Electronic instruments really are becoming like folk instruments. US$42 now buys you a small board that you can touch directly, one that’s immediate and from which anyone can coax sounds. You can jam with it, pocket it; it’s affordable and direct and playable.
And it all fits in a plastic cassette tape box.
The re-released Mixtape Alpha (the first run sold out) looks like a real gem. It’s a crowd-funded run this time – eschewing Kickstarter for the Portland-based Crowd Supply.
An ATmega328p-powered 8-bit synth (that is, using the chip that’s also in the Arduino, among others), Mixtape Alpha has a surprising range of features:
- “Stylophone-style” input (yes, you touch it and get continuous ribbon controls, or choose buttons for separate ntoes)
- Four voices, five-note polyphony
- Four effects
- Record and playback looped phrases – in the video, combined with the effects, producing some rather pretty results
It’s also open source hardware, and – in a nice change for a crowd-funded project – the schematics and code are already there, plus a little patch for the free software Pure Data (Pd) that generates wavetables. And yes, being based on the ATmega, it’s hackable.
The project is a collaboration between Chicago, Illinois’ Open Music Labs and Jie Qi from the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab.
http://wiki.openmusiclabs.com/wiki/MixtapeAlpha
Crowd-funded run ends in about a month:
http://www.crowdsupply.com/open-music-labs/mixtape-alpha
looks like a great little thingy. i especially like the polyphony.
looks like a great little thingy. i especially like the polyphony.
looks like a great little thingy. i especially like the polyphony.
very cool !
very cool !
very cool !
beautiful
beautiful
beautiful
Backed!
Backed!
Backed!