Though manufacturers like Roland have been selling digitally-driven accordions for a number of years, they're not exactly wallet-friendly. Brendan Vavra opted to take the DIY route, transforming a relatively cheap, non-working acoustic instrument he bought on eBay into a capable MIDI music maker.
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Tangled cables are the curse of mobile music enjoyment. No matter how carefully you stow away your buds, by the time you break them out, the cables are a jumbled mess. Such trials have inspired Dmitry Morozov to create the volnovod, a machine that turns twisted cables into eerie sounds.
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About 10 years ago, Percussa launched AudioCubes, an e-music system made up of smart cubes that could communicate wirelessly with each other and a computer. A software synth and a Remote controller followed, and now a hardware synth called the Engine has been added to form the Synthor System 8.
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Pint-sized hardware devices have been available for quite a while now, but players still need to get hands on to produce sounds. Gecho users can choose to physically interact with the tiny synth-in-a-box, or can leave it to make melodies from what's picked up from the world around it.
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2016 has been another strong year for envelope-pushing musical instrument innovation. Each year it gets harder to choose favorites, but there have been a few products, creations and ideas that simply jumped out from the stack of contenders. Read on for our pick of the year's best music-making gear.
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Since its launch 4 years ago, Makey Makey has been used to turn bananas into piano keyboards and make potted plants talk when handled. Now Dr. Liza Seigido of the Psyche Electro-Acoustic Opera company has used the board to bring a broken Ðàn ty bà back to life as a MIDI music maker.
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Last year, Sweden's Teenage Engineering launched a range of barebones electronic sound generators that were teeny enough to slide in a pocket. Jan Ostman has now managed to reduce the portable synth form factor to the size of a credit card, with an open source DIY project called the Tiny TS.
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Modal Electronics has detailed its upcoming Modal CRAFTsynth monophonic DSP-based synthesizer, which comes as a self-assembly kit. The UK-based boutique maker reckons that sonic wizards should be ready to rock in less than 10 minutes.
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Japan's electronic instrument maker ATV Corporation has revealed a digital percussion instrument called the aFrame. The hand drum has a playable surface stretched over a bamboo frame and is claimed able to respond to playing subtleties like no other digital percussion instrument can.
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When Raleigh released its Chopper wheelie bike in the 1970s, it became something of an instant classic. An original 1973 MK2 has now been turned into the Synth Bike 2.0 mobile groove station – complete with analog synth, built-in speaker and wheel-based tempo control.
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