Musical Hacks

1382 Articles

Pi Pico Lays Down The Groove

October 30, 2024 by 7 Comments

From the 60s to perhaps the mid-00s, the path to musical stardom was essentially straight with very few forks. As a teenager you’d round up a drummer and a few guitar players and start jamming out of a garage, hoping to build to bigger and bigger venues. Few people made it for plenty of reasons, not least of which was because putting together a band like this is expensive. It wasn’t until capable electronic devices became mainstream and accepted in popular culture in the last decade or two that a few different paths for success finally opened up, and this groovebox shows just how much music can be created this way with a few straightforward electronic tools.

The groovebox is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and includes enough storage for 16 tracks with a sequencer for each track, along with a set of 16 scenes. Audio plays through PCM5102A DAC module, with a 160×128 TFT display and a touch-sensitive pad for user inputs. It’s not just a device for looping stored audio, though. There’s also a drum machine built in which can record and loop beats with varying sounds and pitches, as well as a sample slicer and a pattern generator and also as the ability to copy and paste clips.

There are a few limitations to using a device this small though. Because of memory size it outputs a 22 kHz mono signal, and its on-board storage is not particularly large either, but it does have an SD card slot for expansion. But it’s hard to beat the bang-for-the-buck qualities of a device like this, regardless, not to mention the portability. Especially when compared with the cost of multiple guitars, a drum set and a bunch of other analog equipment, it’s easy to see how musicians wielding these instruments have risen in popularity recently. This 12-button MIDI instrument could expand one’s digital musical capabilities even further.

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75-In-One Music

October 23, 2024 by 18 Comments

It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will have had their interest in electronics as a child honed by exposure to an electronics kit. The type of toy that featured a console covered in electronic components with spring terminals, and on which a variety of projects could be built by wiring up circuits. [Matthew North Music] has a couple of these, and he’s made a video investigating whether they can be used to make music.

The kits he’s found are a Radio Shack one from we’re guessing the 1970s, and a “Cambridge University Recording Studio” kit that looks to be 1990s-vintage. The former is all discrete components and passive, while the latter sports that digital audio record/playback chip that was the thing to have in a novelty item three decades ago. With them both he can create a variety of oscillator and filter circuits, though for the video he settles for a fairly simple tone whose pitch is controlled by an light-dependent resistor, and a metronome as a drum beat.

The result is a little avant garde, but certainly shows promise. The beauty of these kits is they can now be had for a song, and as grown-ups we don’t have to follow the rules set out in the book, so we can see there’s a lot of fun to be had. We look forward to some brave soul using them in a life performance at a hacker camp. Continue reading “75-In-One Music” →

A Parts Bin MIDI Controller In 24 Hours

October 20, 2024 by 9 Comments

Part of the reason MIDI has hung on as a standard in the musical world for so long is that it is incredibly versatile. Sure, standard instruments like pianos and drums can be interfaced with a computer fairly easily using this standard, but essentially anything can be converted to a MIDI instrument with the right wiring and a little bit of coding. [Jeremy] needed to build a MIDI controller in a single day, and with just a few off-the-shelf parts he was able to piece together a musical instrument from his parts bin.

The build is housed in an off-brand protective case from a favorite American discount tool store, but the more unique part of the project is the choice to use arcade buttons as the instrument’s inputs. [Jeremy] tied eight of these buttons to an Arduino Uno to provide a full octave’s worth of notes, and before you jump to the comments to explain that there are 12 notes in an octave, he also added a button to the side of the case to bend any note when pressed simultaneously. An emergency stop button serves as a master on/off switch and a MIDI dongle on the other side serves as the interface point to a computer.

After a slight bit of debugging, the interface is up and running within [Jeremy]’s required 24-hour window. He’s eventually planning to use it to control a custom MIDI-enabled drum kit, but for now it was fun to play around with it in some other ways. He’s also posted the project code on a GitHub page. And, if this looks a bit familiar, this was not [Jeremy]’s first MIDI project. He was also the creator of one of the smallest MIDI interfaces we’ve ever seen.

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Module Makes Noisy Projects Easy

October 16, 2024 by 7 Comments

You want to add voice, music, or sound effects to your project. What do you do? Sure, it is easy enough to plug a Raspberry Pi or some other tiny computer, but that’s not always desirable from a power, space, or cost point of view. [Mellow_Labs] shows a module that makes it simple to add sound to any project. The little board is just big enough to house a speaker and doesn’t cost much. Check it out in the video below.

The device allows you to preload tracks as MP3 files. There are two ways to control it: via a serial port, or using a single pin that can accept commands like you might expect from a MP3 player, like play and next track.

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Linus Live-Codes Music On The Commodore 64

October 16, 2024 by 12 Comments

In this tremendously educational video, [Linus Åkesson] takes us through how he develops a synthesizer and a sequencer and editor for it on the Commodore 64, all in BASIC. While this sounds easy, [Linus] is doing this in hard mode: all of the audio is generated by POKE, and it gets crazier from there. If you’re one of those people out there who think that BASIC is a limited language, you need to watch this video.

[Linus] can do anything with POKE. On a simple computer like the C64, the sound chip, the screen chips, and even the interrupts that control program flow are all accessible simply by writing to the right part of memory. So the main loop here simply runs through a lot of data, POKEing it into memory and turning the sound chip on and off. There’s also a counter running inside the C64 that he uses to point into a pitch lookup table in the code.

But the inception part comes when he designs the sequencer and editor. Because C64 BASIC already has an interactive code editor, he hijacks this for his music editor. The final sequencer interface exists inside the program itself, and he writes music in the code, in real time, using things like LIST and editing. (Code is data, and data is code.) Add in a noise drum hack, and you’ve got some classic chiptuney sounds by the end.

We love [Linus]’s minimal C64 exercises, and this one gets maximal effect out of a running C64 BASIC environment. But that’s so much code in comparison to his 256-byte “A Mind is Born” demo. But to get that done, he had to use assembly.

Thanks [zogzog] for the great tip!

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The Greengate DS:3 Part 2: Putting A Retro Sampler To Use

October 14, 2024 by 2 Comments

The Greengate DS:3 had been re-created in the form of the Goodgreat. Now [Bea Thurman] had to put it to use. If the Greengate DS:3 card was rare,  the keyboard was nearly impossible to find. After a long search, [Bea] bought one all the way from Iceland.  The card of course came courtesy of [Eric]. 

It was time to connect the two together.  But there was a problem — a big problem. The GreenGate has a DB-25 connected via a ribbon cable to the board’s 2×10 connector. The keyboard that shipped with those cards would plug right in.  Unfortunately, [Bea’s] keyboard had a DIP-40 IDC connector crimped on its ribbon cable.  What’s more the connectors for the sustain and volume pedals were marked, but never drilled out. The GreenGate silk screen was still there though. 

Maybe it was a prototype or some sort of modified hardware. Either way, the 40-pin DIP connector had to go if the keyboard ever were to work with the card. What followed were a few hours of careful wire tracing 

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Solving A Retrocomputing Mystery With An Album Cover: Greengate DS:3

October 14, 2024 by 9 Comments

[Bea Thurman] had a retro music conundrum. She loved the classic Greengate DS:3 sampler, but couldn’t buy one, and couldn’t find enough information to build her own. [Bea’s] plea for help caught the attention of [Eric Schlaepfer], aka  [TubeTime]. The collaboration that followed ultimately solved a decades-old mystery. 

In the 1980s, there were two types of musicians: Those who could afford a Fairlight CMI and everyone else. If you were an Apple II owner, the solution was a Greengate DS:3. The DS:3 was a music keyboard and a sampler card for the Apple II+ (or better). The plug-in card was a bit mysterious, though. The cards were not very well documented, and only a few survive today. To make matters worse, some chips had part numbers sanded off. It was a bit of a mystery until [Bea and Tubetime] got involved. 

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