instrument

If you’ve been worrying about how you can incorporate more onanistic pantomime into your act, you may want to check out Eric Singer’s Sonic Banana.

The Sonic Banana may not quite as cool looking as a keytar, but the instrument is completely original, offers unique performance opportunities and could be the perfect excuse for the occasional single-entendre pickup line. Read more…

Wiimote Hacked Instrument

via eyesuck17:

My first stab at making the Wiimote into an instrument.

Made using Glovepie, PureData, and FM8.Roll controls pitch within a C lydian scale, pitch controls a morph, and 2 simple sequences at 120 BPM are controlled Via the buttons.

It’s all Legend starting tom cruise up in here.

Moldover has released a new album, titled Moldover, that’s not just a interesting collection of electronic music, but it comes in a CD case that’s a light theremin.

Explains moldover:

It completely redefines what it means to “play an album”… Moldover’s CD packaging itself IS a new musical instrument!

The CD is mounted on a custom designed circuit board, intricately patterned and powering a “light-Theremin”.

Yes! You play the artwork and it makes sound!

Only the musical supervillain genius of Moldover could develop something so stunningly innovative.

The album comes in several edition, including the Standard Edition (no light-theremin), the Pocket Edition (mini light-theremin) and the Awesome Edition (full circuit-board light-theremin CD insert).

You can preview the tracks from Moldover’s CD and purchase it at his site.

Leave a comment below with your thoughts on this bad boy!

Luca De Rosso’s OTTO is an electronic musical instrument for realtime manual beat slicing of audio samples.

OTTO provides a tangible user interface designed with the aim of giving the user the feel of having the sample in his hands. The musician can manipulate an audio sample in real time through the use of a restricted number of simple physical buttons and switches.

In computer music audio samples are generally represented as the waveform itself or as little colored blocks. Since the sample inside OTTO as to be controlled really fast, the performer needs to quickly understand where and how to play a specific part. The sample visualization has been designed to provide just the information needed and nothing more.

There are several more demo videos at Luca De Rosso’s YouTube channel.

via Peter Kirn’s Create Digital Music – Peter puts up something incredible every day, so make sure CDM is on your shortlist of sites to visit!

This video tries to answer the question “What is MIDI?”

via SynthGnosis:

Midi stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Midi is not sound whatsoever, rather, it is a signal. That is one misconception about it. In this video I’ll explain the basics of it for those who don’t know what it is and what it can do for you.

Midi is simply sending a signal to your computer or some other musical device. Since it’s dealing with signals, just think of a midi controller being like a videogame console controller (SNES!) that sends a signal when you press a button on the pad, or being just like the keyboard (typing) that’s sitting right in front of you.

Midi is a little more advanced than the signaling that I talked of above because it deals with music, and with music there are a lot of variables. For example we have a velocity range which goes from 0 to 127, and velocity is how hard or soft you hit a key on your controller. It also tells whichever hardware or software that you’re sending the signal to exactly which note you’re playing and how long you hold it for. It can get a bit more advanced, but those are the basics.

Midi is a great way to record sort of a ‘DI’ and go back to replace or switch out the sounds of a synthesizer or piano performance. Learning the basics of midi is essential to any musician these days, and you don’t necessarily have to play keys to fool with it. Anyone can PROGRAM midi.