fbpx

 

 

Tristan Calderbank made a drum robot for acoustic music

screen-shot-2019-10-05-at-7.33.45-pm

Tristan is an acoustic musician and a coder so he combined his skills in this musical performance.   What worked and what didn't  Tristan tried a number of different types of motors for his robot including Car Door Locks, Stepper Motors and Solenoids, but they were all too noisy for the acoustic application he was...

Continue reading
5664 Hits

Build a MIDI Controller with Arduino

Screen-Shot-2020-07-16-at-9.11.18-A_20200717-230855_1

Hi everyone! In this article I will teach you how to build your own Arduino powered MIDI controller. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and it is a protocol that allows computers, musical instruments and other hardware to communicate. If you follow each and every step of this tutorial you will be able to make music with ...

Continue reading
40164 Hits

Watermelons, Summer and MIDI from MEZERG

Sometimes you just need to relax and do something cool. So on Labor day weekend 2020 we shared this video from MEZERG enjoying some cool watermelon, some bright sun and a dip in the pool. Oh yeah, and MIDI of course!  Want to try it yourself ? Playtronic makes it possible Playtron is a new type of music device. Connect Play...

Continue reading
5345 Hits

LEET Synth is everything we love-DIY, 3D Printable, Open Source, Modular and MIDI

cropped-rig-scaled-1

You can make Johan Von Konow's new modular synth for about $6! "I have designed a keyboard, drum pad, chord keyboard, arpeggiator and a step sequencer. One special feature is that the units have RGB LEDs for each key, enabling playback visualization (so each device is both MIDI out and in). This is helpful for music training and editing, but i...

Continue reading
5352 Hits

Sonoclast: Plastic Pitch Plus - Using MIDI to Experiment with Microtonality

I created the Plastic Pitch Plus (PPP) to experiment with microtonality.  My primary design goal was to create a physical interface that gives immediate and independent control of pitches in a scale.  One way of doing microtonality involves generating lists of frequencies or ratios. In contrast, I wanted something that would naturally eng...

Continue reading
7269 Hits

How to make a MIDI compatible Stylophone

SS5_small

The Original Dubreq Stylophone The Dubreq Stylophone was invented in 1968 by Brian Jarvis.  It was originally designed as a toy, but the fact that it was portable and easy to play and it's distinctive synth sound soon made it popular with some of the most iconic musicians of the late 60's. David Bowie used it on the track 'Space Oddity' a...

Continue reading
14707 Hits

Mixtela- A MIDI Stylophone Business Card, Music Box, and 5 Pin DIN Synth

box3

MIDI Stylophone Business Card Last Sunday we were looking at bookmarks we had made while searching the Internet for blog topics.  We had booked marked Mixtela.com a few months ago because of all the cool MIDI DIY projects.  But then we found WaitingForFriday's website and decided to do an article on the MIDI Stylophone...

Continue reading
14177 Hits

Curve - by Nathan M. Asman

nate-recital-73

This custom-built instrument is called Curve, and is named after the shape and contour of the interface itself. I wanted to create something that had a myriad of different sensors and ways of controlling different musical parameters, while also maintaining the functionality and traditional idioms of other controllers, interfaces, and instruments th...

Continue reading
6557 Hits

Virtual organ console unit: how to let your MIDI devices play as an organ

cover_image_VOCU_medium

Introduction We have started our project to find a way how to build full-featured organ console out of available MIDI instruments. One of our project goals was to extend the coverage of the "virtual organ" from software also to the hardware. We have turned it into "virtual organ console". Virtual pipe organ technology (VPO) has been well estab...

Continue reading
25778 Hits

Tirare - MIDI String Instrument

The Tirare is a custom performance interface. In Italian, Tirare means: (to) throw, (to) to pull. The name refers to the primary performative action employed in order to generate sound. Initially, I was trying to create a form of MIDI concertina. I wanted to pull and push the interface to generate sound, similar to a concertina. I also ma...

Continue reading
9693 Hits