Collaborate Disseminate
He’s transformed an old bike into a rolling synth, smashed up a microwave to make a sparky drum, and more recently turned a games console into a music machine. Now Sam Battle of Look Mum No Computer goes back in time to revisit one of his earliest buil… Continue reading Synth hacker helps Gibson Les Paul go MIDI mad
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the many great hacks of the past week. Just in case you missed the fact that we’re living in the cyberpunk future, you can now pop off your prosthetic hand and jack directly into a synthesizer. The robot headed for Mars has …read more
As amazing as prosthetic limbs have become, and as life-changing as they can be for the wearer, they’re still far from perfect. Prosthetic hands, for instance, often lack the precise control needed for fine tasks. That’s a problem for [Bertolt Meyer], an electronic musician with a passion for synthesizers with …read more
Continue reading Hacked Prosthesis Leads to Mind-Controlled Electronic Music
This one goes out to anyone who loves music and feels it in their soul, but doesn’t necessarily understand it in their head. No instrument should stand in the way of expression, but it seems like they all do (except for maybe the kazoo).
[FrancoMolina]’s hybrid synth-MIDI controller is a …read more
Continue reading Synthfonio Makes Music Easy Like Sunday Morning
When you think of simple synths, what components come to mind? All you really need to make one is an oscillator, an amplifier, and some kind of input such that you can play different notes. Our favorite go-to for churning out square waves is probably the 40106 IC, which has …read more
Continue reading One Chip Does It All In This MacGuyver Synth
For his final project in [Bruce Land]’s infamous microcontroller design class, [Mark] set out to make a decently-sized synth that sounds good. We think you’ll agree that he succeeded in spades. Don’t let those tiny buttons fool you, because it doesn’t sound like a toy.
Why does it sound so …read more
Continue reading Additive, Multi-Voice Synth Preserves Sounds, Too
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
We’re pretty sure there’s no internationally recognized arbiter of records like “World’s smallest full-featured polyphonic stereo MIDI synthesizer that fits in a DIN shell”. If there isn’t, there sure should be, and we’re pretty sure [mitxela]’s Flash-Synth would hold that particular record.
This is one of those lessons that some …read more
Continue reading World’s Smallest MIDI Synth, Now Even Better
It’s brilliant enough when composers make use of the “2SID” technique to double the channels in a Commodore 64 with two sound chips, but even then some people like to kick things up a notch. Say, five times more. [David Youd], [David Knapp] and [Joeri van Haren] worked together to …read more
Continue reading How Many Commodores Does It Take To Crack A Nut?
There’s something about Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesizer chips that appeals to a large audience. That’s one of the reasons behind [René Ceballos]’s XFM project, aiming to duplicate on an FPGA the sound of pure-FM synthesizer chips of the past such as the Yamaha DX series, OPL chip series …read more
Continue reading XFM: A 32-Voice Polyphonic FM Synthesizer On An FPGA