Collaborate Disseminate
What does portability in a keyboard mean to you? For Hackaday alum [Brian McEvoy], the image evokes that quintessential 80s instrument, the keytar. But those left-hand keys aren’t just for …read more Continue reading Keebin’ with Kristina: The One with the QWERTY Drum Set
It’s hard to imagine 80s Synth-pop without the keytar, and yet this majestic Centaur of a musical instrument rarely gets much love, and their players are often the target of ridicule. It almost seems as if being hung around the neck should be a privilege solely reserved for stringed instruments. …read more
All the best retro-1980s chiptune acts should possess a keytar. It’s the Law, or something. [Theremin Hero] has reminded us of this with a new video we’ve shown below featuring an instrument he had a part in creating alongside [Sam Wray] and [Siddharth Vadgama] a few years ago. The Blade …read more
Catch up on the past week of hacks with Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys. “AI on the Edge” is the buzzword of choice lately, with hardware offerings from BeagleBone and Google to satiate your thirst. We take on spotty data from Tesla, driving around on four bouncy-houses, reverse …read more
We can’t think of where you’d buy a new, cheap, MIDI keytar that’s just a keyboard and a handle with some pitch and mod wheels or ribbon controllers. This is a format that died in the 90s or thereabouts. Yes, the Rock Band controller exists, but my point stands. In …read more
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 …read more
Continue reading FrankenKorg; or, The Modern Remote Keyboard
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.
The drum is just an ice cream bucket that gives the …read more
[CNLohr] is kinda famous round these parts; due to some very impressive and successful hacks. However, for his 20k subscriber video, he had a bit to say about failure.
Of course glass circuit boards are cool. Linux Minecraft things are also cool. Hacks on the ESP8266 that are impressive enough people thought they were an April Fool’s joke are, admittedly, very cool. (Though, we have to confess, posting on April 1 may have added to the confusion.) For a guy who puts out so many successes you’d think he’d talk about the next ones planned; hyping up his growing subscriber …read more
Continue reading Fail More: The Story of [CNLohr]’s Clear Keytar
Do any of you stay awake at night agonizing over how the keytar could get even cooler? The 80s are over, so we know none of us do. Yet here we are, [James Cochrane] has gone out and turned a HP ScanJet Keytar for no apparent reason other than he thought it’d be cool. Don’t bring the 80’s back [James], the world is still recovering from the last time.
Kidding aside (except for the part of not bringing the 80s back), the keytar build is simple, but pretty cool. [James] took an Arduino, a MIDI interface, and a stepper motor …read more
Continue reading Keytar Made Out Of A Scanner To Make Even the 80s Jealous
