Make Magazine: DIY Music

I’ve been reviewing O’Reilly publications all week. I got ahold of Make Magazine: DIY Music (Technology on Your Time Volume #15) this time. It was fun reading about the various music hacks, brought me back to my hardware hacking days of undergrad and more recently Dartmouth Digital Musics.

There is a particular project that seems very worthwhile to build. It’s a solenoid powered drummer. Basically it’s a midi decoder coupled with a big stick powered by the solenoid. The midi decoder recieves a signal which triggers the solenoid which strikes the drum. Nice and simple, with some easy to follow instructions. To make this project really cool you implement an algorithm on your pc to drive the midi controller that uses some autoacompanimnet algorithm. Just snag one from Rodger Dannenberg (CMU) or Gil Weinberg (Georgia Tech)

BTW You can find this issue of Make on Amazon or the O’Reilly store.  Here’s some robot drummer inspiration below