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The Chipophone — an 8-Bit Chiptune Organ
adunk writes "Linus Åkesson has built an 8-bit synthesizer inside an old electric organ case. 'All the original tone-generating parts have been disconnected, and the keys, pedals, knobs and switches rerouted to a microcontroller which transforms them into MIDI signals. Those are then parsed by a second microcontroller, which acts as a synthesizer.' The Chipophone is perfect for playing classics such as the Super Mario Bros in-game music or Rob Hubbard's Spellbound. A description of the build process, with photos, is available."
THIS KILLS !!!!
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Similar vein, and I always wanted one of these: SIDstation, but sadly they're no longer made anymore.
For those using softsynths, have a look at QuadraSID too (demo MP3 on the right-hand side of that page), particular with the Rob Hubbard expansion packs. I use that a fair amount in what I write. If anyone else knows of some interesting softsynths along the same lines, I'd be interested to hear.
Cheers,
In
this brings back oh so many hours spent in front of the NES.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
My jaw was already on the desk but when he started playing the Mega Man theme... OMG!
Yeah because someone's going to cry about making one of the billion learner organs out there into a sweet 8-bit instrument.
FYS
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Better restored as a synthesizer than in a landfill.
This synth is great, but it isn't a REAL synthesizer unless it can adequately play the theme music to Leisure Suite Larry. :)
Torvalds is Finnish; Finland is strictly not Scandinavian. Scandinavia is the peninsula with Sweden and Norway.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Has everyone completely lost their value of history in this 'throwaway' culture?
Other people are making lamphades from vintage sheet music.
I inherited a similar one a few years ago. Mid 70's one owner Yamaha DK-40, pristine condition. ~$3500 orig price. I couldn't give it away. Name your price, free delivery anywhere in Ohio. No takers. I talked to the main piano/organ dealer in the city I was living in. "If you can get $300 for it, you're lucky. I have a basement full of those."
Throwaway culture or no, some things just aren't worth it.
That's not an electric piano.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_piano
The chipophone is clearly a synth. It doesn't create the sounds mechanically, unlike an electric piano.
He didn't throw it away, he recycled it. He could've gone out and bought a cheap MIDI keyboard and hooked it up to a softsynth, but instead he reused something he already had in a novel way. How is that throwaway culture? Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Well, a couple of years back I was thinking of a similar project: use an Atmel AVR 8 bit (RISC) microcontroller to create a sound chip, controlled by MIDI. Well, this Linus dude did that, and MUCH, MUCH more! Pluse, the guy is a great musician (he can actually play a full organ, which in addition to hand, needs also foot coordination), and can play the whole of Rob Hubbard's Spellbound entirely by heart.
In a perfect world, this guy should be famous, make millions, and sportsmen like Tiger Woods would be happy to mow his lawn :o) (that's my geek utopian dream).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I dunno, I have a cheap tacky solid state hammond kicking around that's still "good enough" for use in live music settings because when you're throwing a 57 in front of the speaker grill, most teens/young adults can't tell the difference between the vibrato switch and the rotating cone of a hammond... especially with a couple electric guitars in the mix. Admitted, it IS a hammond, it DOES have an internal leslie cab, heck it even has an 11 pin out for an external leslie cab (albeit no one has the new 11 pin cabs these days cos the B3 and C3 used 5 and 6 pin cables)... but still. There's room for even the tackiest of organs in live rock these days.
If you bothered to RTFA, you'd know the thing was of no real historical or any other value. Mass produced old organ whose future was either this or the garbage heap. I think this is infinitely more awesome.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Torvalds represents the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Besides, when people say "Scandinavian", they usually refer to the Nordic Countries, which include Denmark, Finland and Iceland in addition to the scritcly defined Scandinavia. These countries are deeply connected in history and culture, for example Finland was a part of Sweden for most of its history.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Let me clarify at this point that organs like these are not particularly rare. They were mass produced in the seventies, and most thrift stores in Sweden have at least one of them on display.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I like the very DIY flavor of this particular installation. But old organs are commonly stripped and MIDI-fied through a similar process, frequently enough that there are forums and even commercial products to assist. Two of my favorite are Midibox (midibox.org), and Hauptwerk (www.hauptwerk.com). The former is a DIY MIDI hardware site, with a forum for people trying to add MIDI capability to old organs and similar instruments; the latter is essentially a MIDI sampler designed specifically for playback of organ music. I am in the early stages of a similar project to add MIDI capability to an old Allen organ, which I am attempting to do without disrupting any of the existing electronics, which makes it quite a bit more challenging at least for me.
Nonaggression works!
He's apparently also involved in the 8-bit demoscene: Craft by lft.
It's still wrong, and the Cold-War invention "Nordic countries" should perhaps be preferred if Finland must be included. Scandinavia is definitely not only a geographically separate entity, but a separate cultural-linguistic whole as well. Just listen to the Swedish People's Party folks who insist on us having to integrate to Scandinavia because it's so damned special compared to *us* (of course, an alternate variant of this argument is the idea that nothing except Swedishness exists, and the wrong kind of people will be allowed into the club after enough manipulation into accepting the idea themselves).
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
8 bits are not enough to measure the awesomeness of this device.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
For cheap cool music, I took a different approach. I wrote an open-source hardware controller for an inexpensive commercial MIDI tone module. The best tone module to use is the Yamaha TX81Z, because they are cheap and very flexible. They are widely available still because there were millions sold new about twenty years ago. They are available on eBay for about $60-$80. The sound engine is a four-operator FM synthesizer that can programmed to make all kinds of weird sounds, along with classic analog-synth sweeps and 80's video game sounds.
Instead of a real organ keyboard, I use a standard PS2 (purple connector miniDIN6) computer keyboard to play the notes. The standard PC keyboard has its own internal microcontroller. It sends a scancode when a key is pressed and also when the key is released, which makes it able to be used as a music keyboard. Its advantage is that it's really cheap, about a few dollars each. The disadvantage is that the keys are small, and, certain combinations of keys (played as chords) don't sound. The specific combinations depend on the keyboard manufacturer.
Google for the Two-Pot controller at the Yamaha TX81Z Homepage. I also do have later versions of the firmware, all open-source.
Yup. The easiest instrument to get for free on Seattle craigslist is an organ from the Cold War. The second easiest instrument to get for free is an upright grand piano, which is easy because everyone wants to get rid of a huge freakin' upright grand, but hard because it's a HUGE FREAKIN' UPRIGHT GRAND.
Watch the video. This is amazing!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
The whole geographical point here is the Scands mountain range, that runs north-south in Sweden and Norway. Hence, Scandinavian peninsula.
Whether the "cultural" argument is valid is a bit contentious -- a lot of the typically Swedish-speaking Nordists who are objectively speaking a bunch of Swedish imperialists certainly want to extend the concept of Scandinavia to include Finland ("because it is good for us").
Personally, although we all live a in typical Western European democracy with similar political leanings, I find Scandinavia to be culturally different. And of course it is linguistically different too; it's just that for some weird political reason, Finnish never is allowed to "count" in these kinds of considerations. After all, we're a bilingual country and all that, and in the future Swedish is going to be the mother tongue of all of us...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Truly inspiring. It makes me want to get back into the microcontroller hobby. (No arduinos though, where's the fun in that?)
So... this guy takes an electric organ and turns it into a synthesizer? Reminds me of that guy that turned an old guitar into a giant, six stringed ukulele, or the other guy who turned a trombone into a bugle.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
According to TFA, the conversion involves 1)creating MIDI data from the keyboard and 2)synthesizing audio from that MIDI data. Since there are very good synths available (much better than an 8 bit uC), I hope this design has the option for sending the MIDI to such an external device. Now THAT would be awesome.
Have gnu, will travel.
I see a part for him in the next The Royal Tenenbaums / The Life Aquatic...
What a bizarre comment. The chipophone was created for live chiptune performances. The intention wasn't to destroy anything or prove how special anyone is. The organ, which is a very common model produced in the seventies, is just the shell that happened to be used for this project. Your comments about restoration of history are all the more strange considering the whole point is to resurrect 8-bit synthesized instrumentation for live play.
You see, this guy's a genius, but it shouldn't have to be this hard.
Not so long ago, I enquired to see if there was a keyboard (preferably weighted) which can take VSTs as input to allow for an infinitude of possible instruments.
Guess what? No such keyboard exists.
It would be incredible to use and play a keyboard, but with the infinite range of VST instruments and effects out there. Unfortunately though, manufacturers like to 'lock in' their keyboards with the own limited range. It's pretty sad.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Thanks for your reaction. I've learned a lot from it (and subsequent Googling).
I'm not going into the Swedish/Finnish discussion (as I frankly don't know the details of that, although I can guess). Suffice to say that Swedish is a language that I could learn if I tried, but Finnish, no way I could master that one.
And, seeing that my own country is rapidly declining due to insane government policy, I would like to think I'll someday move to a more pleasant country. And that would be an Scandinavian (in the broadest sense) country.
If it wasn't that I can't leave my family, I'd already packed up and gone north...
It's not like he hacked it to pieces and made a shelf from it. He turned one electronic music instrument into another. Essentially, he installed a hardware upgrade. Like installing more RAM, only a tad more involved.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Is it just me or did he consistently miss the same note when playing the Mega Man Soundtrack.
does it seem like i care much about how much karma i lose ? i speak my mind whenever, wherever. i swear when i feel to, too.
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Exactly. It like how my guitarist and I love to go looking for "pawn shop special" guitars and basses, which we then trick and tweak and just have a blast with. One bass I have that always gets people coming up afterward to check out is a late 70s/early 80s Washburn that kinda looks like a P-Bass with longer horns. Since it had some serious scratches on the paint I found some 40s style pinup girl stickers on Beale Street, replaced the busted knob cover with a pair of home-made dice knobs(goes nice with the black and white theme), used glitter fingernail polish to paint the black pickguard and headstock, and finally had a friend that was good with a soldering iron rig me a push button on the volume so I can switch between series and parallel on the P-pickup. Sure it only cost 70 bucks with a little TLC and imagination it is now a fun easy playing bass that I've had guys offer me $400 for on the spot.
so I say bravo to this dude for taking something that was a dime a dozen and making it into something cool. Sometimes you just need to let your imagination loose and have some fun. Just like for my next project I have an acoustic electric bass I picked up for $50 that has some seriously bad frets, so me and a buddy are gonna pull them and fill in the gaps with epoxy or something and make it a fretless.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The whole geographical point here is the Scands mountain range, that runs north-south in Sweden and Norway. Hence, Scandinavian peninsula.
Which is a moot point, because derivation is not synonymous with definition. Specifically: "Finland is sometimes considered a Scandinavian country in common English usage..."
Given that English is the language in use here, one oughtn't quibble with someone's correct English usage of the term 'Scandinavian' on grounds that it would be incorrect in Swedish or Finnish.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Besides, when people say "Scandinavian", they usually refer to the Nordic Countries, which include Denmark, Finland and Iceland in addition to the scritcly defined Scandinavia.
Very true. In fact, the Scandinavian Studies department at my university includes courses on all of those countries, and their languages.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Yes, sometimes considered; common usage... but it's still a wrong common usage, that I will keep pointing out, in particular as there is some charged politics here :-)
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
I think you and I should team up to battle the people who use "Caucasian" to mean "white" (in reference to race). No, my ancestors did not come from Georgia, or Armenia, or Azerbaijan, thank you very much.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Just another story explaining why some people never get la*d.