Collaborate Disseminate
There are a handful of relatively dirt cheap synths out there like the KORG Monotron, but many of them use ribbon controllers that aren’t very precise. Ribbon controllers basically slide pots that you operate with your finger or a stylus. They’re painted to look like piano keys in order to …read more
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what then are we to make of something that shares only a few of the original’s design elements, operates in a completely different way, and has been scaled down to a fifth its size? Still seems like flattery to us.
Despite the …read more
Continue reading Mini Marble-Powered Synth Pays Homage to Its Bigger Cousins
The HapsBox portable music system has the look of a toy spaceship, but it’s a powerful mobile music-making machine that’s newbie-friendly while also being attractive to pros. It features its own carry handles, has built-in Bluetooth speakers, runs on b… Continue reading All-in-one HapsBox puts portable music creation at your fingertips
If you’re into creating music, you’ll have a surprisingly large variety of open source options at your disposal, ranging from Audacity as rather simple audio editor to Ardour as a full-blown, studio-worthy DAW — and LMMS, Rosegarden, MusE etc. for anything in between. With [Thomas Tortorini]’s GridSound project, you’ll have …read more
Continue reading GridSound – An Audio Workstation In Your Browser
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
Continue reading Unique Instrument Plucks Out Notes on a Ruler
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
[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
Continue reading Spoofing an Analog Rotary Knob with an ATtiny, and Vampiric Power
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
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
Continue reading Turning A MicroKORG Into A MicroKORG S With This Speaker Mod
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
Continue reading Arduino Drums Bring The Noise, no MIDI Required