the piezo and antenna are run through Max/MSP on a computer to turn the bread into a MIDI controller. Like many DIY theremins, it appears that this build neglects the volume antenna, but there’s no reason you couldn’t add one. Maybe disguised as a piece of cheese?

Outside smuggling an instrument into a French café for a flash mob performance, this could also prove handy if you’re someone who gets hungry while playing music. We don’t recommend snacking on the Arduino even if it is ROHS compliant though.

If you want to learn more about how theremins work, check out Theremin in Detail. After that, you might want to browse all of our theremin articles or look at this project where they used a 555 instead.

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Glue-on nails with vinyl record pickups pierced through them that are used on a vinyl record

The Sound Of Nails On Black Vinyl Records

September 16, 2022 by Abe Connelly 32 Comments

[Victoria Shen] modifies glue-on nails to give her the ability to play vinyl records with her fingers. Details are light but from the many glamour pictures, it looks like she pushes record player needles through glue-on nails with thin pickup wire that then presumably goes to an audio jack for amplification.

[Victoria] experiments with novel musical tools for use in her art and performances. Be sure to check out the videos of the nails in action. The combination of “scratching” and ability to alter the speed of vinyl with the free fingers creates a weird and eerie experience.

Using her “Needle Nails”, [Victoria] has found she’s able to play multiple records simultaneously (Nitter). Thanks to the different diameters of 33, 78 and 45 vinyls, she’s able to stack them up while still keeping her fingers on them.

Glove like musical instruments are nothing new but the novel use of fashion, glamour and technology allow [Victoria Shen] the freedom to create something uniquely weird and cool, so much so that Beyonce used it in a video shoot for Vogue (Nitter).

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DIY bagpipe made from a latex glove and some straws.

Ring In The New Year With DIY Bagpipes

December 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

Remember early on in the pandemic when people would don protection just short of a full hazmat suit to go out, and wore rubber gloves to the grocery store? Was that just us? The point is, we are surely not alone in having an excess of latex gloves left over, and pitifully few uses for them aside from the usual — gross jobs around the house, and making hand-shaped ice cubes.

Well, here’s something a little more fun: DIY bagpipes. No matter how you feel about the sounds they produce, the way that bagpipes work is pretty interesting. In the video embedded after the break, [Charlie Engelman] shows us how they work and compares them to saxophonist Kenny G’s little jazz mouth.

See, Mr. G can circular breathe, which means he can hold a note for as long as he wants. Basically, he is able to keep a reserve of air in his mouth for playing the thing, while at the same time inhaling new air.

If we bring this back around to bagpipes, the bladder is akin to Kenny G’s mouth. It always contains air, so it perpetually releases air through the sound pipes that stick up. In the case of the glove pipe, the glove is the bladder, and the pipes are made of drinking straws. Check it out after the break — we think the sound is far more tolerable than real bagpipes.

We’ve seen bagpipes made from common household items before (if you consider a couple of plastic recorders to be common household items), and we’ve also seen real bagpipes go electromechanical.

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A Sympathetic Nail Violin

March 3, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 5 Comments

As a hacker community, we are no strangers to beautiful and unique musical instruments. A sympathetic nail violin built by [Nicolas Bras] is a welcome addition to the eclectic family. Working up from the simple idea of a nail in a piece of wood and adjusting the pitch by hammering the nail farther into the wood, [Nicolas] expanded the idea. With careful planning and tuning, the nails can have sympathetic properties. These properties mean that when one nail is played via a bow, it causes other nails to sound, creating harmonies and sustains.

With a bit of careful woodworking and a scant touch of metalwork, an instrument was crafted. It offers vast flexibility as it can be played by bow, by plucking with your finger, or by strumming. There are several levels of nails, each level having a paired sympathetic nail. This allows for a diverse and versatile instrument.

Here at Hackaday, we seem to have a thing for tiny violins, whether physical or virtual. While the nail violin may not look like your traditional violin, we can certainly appreciate the wonderful music it creates.

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