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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."
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
My jaw was already on the desk but when he started playing the Mega Man theme... OMG!
Better restored as a synthesizer than in a landfill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!