As an overall artistic piece, Akko Goldenbeld’s Stadsmuziek (City Music) exhibit certainly stands on its own. But as an attempt to show that urban planners are just as concerned with musical composition as they are with traffic flow and green spaces, it’s a complete and utter fail. It looks like a giant music box, and in essence that’s exactly what it is. But instead of plinking out a simple tune on a miniature harp, it uses a full-sized piano. And instead of a drum covered in metal dots, the rotating cylinder is wrapped in a miniature 3D relief of the city of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. It’s no Beethoven, that’s for sure, but if a city ever needed its own civil anthem this is definitely a unique way to compose it.
I’m a bit of a fidgety type, and from time to time I’ll find myself drumming along to random songs on random surfaces with my fingers. And thanks to Korg, even just pounding away on a table can sound like I’m skillfully playing a conga drum with their new Wavedrum Mini synth. By itself, using its pressure sensitive pad, you can sound like you’re playing a myriad of different drum types thanks to its library of 100 professionally programmed sounds which can be further enhanced with 10 different effects like delay, chorus, reverb filters and pitch-shifters.
But if pounding away on its pad just doesn’t feel natural to you, the Wavedrum Mini comes with a sensor clip which can be attached to almost any surface, like a table, your shoe, even other instruments, providing an endless source of places to drum along on. It also allows you to build up your own rhythms to play along with, up to 25 seconds in length, and on a set of 6 batteries you can expect to get about 4 hours of play time, though an AC adapter is also an option if you’re in the studio. Available sometime in the 3rd quarter of this year, pricing TBA.
Sorry, it’s not an official OhGizmo! contest where winning is as easy as leaving a comment. If you want to win this epic-looking, one-of-a-kind OMG-1 synthesizer built by Spectrasonics’ Eric Persing, you’re going to have to work for it. Featuring a Moog Little Phatty, an Omnisphere, a Mac Mini, dual iPads, dual iPods and an Omni TR built into a hand-crafted curly maple cabinet, the OMG-1 is available to the artist who produces the best original music using Spectrasonic’s Bob Moog Tribute Library for their Omnisphere synth software. The contest does require you to purchase and download the Bob Moog library if you already haven’t, which is $100, but 100% of the proceeds will go to the Bob Moog Foundation.
The contest submission deadline is July 15th 2011, and multiple entries are welcome. The winner will be announced on the Spectrasonics’ website on September 15th, 2011, with the OMG-1 being presented to them at the 2011 Moogfest in October.
It was originally shown off at CES in private demos from what I can tell, but GEAR4, maker of the iPhone UnityRemote, has teamed up with MIDI accessory maker Novation to produce the Pocketloops keyboard for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The keyboard works in conjunction with a free app (and by ‘free’ I of course mean the cost is rolled into the Pocketloops’ $69.99 price tag) that allows aspiring Daft Punks and Chemical Brothers to finally create their own bleep bloop masterpieces without needing any musical knowledge whatsoever, save being able to keep a beat.
Users can layer up to 16 different loops at one time taken from the app’s library of sound effects, complete with mixing capabilities and the ability to add rudimentary filters. It hasn’t popped up on the GEAR4 website just yet, nor has the Pocketloops app made an appearance in the app store, so availability is still TBD.
Even if your kids have shown absolutely no aptitude towards playing a musical instrument, thanks to Tomy they’ll still be able to create ‘beautiful’ music by probably doing what they already do best; touching, tapping or poking each other. Their Nikken Gakki features 4 electrodes, and whenever 2 of them are connected, it creates a unique tone or triggers a sound effect. So if 2 people were each holding an electrode, a sound can be triggered by simply touching the other person, which completes the circuit.
The Nikken Gakki can even detect where on the body someone has been touched, presumably by measuring the resistance or level of current, and produces different sounds accordingly. It also has 3 play modes including performance, transform and drum mode, with the latter allowing you to rock out on your friends like they were a virtual drum kit. Available sometime in June, presumably only in Japan, for ~$40. (¥3,200)
Though more capable and flexible than their analog brethren, digital-based instruments (besides keyboards) haven’t really managed to find a solid foothold with musicians. But that hasn’t stopped companies from trying. The Kitara is a digital guitar featuring a touch screen where you’d normally strum the strings, and 6 buttons on every fret along the neck. It’s played exactly like a real electric guitar since it has the same look, feel and weight thanks to the model pictured above being machined from a solid block of aluminum.
Like any digital instrument worth its weight in silicon the Kitara can be used as a midi controller and be upgraded with new sample libraries for producing different sounds when playing. It’s completely open source too, with an SDK, so developer/musicians are encouraged to do whatever they want with the hardware, including uploading and sharing their modifications to a public portal operated by Misa Digital Instruments. The aluminum Kitara pictured above will sell for $2,899 when it becomes available mid-April, but a black plastic version, which is weighted to feel the same as this one does, will be considerably cheaper at $849.
Rounding out your t-shirt based band comes this new tee designed by ThinkGeek that features a fully-playable sythesizer with “five different pro-quality sampled instruments”. It’s also got eight-voice polyphony which basically means you can play up to eight keys at once, and a retro looking amp/speaker box you can wear on your belt clip. Like any of these electronically enhanced tees the powered bits can be removed for easy washing, and if you were wondering the answer is yes, the volume knob on the amp does go to eleven. $29.99 – $32.98 depending on your size, shipping November 30th.
Over on The Gadgeteer they just reviewed a clever little contraption that will appeal to guitar, banjo or stringed instrument players that require a pick. It’s kind of hard not to instantly ‘get’ what the Pick Punch does, but if you’re having trouble wrapping your brain around it just think of it as a hole punch that produces 351 or Fender-shaped guitar picks, instead of round confetti.
The Pick Punch website also sells sheets of plastic in different varieties depending on what material you like your pick made of, but you’re also welcome to use old credit cards, gift cards, even plastic containers if you were hoping for something truly unique. $24.95 available from Pick Punch.
You’re probably thinking “oh no! what’s this? another crappy sounding, cheap looking fake guitar?” and for the most part you’re pretty much bang on. But what the Air Guitar Pro has going for it when compared to other cheap fake guitars is that it forgoes a body and strings in lieu of using an infrared beam to detect when you’re strumming. So while your living room might be overflowing with Guitar Hero and Rock Band accessories, this thing can be tossed in a drawer when you get tired of it after 3 minutes.
Surprisingly for just $10.99 it’s got 7 buttons on the neck for playing chords, buttons for playing sharps, minors etc. and even a built-in tilt sensor that lets you change the sound just by moving it around. Now I can’t speak for how well it works, but based on the video below it actually doesn’t sound horrifically terrible.
Related Tags: Design, Instruments, Unusual
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