Tag: Musical Instrument

If you ask me, 3D printing is the future of small-scale and short-run manufacturing. Assuming that the technology can come down in cost and increase in speed, many of the smaller items we use will eventually be 3D printed – at least custom stuff, like these awesome 3D printed guitars by Olaf Diegel.

One of my favorite instruments is the guitar, although I never really learned how to play it all that well. I’m constantly fascinated with the people who do, however, and even more fascinated by people who have actually thought up ways to modernize the instrument.

What do you get when you combine a taxidermied badger with a theremin? You get the Badgermin. Yes, in this world of “if it can be done, why not try it?” somebody actually has created what is likely to be the first ever electronic instrument stuffed inside a dead animal.

If you’re going to really rock out with an electric guitar, you deserve to look like a bad-ass, right. Well, behold the bad-assiest guitar out there – formed in the image of the mighty Cthulhu!

These Ministar travel guitars will allow you to easily play music, almost the same way as if you’d be carrying a bulky electric guitar. There are some models that are only 19 inches long, and they lack something obvious: the main body of the guitar.

If you know someone who’s a Transformers fan, and who also knows how to play string instruments, I think I just took care of your entire Christmas list for you. Yep, it’s a ukulele, fashioned in the shape of the Autobot’s symbol.

The Nintendo Gameboy. One of the most iconic portable gaming systems in the history of video games. Its brick-sized form has occupied many a nerd for hours on end with it’s monochrome green-grey display and carnival like sounds.

Have you ever wanted a Mogwai? You know, those creatures from Gremlins who remain cute and cuddly as long as you don’t expose them to sunlight, feed them after midnight or get them wet? While this new toy from Japan doesn’t really look like a Mogwai, it does sing like one.

The Gibson Firebird X guitar is a limited edition, but that alone isn’t what makes this guitar special. The guitar has 20 revolutionary features according to Gibson that were impossible to have even five years ago.

I had a couple harmonicas as a kid. I liked them because all you needed to do to annoy the hell out of the parents was blow on one for like 30 seconds. I hated it because blowing on the harmonica was all I could ever do.

When I first saw these things, I honestly didn’t know what to say, but you get used to ridiculous headgear pretty quickly around here. These MIDI hats were designed by Sunny Oh and Anna Obikane, and allow you to make music.

I’m always coming across all sorts of interesting inventions over on Kickstarter, and this one is definitely one of the more unusual ones I’ve seen lately. The TurboHarp ELX is what its inventor calls “the world’s first and only fully-electric harmonica.”

I took guitar lessons when I was a kid, but I never practiced because practicing anything wasn’t for me. The instructor kicked me out of class, and I moved on with my life. I have never seen a ukulele in real life, but I always thing of big Hawaiian dudes playing them as people get off a ship.

If you ask me, the uses for 3D printing technology keep getting more and more impressive. Take, for example, this guitar that had its body parts manufactured using a 3D printer. If you watch and listen to the video below of Bård S D’s open-source Zoybar TOR guitar, I think you’ll be impressed with what he was able to do with a 3D printer: Not bad for something that was modeled in the digital world, then printed, eh?

Koopa Troopa on a guitar. ‘Nuff said.

I’m a sucker for robots playing musical instruments. But despite the technical skill it took for the team to get a PR2 robot programmed to play both keyboard and drums at the same time, he just seems a little lonely up there on the stage without some other robot companions.