Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Gaming

Joining the nearly endless amount of Nintendo DS hacks already in the wild is TobW‘s DS Sampling Keyboard, which “uses the DS’s microphone and touchscreen” to interface with a software-based sampling keyboard. A close contender to join our Music Thing series, this wonderous hack takes advantage of the wee machine’s excellent X / Y-axis controls as well as its built-in WiFi to beam the MIDI commands wirelessly. The program has been tested with Wifi, GBAMP, and M3, so “it should work on pretty much anything,” and provides a much less expensive alternative to those dedicated offerings. While musical gizmos are always more effective when seen heard rather than just heard about, be sure to click on for a front row seat to the YouTube demonstration.

[Via MusicThing]

Continue reading Nintendo DS doubles as wireless MIDI keyboard / controller

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that’s coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

About a year ago, I wrote about boutique synthesizers – fantastically obscure boxes hand-made by freaks (normally Scandinavian). Compared with synths, effects pedals are relatively simple — sometimes just a handful of components, a switch and a couple of knobs in a steel box — so there are loads of people experimenting and making great-looking but expensive pedals for guitarists. Most of the pedals mentioned here are in the $350-$500 range. Sure, that would buy you a dozen Chinese-made Behringer pedals, but would that make you happy?

Zvex Ringtone
Disappointingly, Zachary Vex’s new Ringtone pedal won’t make your vintage strat sound like the Crazy Frog. Instead, it’s a 8-step sequencer driving a ring modulator — the early sound effect used to make the voice of the Daleks, and built into the Commodore 64′s SID sound effects chip. It’s pretty hard to understand what the Ringtone does, or why it’s cool, without watching Zachary’s wonderful demo video. Like all boutique pedals, the Ringtone is crazy expensive at $349, but that gets you a hand-made, hand-painted pedal.

After the break: Kitsch Brazilian pedals, butch American pedals, clever English pedals, and a fuzzbox with a joystick…

MG Pedals
Marcelo Giangrande makes MG pedals (and a cool little range of amps) in Sao Paolo, Brazil. His bright pink “That’s Echo Folks” pedal is an analog delay controlled by a light-sensitive sensor on a tail.

BugBrand
In Bristol, England, Tom Bugs makes a big range of lo-fi sound mangling devices. His Mini-Modular is a little slope-fronted box full of circuits to modify other sounds, or create them from scratch. It’s also a synth, but don’t expect it to play in tune. His Bug Crusher is a stompbox which uses an analog process to roughly reproduce the bit-reduced sound of old samplers and circuit-bent toys.

Trogotronic
While MG gear is kitsch and colourful, Trogotronic’s stuff is butch: Huge, custom-modified all-tube signal generators and effects, and the Iron Cross, a bombproof arcade joystick turned into a four-way signal router.

Guyatone Optical
Guyatone pedals are a little less underground than the others featured here – they’re made in Japan in a factory, rather than someone’s garage – but they make up for it through over-engineered complexity and an exuberant number of lights, switches and controls. Their Ultron filter pedal even has old-school DIP switches inside for further tweaking.

Schumann Electronics
In the back room of a music store in Brooklyn, John Schumann builds pedals for bands like Portishead and Radiohead. His pedals are fantastically esoteric, like the PLL: an “analog harmonizer” which plays along with the notes you’re playing.

Effector 13
While most pedals are aimed a guitarists, the Effector 13 Synth Mangler is designed for keyboard players. It’s two channels of ultra-fuzz, controlled by a joystick and a “magic eye” light sensor.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Portable Audio

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
Two new shiny boxes were announced this week. They both run on batteries and can record and edit audio, but they couldn't be more different. In the trashy and corporate corner is the Boss Micro-BR. It's a four-track, with guitar and mic inputs. It's "slightly larger than an iPod," runs on 2 AA batteries, has built in drum sound and effects, and is shinier than a cheap Korean DAP from 2005. This unit is the spiritual offspring of the cassette four-track, which anyone who was in a band in the '80s or early '90s will remember with a mixture of fondness and dread. If for some reason you're recording a demo by yourself, and you can't get to a laptop, it's probably perfect. No price yet, but it won't be much.

Meanwhile, in the open source startup corner is the Trinity DAW, a Linux-powered stand alone audio recorder. It's has the professional ins and outs that the Micro-BR so obviously lacks, and is built around a 500mhz processor, 128mb memory, 20gb hard drive and a real screen. It ships with Audacity software which, like most Linux software, is great/cruddy depending who you ask. It can record in stereo with professional microphones that need phantom power, and there's a nifty circular touchpad next to the screen to navigate around the GUI. Unfortunately, there's a whiff of vapour around the project, which currently only exists in rendered form, with an eye-watering price tag of $999. For which price you could probably buy 16 tracks of Micro-BR, or a decent laptop and a pile of software.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

Wait! Come back! Stop scrolling! Why should you read about a boring-looking grey synthesizer? I'll tell you why. This week, music geeks have been talking about two things. The first is the Bleep Labs Thingamagoop, the tiny, cute, handmade-in-America noise box with a strobing LED tentacle and surprisingly reasonable $100 price tag. The Thingamagoop represents one end of what's interesting in music gear at the moment -- fun, handmade, not necessarily very practical analog gear put together in garages by Make magazine readers.

Then there's this grey plastic synth. It's Novation's new Xio, which represents the other big thing happening in music gear: astonishing value for money. This thing is a USB audio interface, with phantom power and a pre-amp, so you can record using real professional microphones. It's a MIDI controller for racks and soft-synths, with a cool touchpad and joystick and lots of knobs. It's a nice-feeling (if short) semi-weighted keyboard (there's also a 49-key version). And, it's a real stand-alone analog-modelling synth, which you can tweak in your deckchair while it runs off 6 AA batteries. The Xio costs £229 (Maybe $350-$399 retail), significantly cheaper than it's nearest rival, the 3 year-old MicroKorg, which has mini keys and no controller or USB audio features. It's amazing.

Chinese manufacturing and cheap DSP chips have revolutionised the music gear business. Sure, this stuff doesn't have much soul, and it probably won't be collectable in 20 years, but it's making the average dorm-room studio a far more exciting place to be. Anyway, you can always invest the change in a small family of Thingamagoops.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

One of the first columns I ever wrote for Engadget was about Triple Neck Guitars, which are normally played by heavy metal guitarists with curly perms and an enthusiasm for lengthy solos. Now, straight outta the Mathematics department of a Canadian university, comes the Tritare: A guitar with three necks, but only six strings.

Last week, at the Acoustical Society of America's 151st meeting in Providence, RI, Sophie Léger of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Université de Moncton, Canada, presented a paper on "A New Family of Stringed Musical Instruments".

She's one of the inventors of the Tritare. It has triple-ended strings - one string goes up the fretted neck, and the other two resonate on the second, and third, fretless necks (which the guitar is standing on in this picture). You play it roughly like a normal guitar, with the two necks down to your right.

Obviously, the interesting bit is the sound, and this page contains several samples, which are amazing. Presumably they're uneffected, but sound alternately like bells or reverb-covered 'Paris Texas' slide guitar.

The Canadial professors are trying to market the Tritare as a product -- there's a homepage at Tritare.com, but absent are prices or availability. They're also experimenting with networks of strings, which at the moment are more at the clanking and atonal end of things.

Of course, if three necks doesn't sound hardcore enough, you could always build a double body guitar.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets, Home Entertainment

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

A year ago, the Monome was the Bitbox, a crude wooden box covered in illuminated momentary push-button switches. It had some early software developed in MAX/MSP which triggered a different sample on each row. Now, there are a range of interesting applications using OSC and MIDI, and the box is going into small-time production.

In February, the Philly-based development team bought 13,000 diodes from Digikey, and they’re currently building the first batch of 200 units, 8 x 8 grids which will sell for $500 with a USB interface and a bundle of open-source software.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

A year ago, the Monome was the href="http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/04/bitbox-more-flashing-leds-than-ever.html">Bitbox, a crude wooden box
covered in illuminated momentary push-button switches. It had some early software developed in MAX/MSP which triggered
a different sample on each row. Now, there are a range of interesting applications using OSC and MIDI, and the box is
going into small-time production.

In February, the Philly-based development team bought 13,000 diodes from
Digikey, and they’re currently building the first batch of 200 units, 8 x 8 grids which will sell for $500 with a
USB interface and a bundle of open-source software.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

The acoustic guitar has been an expressive, versatile instrument for centuries, but it's always lacked even a basic selection of cheesy drum kits and auto-rhythms. Now engineers in the Czech Republic have taken an acoustic guitar, covered the wooden top with a plastic touch membrane, and put little switches all over the neck. The version of the Stones 'Honky Tonk Women' played on this monstrosity has to be heard to be believed.
Presumably, there's a lot of skill that goes into building and painting a violin which resembles a leg of fine Serrano Spanish ham, but the luthier who created this instrument is unable to answer one simple question. Why?

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments