Collaborate Disseminate
The one thing you might be surprised not to find in [Laurent]’s beautiful tonewheel organ build is any tonewheels at all.
Tonewheels were an early way to produce electronic organ sounds: by spinning a toothed wheel at different frequencies and transcending the signal one way or another it was possible …read more
Continue reading A STM32 Tonewheel Organ Without A Single Tonewheel
Public art installations can be cool. Adding in audience interactivity bumps up the coolness factor a bit. Throw civic pride, dancing jets of water, music, and lights into the project, and you get this very cool pressure washer powered musical fountain.
The exhibit that [Niklas Roy] came up with is called Wasserorgel, or “water organ”, an apt name for the creation. Built as part of a celebration of industry in Germany, the display was built in the small town of Winnenden, home to Kärcher, a cleaning equipment company best known for their line of pressure washers in the distinctive …read more
Continue reading A Fleet of Pressure Washers Powers This Interactive Public Fountain
We got a question from [DC Darsen], who apparently has a broken electronic organ from the mid-70s that needs a new top-octave generator. A top-octave generator is essentially an IC with twelve or thirteen logic counters or dividers on-board that produces an octave’s worth of notes for the cheesy organ in question, and then a string of divide-by-two logic counters divide these down to cover the rest of the keyboard. With the sound board making every pitch all the time, the keyboard is just a simple set of switches that let the sound through or not. Easy-peasy, as long as …read more
Continue reading Ask Hackaday Answered: The Tale of the Top-Octave Generator
It’s often hard to know what to do with a classic bit of electronics that’s taking up far too much of the living room for its own good. But when the thing in question is an electronic organ from the 1970s, the answer couldn’t be clearer: dissect it for its good parts and create two new instruments with them.
Judging by [Charlie Williams]’ blog posts on his Viscount Project, he’s been at this since at least 2014. The offending organ, from which the project gets its name, is a Viscount Bahia from the 1970s that had seen better days, apparently …read more
Continue reading Vintage Organ Donates Parts for Two New Instruments
One of the great joys of Hackaday are the truly oddball requests that we sometimes get over the tip line. Case in point: [DC Darsen] wrote in with a busted 1970s organ in need of a new top-octave generator, and wondered if we could help. He had found a complicated but promising circuit online, and was wondering if there was anything simpler. I replied “I should be able to get that done with a single Arduino” and proceeded to prove myself entirely wrong in short order.
So we’re passing the buck on to you, dear Hackaday reader. Can you help …read more
Continue reading Ask Hackaday: How Do You DIY a Top-Octave Generator?
Sometimes you have an idea that is so brilliant and so crazy that you just have to make it a reality. In 2011, [Look Mum No Computer] drew up plans in his notebook for a Furby organ, an organ comprised of a keyboard and a choir of Furbies. For those who don’t know know what a Furby is, it’s a small, cute, furry robotic toy which speaks Furbish and a large selection of human languages. 40 million were sold during its original production run between 1998 and 2000 and many more since. Life intervened though, and, [LMNK] abandoned the Furby …read more
Someone left this organ out in the rain, but [Tinkartank] rescued it and has given it a new life as a SID controller. What’s a SID, you ask? That’s the sound chip Commodore used in the C64, a remarkable chip revered among retro gamers that was way ahead of its time.
He threw out everything but the keyboard assembly for the build. Each key press now drives a momentary button, and those are all wired up to an Arduino Mega through some I/O expansion boards left over from another project. The Mega drives the MOS6581 SID chip which generates those …read more
A hundred years or more of consumer-level recorded music have moved us to a position in which most of us unconsciously consider music to be a recorded rather than live experience. Over a century ago this was not the case, and instead of a hi-fi or other device, many households would have had some form of musical instrument for their own entertainment. The more expensive ones could become significant status symbols, and there was a thriving industry producing pianos and other instruments for well-to-do parlours everywhere.
One of these parlour instruments came the way of [Alec Smecher], a pump organ, …read more
Continue reading MIDI And A Real Vox Humana Come To A Century-Old Melodeon
When it comes to making music, there are really only a few ways to create the tones needed — pluck something, blow into something, or hit something. But where does that leave this dry-ice powered organ that recreates tunes with wind chimes and blocks of solid CO2?
It turns out this is firmly in the “hit something” camp, as [Leah Edwards] explains of her project. When the metal wind chime tubes come in contact with dry ice, the temperature difference sublimates the solid CO2. The puff of gas lifts the tube slightly, letting it fall back against the brick of …read more
Continue reading Wind Chimes and Dry Ice Make an Unusual Musical Instrument
What did you do in high school? Chances are it wasn’t anywhere near as cool as turning a reed organ into a MIDI device. And even if you managed to pull something like that off, did you do it by mechanically controlling all 88 keys? Didn’t think so.
A reed organ is a keyboard instrument that channels moving air over sets of tuned brass reeds to produce notes. Most are fairly complex affairs with multiple keyboards and extra controls, but the one that [Willem Hillier] scored for free looks almost the same as a piano. Even with the free instrument …read more
Continue reading Reed Organ MIDI Conversion Tickles All 88 Keys
