Two C64, old floppy disks and gaffer tape:
https://linusakesson.net/commodordion/index.php
The world is not lost yet.
https://linusakesson.net/commodordion/index.php
The world is not lost yet.
The Commodordion is awesome! Apparently an almost endless amount of creativity 👍👍👍!
Best regards!
Best regards!
Finally, a musical instrument that sounds even worse than an accordion! 😀
(But I appreciate the amount of labour that went into its creation.)
-Gnobuddy
(But I appreciate the amount of labour that went into its creation.)
-Gnobuddy
An accordion can sound amazingly good in the right hands, in my opinion. Here's Alexandr Hrustevich playing Vivaldi on a bayan (a kind of chromatic button accordion):
He's amazing. Wow!
Maybe he's the exception that proves the rule? 😀
It's like the banjo. A banjo can sound beautiful - but only if Bela Fleck is playing it!
I'm kidding around a little. We all have our preferences. And one of the reasons why music is so rich is because there is music out there for every preference.
-Gnobuddy
I also love Paul De Bra's accordion arrangement of Leon Boellmann's Suite Gothique op.25, available at imslp.org.
Best regards!
Best regards!
Last saturday BBC radio 3 was playing Stravinsky's rite of spring performed by Félicien Brut on the accordian. Interesting. not sure I will buy that album though.
Oh my word. Programming that must have been like trying to build a copy of the Great Pyramid of Giza, using nothing but tweezers, grains of rice, and tubes of school glue.
-Gnobuddy
Stunning, indeed! Admittedly I absolutely don't get how to get these different frequencies/tones from flatbed scanners (or laser printers?) 🤔 ! Or do you think they're just for decoration?
Best regards!
Best regards!
I have been following this Youtube channel since the first version of the Floppotron. I believe that he uses custom Arduino based driver boards for the stepper motors in the old floppies, hard drives and scanners. The sound you hear is from the motors and the drive mechanisms which are often slammed against their mechanical limits. The frequency and pulse width to each motor is controlled over MIDI and fed from what looks like an 80's / 90's vintage MIDI tracker program running on an unseen computer. There is a brief glimpse of what looks like a DIY MIDI thru box in the video at 2:07 and some of the interfacing hardware at 1:25 and 1:44.
A "tracker" is a type of MIDI sequencer where all note events are time stamp based output messages fed to MIDI instruments via a serial port. The first MIDI Tracker appeared in the late 80's on the COMMODORE Amiga. DOS based PC versions sprang up in the early 90's. Trackers fell out of style when full on DAW's like Cakewalk Sonar appeared, and loop based sampling / sequencing became possible with Fruity Loops, now called FL Studio due to pressure from the cereal company. Hardware based trackers have made a pretty solid comeback recently too.
I had a freeware tracker that ran on MS DOS, took its user input from an Excel or Lotus 123 spreadsheet, and sent data out over MIDI via a Roland MPU 401 card to a Roland MT-32 sound module somewhere around 1990. I sold the whole i286 based system long ago. The whole Floppotron thing is a hardware based sound module.
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There is an argentine music and humor band called "Les Luthiers" that made music intruments with cans, shower flower and with a toilet.
That's just incredible. Now I know what to do with all of that compu-crap in my basement.
Better yet, now I know what someone else can do with all that compu-crap in my basement (I don't need another project!).
My computer journey started out with the SWTPC 6800 system in 1975. That system grew to fill an entire workbench that caused noticeable light dimming when turned on. Like nearly every Tiger amp my friends at Motorola and I cloned the computer and designed a few SS-50 buss cards for it. Mine had color graphics an 8 inch floppy disk drive and 128K of bank switched memory in 32K banks. A seriously modified TRS-80 system and a few Apple II clones followed it. All were used for some crude computer based music making attempts.
IBM had a large plant in Boca Raton a few miles from the Motorola plant where I worked. Starting in the late 70's technical people started leaving Motorola for a "better job" at IBM. Those who left Motorola were extremely tight lipped about the secret project at IBM that would "change the world." I had a friend who was a PC board layout contractor who bounced back and forth between Mot and IBM. One day in the early 80's he shows up at my house with a car trunk full of "junk" from a cleanup day at IBM. From that junk I made him and 8 slot PC-XT and myself a 5 slot PC with mostly genuine IBM parts. That started the compu-crap collection. Within a couple years a few friends and I were in the PC clone making business. We would visit "clone shops," talk to their "techie" and if he met the proper qualifications (clueless) we would offer to buy all of their "defectives" for between 10 and 25 cents on the dollar. In the late 80's I decided to go to college for a degree on Motorola's money at age 37. I sold a lot of PC clones in those years and accumulated a warehouse full of compu-crap, from individual piece parts to functional SUN Sparc Station 1's and a Sparc 2. Fortunately, hamfests exist and most of my compu-crap was gone before I left Florida in 2014.
I still make something that could be called music on computers. I have several DIY synthesizers which I designed that use 32 bit ARM core chips for sound generation. The guitar that boots Windows 10 is not quite ready for prime time yet though. There is a DIY keyboard in the works (case not built yet) that does run W10 and several popular synthesizer emulations like the Arturia V collection, the Cherry Audio stuff, and a virtual modular synth called VCV Rack. It also runs the Ableton Live and FL Studio DAWs for full sequencing capability.
