I've been following along as Sam Battle of Look Mum No Computer builds and documents his 1000 oscillator megadrone, aka the KiloDrone. Sam decided to take on this completely mad project as something suitably mind-numbing to do during the pandemic. In the end, he used 2400 knobs, 2400 potentiometers, 820 jacks, 220 jack cables, 8000 […]
When I'm not writing here on BoingBoing (or anywhere else, for that matter), I also play guitar and sing in a rock band called The Roland High Life. Today we announced our new record, Songs About Comic Books and Mid-30s Malaise, and released the first single, which is kind of a Cars / Green Day mashup […]
You know how in movies where there's a mad genius tech-wizard/hacker (often a precocious teen) who can make the most fantastical creations with seemingly no effort? It's such a great fantasy with little analogue in the real world. Sam Battle, he of Look Mum No Computer strikes me as a character from one of those […]
It's beautiful pic.twitter.com/uDI9nlnI4A — beef (@shittyfriend) May 13, 2020 Image: Evan Swigart / Flickr (CC 2.0)
Otemrellik made this "100% homemade" nifty modular synthesizer. Here's his video about how he built it and how it works. Image: YouTube
I've been wanting a Teenage Engineering op-1 for years, but I can't justify paying $1300 for something I might not use a lot. But the Behringer TD-3 synthesizer, at about 1/10th of the price, looks like it's as much fun as the op-1. It's a remake of the Roland TB-303 Bass Line that came out […]
Bertolt Meyer wears a myoelectric prosthetic arm and hand controlled by electrodes attached to his residual limb that pick up impulses generated when he consciously contracts that muscle. Those impulses are then translated into control signals for the prosthetic hand. An electronic musician, Meyer had the idea to swap out the prosthetic hand for a […]
On Hackster.io, Jeremy Cook, writes about the Harmonicade, a modular 5.5 (x2) octave, multi-channel MIDI keyboard which uses arcade-style push-buttons arranged in the Wicki-Hayden button layout. Like Dvorak layouts, this alternate note arrangement is much less common. As seen in the demo video, however, KOOP Instruments has leveraged the Wicki-Hayden setup to create a stunning […]
From her groundbreaking first album Switched-On Bach (1968) to the unforgettable soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Tron (1982), Wendy Carlos is a living legend of electronic music. In March, Oxford University Press will publish Wendy Carlos: A Biography, written by musicologist Amanda Sewel, musical director of Interlochen Public Radio. From […]
Fifty one years ago today, the first incarnation of the prog rock band, King Crimson, gathered in a cramped basement space below the Fulham Palace Cafe in London. One of the instruments the band would use that would come to distinguish their early sound was that strange, iconic 60s instrument, the Mellotron. Keyboardist Ian McDonald […]
In my experience, most people haven't heard of the Rentals — and most of those who have heard of them only really know them as "that other band that Weezer's old bass player was in." Or the band who wrote "Elon Musk Is Making Me Sad." That is all technically accurate. The group was started […]
Sam Battle of Look Mum No Computer, the mad sonic scientist who brought us the Furby Organ, has done it again. This time, he turned a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive into an awesomely retro-sounding synthesizer. The Sega Mega Drive included a Yamaha YM2612 six-channel FM synthesizer chip under the hood. Sam broke that out to create […]
In 1978, Japanese electronic music maestro Osamu Shoji (1932-2018) released this killer analog synth reimagining of the Star Wars soundtrack. I find Shoji's take on the familiar themes to be far groovier than the disco exploitation of Meco's US chart-topping "Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk" released the previous year.
iSongs is a YouTube channel that shows popular songs being recreated from scratch with the music-making app that comes with the iPhone. It's an excellent and incredibly dense tutorial, too, for those with the "observe and copy" learning style.
Love Hultén took a Korg Minilogue 4-Voice Polyphonic Analog Synth and modded it with a wooden case inspired by the Commodore SX-64 (1984).
Master maker Tim Jacobs created a fantastic business card that's actually a Stylophone synthesizer complete with MIDI capabilities. It's based on the original 1967 Dübreq Stylophone, a small synthesizer played by touching a built-in stylus to the metal keyboard. The Stylophone was famously used on David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator." From Jacobs' […]
Boing Boing pal and maker superhero Mitch Altman, creator of the amazing TV-B-Gone, spent several years designing a simple-yet-powerful DIY music synthesizer that he could use to teach creative electronics and also digital signal processing to kids and adults. The result is the ArduTouch Music Synthesizer! And it's only $30! Demo videos below. Mitch wrote […]
