Haxophone - A Hackable Electronic Saxophone with Mechanical Keys

Javier Cardona, the maker of Haxophone wrote in to let us know about his upcoming instrument. Here's what he had to say followed by details from the upcoming crowdfunding campaign.

"I'm excited to connect with you as the creator of the Haxophone, an open and hackable electronic saxophone. The instrument's design files and software have been available to the public on GitHub for some time now at https://github.com/cardonabits/haxo-hw.

We are gearing up to launch a crowdfunding campaign for pre-assembled Haxophone units, bringing the magic of this instrument to a broader audience. The campaign is scheduled to kick off on September 7th.

via Crowd Supply

Haxophone is an inexpensive and fully customizable electronic musical instrument that resembles a travel saxophone. Under the hood, Haxophone is a particularly elegant (and fun!) Raspberry Pi HAT. The mechanical keys and custom ergonomics give Haxophone a unique and satisfying feel. The design is fully open source, hackable and OSHWA (Open Source Hardware Association) certified. This means that you can make Haxophone entirely your own, from changing the type of key switches to making your own note and instrument mappings. It is a good fit for musicians who are looking for a way to practice saxophone silently, musicians who are also hackers, and for hackers looking for a fun musical project that won’t break the bank.

While it is not a substitute for a traditional saxophone, Haxophone is accurate enough to allow saxophone players to rehearse both in silence and "on the go". Muscle memory when practicing on Haxophone is transferable to the traditional instrument, and vice versa. This means you can rehearse in all kinds of places that would be unthinkable with a standard saxophone. If it breaks, it is relatively cheap and easy to repair. And, Haxophone is smaller and lighter than any saxophone.

Haxophone has been designed to utilize standard mechanical key switches as fingering keys. In addition of being cool and unique, these are cheaper, more reliable and more repairable than the custom molded keys that you find on digital saxophones. Hackable Haxophone
Haxophone is purposefully designed to be hackable. Inspect it, modify the fingerings, change the sounds, add features like beats or LEDs. The software is written in Rust, a modern language that has been the most loved code language for the last 7 years (according to Stack Overflow).

Haxophone is designed as a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers. This HAT is a special type of keyboard laid out in the same way that saxophones are. We’ve also designed a mouthpiece and a pressure sensor to detect breath intensity. The HAT includes an audio amplifier, so Haxophone does not need to rely on the amplifier built into the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4. This means the HAT will work with the least expensive of the Pi family, the Raspberry Pi Zero.

Haxophone is fully repairable and customizable. Did you break the thumb rest or would like to use a different color? (3D) print yourself another one. The source models for all 3D printed parts are included in our repository."

You can find additional details at https://www.crowdsupply.com/cardona-bits/haxophone/

Open Amiga Sampler - NEW Amiga hardware announcement!

Echolevel

"Introducing the Open Amiga Sampler - an affordable, open-source, 8-bit/mono, parallel port sampler for the Commodore Amiga featuring stereo mixdown and an input preamp with physical gain control.

Schematics, documentation, parts list and custom PCB files are available at: http://github.com/echolevel/open-amig...

By mnstrmnch and syphus/Up Rough

Music: syphus/Up Rough"

This one is in via @deejayiwan

via github

"What are Amiga samplers?

Over the course of the Commodore Amiga's active lifespan, a great many samplers (also known variously as sampler carts/cartridges, sound cards, audio digitisers, audio interfaces, etc) were manufactured to exploit audio capabilities that were unmatched by any other home computer of its time. In 1989 an Amiga 500 with a cheap 8bit parallel-port sampler gave you the means to produce professional sounding music in your bedroom for a few hundred pounds - about the same as it cost to hire a recording studio for a few days. Acid house and techno were exploding; hardcore, jungle and drum'n'bass were just around the corner. Even if your sample-based Amiga music wasn't quite professional sounding by the standards of audiophiles and hi-fi enthusiasts and the old-fashioned music industry, it was probably good enough for underground clubs and illegal raves! Countless dance, bass and electronic music superstars got their start with an Amiga and a cheap sampler.

Some samplers back then cost a lot of money and offered advanced features or higher quality than the rest, although there was (and still is) a fundamental limit to the sound quality it's possible to squeeze out of an Amiga. This project is a clone of the typical low-budget sampler design that flooded the market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They're often referred to as 'carts', but they're actually not cartridges: they're usually small 25-pin parallel port dongles whose circuit boards and connectors are housed in the type of plastic shell that systems like the C64 and the VIC-20 used as cartridge housings. But some manufacturers called them cartridges, and we've been calling them carts for decades, so we'll stick with that. Some live in separate boxes attached by a parallel extension cable to the Amiga's printer port, and some connect to both parallel and serial ports, or even to a joystick port, as a hacky but clever way of getting up to 16bit resolution. Interesting stuff, but out of this project's scope for now!

The common features of these cheap sampler carts were:

8bit sample resolution
Stereo or mono
Typical maximum sampling rate of ~55Khz in mono (~37Khz for stereo)
Usually claimed to feature impressive SNR, anti-aliasing filters, and special ~90Khz frequency modes (sometimes these claims were even true!)
The feature set of the Open Amiga Sampler is:

8bit sample resolution
Mono
Typical maximum sampling rate of ~52Khz
Input amplifier with variable gain"

See github for more.

KnobCon 7 (2018) part 16 - Detroit Underground & the DU-INO: The Ultimate Eurorack Arduino Shield

Published on Sep 11, 2018 SynthMania

"Aaron shows their latest Arduino based diy module "shield", the DUIno"

Details via Kickstarter:

"What is DU-INO?

In a nutshell? It's whatever you want it to be, in 14 HP.

If you're feeling verbose, call DU-INO a compact programmable digital-analog function platform. With 14 total configurable I/O, using precision ADC and DAC circuits and an analog computer, a vast array of functions are possible. A graphical OLED display and various tactile inputs offer a rich user interface.

It’s essentially the ultimate Eurorack Arduino shield. Supplying your own Arduino (or other shield-compatible microcontroller board), you can select from our growing library of functions, or use our full-featured open source Arduino library to write your own!

Just a few of the myriad A to Z functions to which the DU-INO hardware and software lends itself include arpeggiators, 8-bit oscillators, clock sources and modulators, delays, envelope generators, function generators, glitch effects, harmonic generators, inverters, jack routers, key shifters, LFOs, MIDI interfaces, noise sources, oscilloscopes, parameter storage, quantizers, randomizers, sequencers, transports, utilities of all sorts, VCAs, waveshapers... well, I made it to W!

And, did I mention that they can talk to each other (and other expansion modules) over I2C?"

Additional Demos:

CLICK FOR MORE »

OPEN SOURCE MUSIC FM SYNTHESIZER CHALLENGE

via fmchallenge.osamc.de where you can enter:

"What: Install one or several of the Open Source FM Synthesizers we selected, make an awesome track using only these synthesizers as sound sources, upload it to archive.org under a Creative Commons license and submit it into the competition.

When: The competition starts on September 15th, 2018 and runs for one month until the end of October 14th, 2018.

Who: Everybody (i.e. every natural person) can enter the competition. All selected synthesizers are Free Software and getting started with music production using Open Source software is easy and free to everyone!

Winning: The winner of the competition is selected by public vote. Voting starts on October 15th, 2018 and is open for ten days. The entry receiving the most points wins and will be presented at the second Sonoj Convention in Cologne on the weekend of October 27th/28th. Second and third places will be awarded as well. The winners will only receive fame and glory, but the community as a whole also wins!

Before you enter the competition, be sure to check out the detailed rules!"

Karplus Strong Guitar Strummer Patch for the Organelle

Published on Feb 9, 2017 Genshi Media Group

"This is my Guitar Strummer Patch for the Critter & Guitari Organelle; based on a Karplus-Strong algorithm by Colin Barry, with additional contributions and fixes from users fuurthur and iquestionshard on the Critter & Guitari Forums. The patch is not quite finished yet (it's at version 0.9.7 as of this video) as I still want to add a couple of more features, but for those of you wanting to give it a go, you can download the current version for free at - http://patchstorage.com/my-guitar-str..."

Side note: I created an Open Source label for open source focused posts moving forward. Remember you can also search for open source in the search box on the top right. Of course open source will need to be written somewhere in the post for it to show up.