BodyBeat Metronome Keeps Beat Silently, Forgets Musicians Need Their Fingers

The Peterson BB-1 BodyBeat attaches to your finger/random appendage, sending tiny rhythmic pulses that you can feel on your skin. The non-aural stimulation will give you a silent way to count measures while playing the piano... and since you have to use your fingers to do that, you will have to clamp this to somewhere else. The question is where? More »

Stylophone, Scourge of Seventies Britain, is Back, Back, BACK!

Rather like the kazoo, the Stylophone is what you might term a "musical" "instrument." The farty-bontempi sound was a feature of school playgrounds up and down the land—and even David Bowie used one on Space Oddity. And then, suddenly, rather like white dog poo, and "I choked Linda Lovelace" T-shirts, the Stylophone disappeared from view. Until now. More »

Gibson Powertune Automagically Tunes Up Guitars, Tin-Eared Guitarists Rejoice

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Yamaha PSR-S900 Keyboard is Not Your Grandpappy's Player Piano

This Yamaha PSR-S900 keyboard bridges the gap between musical instruments and the Interwebs, and it can play music and connect to the Net at the same time. It has an Ethernet port that gives you a direct connection to the Internet without even using a computer, and that lets you download thousands of compositions and 7,000 karaoke arrangements. It's pretty much a computer unto itself, with a 5.7-inch 320x240 color display. Have pianos come a long way, or what? What else can it do? More »

Blackbird Rider: Carbon Fiber Guitar Waited for this Moment to Arise

The Blackbird Rider is a guitar made out of carbon fiber that was designed using 3D CAD software. It's 2/3 the size of an ordinary guitar but makes up for that by being hollow throughout—even in its neck and head—making the entire guitar a sound box. The goal of this design was to get the sound of a big acoustic guitar in a smaller form factor that's easily portable. More »

Hottie Amplifier: Burnin' Sound, In the Slot

That's right, that's a real guitar amplifier inside that toaster. It's a Hottie Amplifier, available in a variety of toaster styles for $149. More »

Hello Kitty Stratocaster Guitars

So, today I realized it has been almost two months since our last Hello Kitty related post, which happens to be two months too long. So here is a Fender Hello Kitty Stratocaster guitar. It is available in pink or black and features the famous Hello Kitty head. If bass guitar is more of your bag, there is always the Bronco featuring that son of a bitch penguin, Badtz-Maru. Either guitar will set you back $200 from Musicians Friend with optional Hello Kitty accessories also available. – Travis Hudson More »

Roland's Karaoke Music Keyboard / Digital Hub

Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, and others want to turn your living room into a Web-enabled entertainment center. Roland wants to make it into a full-featured karaoke parlor. Their new "VIMA" keyboard is a bizarre mash-up of digital piano, digital media hub, and karaoke machine. Plug in your iPod, hit center cancel to remove vocals, plug in one or two mics, and the keyboard transforms into a karaoke workstation. The keyboard can even store digital audio, photos, and videos for making custom music videos or karaoke accompaniment, with full support for lyrics display. It's either the perfect way to start your own karaoke bar, or, if you believe the Roland press release, to create "customized family entertainment." Coming hot on the heels of the do-all entertainment center / DJ-VJ station / Windows PC synth MiKo, the VIMA is a further sign that music keyboard makers want in on the battle for the living room. But will it catch on outside Japan? (Hint: large quantities of your favorite alcoholic beverage might help the customized family entertainment.) – Peter Kirn More »

Hohner Six-Sided Harmonica Plays the Blues Six Ways to Sunday

Blues harmonica players, or harpists as we like to be called, play the blues for a number of reasons, but one of them is that our diatonic instruments are so limited. When the band changes keys, we have to go rummaging around for another harmonica. Not any more with the Hohner Six-Sided Harmonica made by the company that's been supplying blues harmonicas to the stars for way over a century. More »

Crystal Roc Instruments Lined With Swarovski Gems

Swarovski crystals (you know, the same kind that every Tom, Dick and Harry company uses to line their products) line a series of musical instruments from Morten Schjolin, the man who helped bring us such useful members of society as Jennifer Lopez. Given the name Crystal Roc, these instruments— microphones, drums and guitars—are also just as beautiful on the inside as they are on the outside, with audio circuitry provided by the likes of Technics and Shure. More »

Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1: DJ and Musician-Friendly Audio Interface

It doesn't take long for DJs and musicians to figure out that internal audio cards are crap for any real work, when it comes to sound quality, features, and performance. So, with a mind-numbing array options, how do you choose a replacement? Native Instruments' new Audio Kontrol 1 could be a good choice, with a $300 list price. It's got a slick-looking, honking-huge knob on the top you can use to control sound level easily, and controls that are neither ugly nor confusing as with some of its competitors. Low-latency (4ms) USB 2.0 audio drivers let you can run your instrument through it or play software instruments without a noticeable delay, specially important on Windows. And a dedicated headphone jack lets you cue through headphones, which is handy not only for DJs, but when you want a separate headphone mix for recording or performing. There's stiff competition in this field from other terrific, cheap interfaces, but the Audio Kontrol 1 ought to be on the short list. – Peter Kirn More »

The Breath Car

I may not have a musical bone in my body, but I can understand how difficult it is for beginner musicians to train the mouth to handle horn instruments. Matthew Brown is trying to help the beginner musicians train their controlled breathing with the Breath Car. More »

USB One Man Band Keyboard/Guitar/Vocal Box

You sing, you play guitar and bass, you record and play live, you play keys, and now you want a single USB device to handle everything in a single box. First, you're more talented than us. Second, you might want to check out Line 6's upcoming TonePort KB37. Announced at the summer music equipment trade show this weekend in Austin, this small keyboard includes controls for your fingers, inputs for footpedals for your feet, and uses software to model amplifiers, mic preamps, effects, and stompboxes, with processing options for vocalists and guitarists alike. Line6's equipment has plenty of competition, but it tends to be affordable and reliable. You may need to grow two extra feet and two extra arms to take full advantage of the thing, so Zaphod Beeblebrox, your audio gear has arrived. – Peter Kirn More »

Bizarre Fish-Themed Technology

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Guitar Picks From Space: Meteoric Sound, Astronomic Price

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Datasound: Music for the 23rd Century?

We're still scratching their heads over this one, the Datasound, a device that takes digital bits and turns them into music. On the left side of the "deck," there's a turntable-like device that plays old-fashioned 5.25" floppy disks, letting you scratch its sounds similar to a vinyl record. On the right is an odd kind of sampler with various objects inside that generate data and electronic noise. Under the glass, there's a hard disk, neon light, the innards of a flatbed scanner and some other unnamed electronic objects. All of this is fashioned into an enclosure that resembles a museum case. More »

Blue Man Group Musical Noisemakers

If you've ever experienced the Blue Man Group, you've probably wished you could get your hands on one of their other-worldly musical instruments. Now noisemakers patterned after the group's PVC monstrosities have been licensed to toy company ToyQuest, where you can get a Keyboard ($80), Percussion Tubes ($70), a Drum Suit and an Air Pole. More »

Tritare: Guitar 2.0

Even though we think the guitar is near-perfect the way it is, inventor Sophie Léger is trying to improve upon it with the Tritare, a guitar with triple-ended strings. The Y-shaped instrument has one normally-fretted neck, and two others that don't have any frets and resonate the sound. You can see the two fretless necks in this picture — they're the ones upon which the guitar is standing. More »

BCD2000 Mix & Scratch DJ/VJ Controller Reviewed (Verdict: Good, Mostly)

What with these kids today carrying around their laptops for DJing, live visuals and VJing, and live laptop music, there's a surprising dearth of physical controls for playing laptops live. More »

Schizoporotica Turns Crappy Bands into Sweet Melodies, Kind of

Remember the olden days, before Myspace became the latest trend for bands to get their name out? That was the time you would get bombarded with fliers all over town to go check out a show by another crappy band who was destined for poverty. The shows sucked, period. Schizoporotica has the ability to turn the tore up fliers into melodies. It will create the tune based upon the highs and lows of the torn patter of the flier. This ingenious device was the work of Troika and Evangelos Kaimakis and it will be on display at the Cybersonica festival in London on May 8-26. More »

MIDI Sword Keytar

A keytar AND a wooden sword combined in one? Are my eyes deceiving me? This eBay oddity is an instrument that combines a small MIDI keyboard with a carved wooden Kung Fu sword. Bidding begins at $249 and this beauty is well worth it. More »

RKS Wave Guitar has Interchangeable Skins

If you and your glam rock bandmates go through a few costume changes during every performance, now your guitar can join you with its own wardrobe malfunction. Here's the Wave Guitar from RKS Guitars, the first ax with an interchangeable pick guard and body shell. Just unscrew the old skin and replace it with the next color, and you're good to go in just a few minutes. The handmade-in-the-USA guitar is $899. Wonder what it looks like naked? More »

Digital Trumpet

Trumpets may be something that primarily goes out of fad with high school graduation, but this may be the perfect gift for your little tyke to see if they can handle the likes of a big brass beauty. This trumpet is able to generate a wide variety of sounds including eight brass instruments, five woodwind and even a synthesized human voice. Best of all, it comes preloaded with 10 teaching songs that are learned via illuminated LEDs. Don t fret, parents. There is even a headphone jack. Now if only brass instruments could include one of those. This high-tech trumpet retails for $400. More »

Toilet Seat Guitar for Only the Most Discerning Guitarists

There's a shitload of toilet news today for some reason, and here's a guitar joining the chorus, made out of a toilet seat complete with toilet paper neckstrap and, uh, a poopy pickup. And look—there are toilet paper holders for both ends of the neckstrap and the bridge, too. More »

Hard Drive Noise Mixer

Valentina Vuksic has taken one out of the Gizmodo book and has created a sound mixer that gets its beats from dying hard drives. If you recall, Gizmodo had a Hard Drive Dying Track Contest back in January. More »

Orla PK-400 Accordion Monstrosity

I used to play accordion as a kid, but I'm sure that I'd have stuck with it to this day if I had had the Orla Pk-400. It looks like a crazy Casio keyboard/concertina mash-up with hundreds of buttons, strange piano keys, accordion bass buttons, and weird organ draw bars. It even has a disk drive for recording your renditions of Lady of Spain in real Reggae Style. More »

The Cat Piano

Chill out, PETA. The cat piano was the work of a German scholar over 350 years ago. Athanasius Kircher designed the cat piano and documented it in the Musurgia Universalis in 1650. The piano was designed to raise the spirits of an Italian prince who was too stressed out. The musician would select cats whose voices were at different pitches then arrange them in the pens accordingly. The piano delivered sharp pokes into the tails of the cats. Cruel? Definitely. Funny? Yeah, a little bit. More »

Six-Man Guitar Orgy

Gil Kuno has designed an instrument to be played by his band—composed of six musicians—each of which responsible for their own sound. It is just a big-ass guitar and each musician has one string to play. It does create a new and unique sound that could be appealing to people in certain drug-induced trances. Follow the linkage for some video and mp3 samples and decide for yourself. More »

Rumor: Inexpensive Mono Keyboard from Synth Design Legend

Just how different are the traditional music hardware manufacturers from, say, Apple? Here's an example: while Apple sues and subpoenas bloggers for repeating an internal leak about a product that never shipped, legendary music synth maker Dave Smith Instruments casually throws a description, price, and color photo of its upcoming mono keyboard on a heavily-trafficked user forum. At least, we think they're different; haven't checked the fax machine for legal documents yet today. Expect a phat, real analog sound, mono operation (we don't need no stinkin' polyphony for our synth leads), and a street price somewhere around $1000. More »

Musician's Holiday Gift Guide

Our blogging cohorts over at Music Thing have put together a nice little list of gift ideas for the music connoisseur in your life. Items range from $10 T-Shirts and electric kazoos all the way up to expensive amps, violins and even the drumometer we mentioned a while back. More »

Inside an $8,000, Linux-Powered Luxury Synth

Korg is announcing it will add cutting-edge physical modeling synthesis to its OASYS synth, for reproducing everything from acoustic stringed instruments to far-out experimental sounds and, yes, realistic amp feedback. So why is this synth $8,000—and why is it running Linux on a Pentium PC? Gizmodo regular Peter Kirn went to Korg for behind-the-scenes details, and got answers so geeky they were a natural for O'Reilly developer sites: More »

iGuitar.USB Connects Directly to Computer

We keep hearing about direct guitar-to-computer connections, but respected custom guitar maker Brian Moore is actually shipping one that works, right now: the iGuitar.USB. Plug a single USB cable into your computer, and you've got instant audio: no external power, breakout boxes, or drivers needed. Gibson's not-yet-shipping "digital" Les Paul can't do that. Better repaint your PowerBook so it doesn't look too dorky onstage. -P. Kirn More »