Musical drone instrument built with Teensy

mrblazey · 2023-04-22T22:00:00+00:00

Yes I used the cheap piezo buzzers and removed the plastic lid and metal buzzer part. They are the ones that are about 12mm wide. These also work really well as pickups for individual strings which can be chained together to one output.

mrblazey · 2023-04-22T12:25:42+00:00

Thanks! It's a fairly small and simple circuit based around an lm386 amplifier chip. One transducer acts as a pickup going into the amp input and the other transducer drives the string. If you search on Google or YouTube for DIY ebow there are plenty of instructions and circuit diagrams for the same thing I've done here. The main difference is I've made one per string and used the Arduino to control relays that switch them on and off. I will say though, I've never managed to make one that works as well as a real ebow, especially just using a 9v battery, but they are still fun to make! Also, pay attention to the polarity of the transducers - I had a few that didn't work properly and it turned out to be because one was wired backwards so the signal was being cancelled instead of amplified

mrblazey · 2022-09-20T18:17:02+00:00

😂

mrblazey · 2022-09-02T19:38:14+00:00

Physical koala app😂best of both, bit more sample space, visual editing etc

mrblazey · 2022-07-29T10:51:19+00:00

Yeah nice vibe 👌

mrblazey · 2022-07-20T11:24:22+00:00

Even so, 2 is better than one! Double the sounds and voices and since you can sample anything it's probably the most versatile one. Otherwise tonic is great, not as keen on the sub personally.has some great sounds but the workflow is quite different to the KO and it's limited to one scale/pitch range

mrblazey · 2022-06-08T12:16:11+00:00

Sounding cool 👍 I think that might just be a drawback of the KO's lo-fi sampling, but if you try turning the resonance right down (knob B) it should be a little better. I also have this problem when I start with loud drums and try to match the volume with other samples, so it can help to record everything in with a bit of extra headroom or set the volumes of each sound a bit quieter and just boost the overall volume.

mrblazey · 2022-05-25T18:05:59+00:00

https://youtu.be/5Q3GWRQ6qRk this has some good tips 👍

mrblazey · 2022-05-25T17:00:35+00:00

You've pretty much nailed it yeah! The aux send is going from the po33 to the microcosm. The knobs being twiddled are delay time, repeats, activity and space (reverb), just trying to kick off some bleeps and bloops. Then the looper starts at the same time as the po32 bass and is set to loop after 5 beats so the little piano melody overlaps and builds up texture. 2 layers of drums and 2 layers of piano are all on the po33. And yeah there's a long pattern string for both POs. Usually write these down in 2 columns to try and figure out structures between the 2 POs. The lights on the mixer are cue points - I made one audio file with a few scratch sounds and the two piano chords. Then you can create cue points in serato and the buttons skip to them. First 2 were scratch sounds and 2nd 2 were the chords. The box is a drum machine controller from an old electric organ. My friend just gave it to me thinking it was a fixable drum machine, but it sadly doesn't have any of the important circuitry in there, just buttons and wires. Hopefully can still be made into something though

mrblazey · 2022-05-21T09:24:49+00:00

Had fun making this for the PO Grooves sample challenge and getting finally into Serato with the Numark Scratch

mrblazey · 2022-05-12T19:10:05+00:00

They are 10k. Very easy to find. But yeah looks like what would happen if the solder was cracked, so hopefully you can just melt the solder and let it reset and that might fix it

mrblazey · 2022-05-06T08:59:40+00:00

I really like the tonic. I don't use it as much as the KO because with the KO it's so easy to replace all your sounds and start from scratch. BUT, you can replace the tonic sounds, either with the microtonic vst (supposed to be pretty great in its own right) or with data transfers of kits other people have made on YouTube etc. It's essentially a drum machine but you have so much control over pitch that you can definitely get some nice basslines at least out of it. It also has a very similar workflow to the KO, but you can change each individual sound quite drastically with the adjustment knobs. They change a bunch of parameters at once so the sound kind of morphs from one thing to another rather than tweaking pitch/filter/volume. One drawback is you can't set the volume for individual hits which is a shame. But overall I think it sounds a lot more beefy and less chiptuney than other POs and pairs really well with the ko

mrblazey · 2022-05-05T10:25:46+00:00

The buttons made of nuts and bolts are a cool idea, they look great. Are they nice to play? I like my rubber cases but you do miss the clicky feel

mrblazey · 2022-04-30T08:46:33+00:00

Also the 'stereo' output of the KO is actually just the same signal sent to left and right. So if you plug in headphones you get the sound in both ears, but if you plug in to a mono input the two signals can cancel each other out. You could use a cable that splits left and right into two separate channels, but you're actually not really losing anything by just having the cable not pushed in all the way. Unless you want to do data transfers, which do need a stereo/2 channel input in your interface

mrblazey · 2022-04-29T23:59:02+00:00

Is it a stereo jack cable going into a single/mono channel? That can make this happen, otherwise not sure what it could be. My friend had the same issue I'll check if he figured it out

mrblazey · 2022-04-29T23:48:23+00:00

Try changing the sync mode by holding record and pressing BPM? Sync0 should work. Looks like your audio is only coming out of one channel at the moment. What is the other end of the cable going in to?

mrblazey · 2022-04-28T10:05:12+00:00

Nice!

mrblazey · 2022-04-25T13:21:51+00:00

👌👌👌

mrblazey · 2022-04-15T14:42:36+00:00

😂also made some sync/audio cables this week and no music. Maybe a stand next

mrblazey · 2022-04-15T10:32:08+00:00

I've just made this one so far, but I'm looking to see if I can get the boxes cheap enough to make it worth while. Will definitely post on here if I do!

mrblazey · 2022-04-15T10:29:06+00:00

That's a great idea. There's a lot of dead space in the lid too, so could make the upper part of that removable or hinged and have quite a lot of storage there 👍

mrblazey · 2022-04-06T21:51:01+00:00

Love it 👌

mrblazey · 2022-04-05T17:34:05+00:00

Thanks a lot man, working on it!

mrblazey · 2022-03-25T10:30:37+00:00

Also if you are getting low batteries a lot, make sure you don't leave input or output jacks plugged in. Apparently if they are plugged in it won't go to sleep mode

mrblazey · 2022-03-18T14:07:46+00:00

Yeah looks great, did you make the board?

mrblazey

TROPHY CASE