John at HighlyLiquid has been busy this year- he’s got a new kit out and one in the works that really step up the game. You may be familiar with his previous kits, which add MIDI control to Speak & Spell, Atari 2600, or pretty much every Casio. HighlyLiquid also stocks more open-ended kits which can add MIDI control to pretty much anything- I used one in my MAKE Magazine article last year to build a drum-playing robot.
If you’re in the New York area, tomorrow night we have another noise-making get-together at the lovely 3rd Ward. The event is free, and we have free Colt 45.
Amanda Ervin is the featured guest this month; see one of her circuits above. Her designs are intended to be something that other folks can make, so they could be an excellent starting point for the project you’re dreaming of. (And once you get sequenced events down, of course, you can assign them to whatever sounds or visuals you like.)
I’ve given up on live streaming from the event because we can’t get a reliable connection, but we will have documentation for CDM on the projects afterward.
Amanda Ervin makes elegant noise-making apparatuses from simple circuits, and is able to share that process with her students (see her classes among 3rd Ward’s Circuits lineup). She’s going to show off some of her latest creations at the open showcase of Handmade Music Brooklyn, our monthly party + science fair + musical performance + ruckus. (More details soon on Handmade Music events that are springing up worldwide, thanks to the hard work and creativity of the DIY music community!)
What really impresses me about these projects is that Amanda has made both the project and the curriculum – that is, she can teach you to make these, too! It’s often easier to make something for yourself alone than it is to make it reproducible, so I do admire that in a design.
If you’re in the New York area, you can catch the event free, Thursday evening September 17. (Directions) If not, we’re working with 3rd Ward on ways to translate the educational experience online.
Here’s a musical excerpt from Amanda, as well: Animal.mp3
Handmade Music info: More on Amanda’s work (with additional sounds and videos) on our Handmade Music site:
Want to contribute your work? If you can make it to NYC this month, we’d love to present your work. All projects, all media (electronic, acoustic, hardware, software), and all levels of functionality (working, partially working, in-progress, completely broken) are welcome!
As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback.
Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument:
1. The Walkman has audio on the tape itself, sampled from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.
2. Because a compact cassette has two tracks (left and right, for stereo), one track is dedicated to the drums, another to the rim shot.
3. The rim shot track is fed as a mono audio input to an Arduino (the open-source microcontroller platform). The Arduino responds to the audio level, so each time a rim shot hit occurs, it ….
4. …sends a sequence event to the Gakken SX-150. That means that you can adjust the speed of the whole contraption by…
5. …adjusting the speed of the tape. (Bless you, analog playback!)
It takes Gijs to think that way somehow: put together, these elements are actually fairly simple, but strikingly effective. Fortunately, if this does inspire new ideas, Gijs has posted all his Arduino code, so you can check this out and try something yourself.
A $50 synth that makes neat noises is fun. But a $50 synth that has a proper housing, audio jacks, and can be MIDI controlled — that’s a whole lot better. So readers were wowed last week as we saw the work MrBook did with his Gakken SX-150.
Now, by popular demand, MrBook shares his techniques with specs, instructions, and code. This isn’t a bad project to get started with if you’ve been thinking of doing something on these lines.
The basic ingredients and process:
Find the connections on the synth for audio and control, using contact points on the board
Build a simple circuit that adds MIDI input (control) and audio output – schematic on his site. It’s not a tough circuit at all — this could be fun soldering practice.
Add the Arduino, the open source, dirt-cheap, accessible microcontroller project board, and some code MrBook has written for you.
That should be fun even for relative newcomers – provided you have basic soldering chops. If you want to get more advanced, there’s room to modify the Arduino code to do fun stuff, or, as MrBook is doing, add a standalone Arduino sequencer or the like to drive your synth in hardware alone. (While I’m still on a crusade to do OSC for stuff that talks to computers, I think MIDI should absolutely be used for what it’s good add – connecting hardware.)
You can also have some fun with the casing. (Someone needs to mod the drab colors on the Gakken, too, I think.)
If you do a project and document it, do let us know! And we’ll be watching for more from MrBook.
You can get your SX-150 kit from our good friends at MAKE. (Nope, I’m not getting any cash for saying that. Hmmm… okay, I need an affiliate account, don’t I? Make?)
21
