Unique Instrument Plucks Out Notes on a Ruler

How does one describe the notes that come from a ruler that is anchored on one end and then plucked? The best word we can come up with is “wubulation”. So would that make this ruler-plucking synthesizer a “wubulator”? Or perhaps a “wubatron”?

Whatever we decide to call it, [ …read more

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Blipblox After Dark synth invites kids over to the dark side

A couple of years ago, Playtime Engineering launched a colorful portable synthesizer on Indiegogo that allowed players young and old “to have fun without fully understanding how it all works.” Now the startup has reworked the hardware and software, and… Continue reading Blipblox After Dark synth invites kids over to the dark side

Spoofing an Analog Rotary Knob with an ATtiny, and Vampiric Power

[Mitxela]’s repair of a Roland JV-1080 (a rack-mounted 90s-era synthesizer) sounds simple: replace a broken rotary encoder on the front panel. It turned out to be anything but simple, since the part in question is not today’s idea of a standard rotary encoder at all. The JV-1080 uses some kind …read more

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Synthesizer Gets an External Touch Screen

Like other owners of the high-end Yamaha MODX, [sn00zerman] wasn’t happy with the synthesizer’s integrated touch screen. It’s a bit small, and not at a very good angle for viewing. So he made it his mission to find some way of adding a larger external touch screen without making any …read more

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Turning A MicroKORG Into A MicroKORG S With This Speaker Mod

When [Michael Wessel] bought his MicroKORG synthesizer/vocoder, he felt less than amused when two years later the MicroKORG S was released, with the ‘S’ standing for ‘sound’, apparently, for the 2+1 speaker system that was added to it. Undeterred, [Michael] figured out that both synthesizers are similar enough that one …read more

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Arduino Drums Bring The Noise, no MIDI Required

When looking through existing Arduino drum kit projects, [joekutz] noticed that most of them just used the microcontroller as an input for an existing MIDI device. That’s fine if you’re just looking to build your own hardware interface, but he wondered if it would be possible to forgo the MIDI …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 24, 2020

We’re saddened to learn of the passing of Gershon Kingsley in December 2019 at the age of 97. The composer and electronic music pioneer was not exactly a household name, but the things he did with the Moog synthesizer, especially the surprise hit “Pop Corn”, which he wrote in 1969, …read more

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The Fart Box, a Synthesizer Not Quite Like Others

[lookmumnocomputer] enjoys creating synthesizers, and early last year he created one called The Fart Box. It is an entirely analog synthesizer with which, according to its creator, it is difficult to make anything that doesn’t sound gassy. It’s not quite like any other synthesizer, and while it is capable of …read more

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Polyend brings retro software to life with powerful hardware tracker

After a brief online teaser campaign, Poland’s Polyend – the same firm responsible for the mesmerizing Perc percussion system from 2016 – has revealed a new music production machine called the Tracker.Continue ReadingCategory: Music, TechnologyTags: Di… Continue reading Polyend brings retro software to life with powerful hardware tracker