By Andrew Liszewski
You can compare this Nebulophone to the Stylophone that was re-released a few years ago, but that’s not really doing it justice. They can both be used to produce some retrorrific electronic music, but the Nebulophone is built on an Arduino so it’s compact and, well I’m just going to come out and say it, adorable.
It does require some electronics know-how since you have to build it yourself, like soldering and stripping wires and what-not. But because it came from your hands the final product will be all the more satisfying to play. As you can see it even has a tiny keyboard, but improves on the Stylophone with additional settings and dials for changing the waveform (ramp, triangle, square, pulse or noise), adjusting the decay, switching between major and chromatic keyboard mapping, arpeggio modes and three speed settings of portamento. Yeah, all that stuff. The only things you have to provide are a 9-volt battery, a speaker and talent. $54.99 from ThinkGeek.
