Gizmodo: music gadgets

Portable Cross Fadin' Cassette Will Make All Your Spontaneous DJ Dreams Come True

Elaine Chow — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:30:00 EDT

Once, while walking down the street, a man suddenly approached me screaming "QUICK! We need someone to DJ!" If only I had had this portable cross fader—who knows how differently my life would've turned out.

The Urban DJ portable cross fader has been ultimate retro hipster designed into a cassette shape. It has three inputs up top, two for connecting to anything from an iPhone to a cellphone (with the appropriate jack) and one for connecting into... well, I'm not sure what that middle one is for. The bottom has a separate input for connecting into a speaker set or headphones.

Move the slider to mix and crossfade between your two chosen music players. Alas, because all I had on me at the time was one measly iPod, the man sneered and approached the person standing next to me and that guy went on to become one of the most famous DJs in the world. True story.

Available for roughly $48. From Japan. [Gizmodo JP]

Video: Musical Exoskeleton Is a 'Nonsense Machine' From Maywa Denki

Adrian Covert — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Nobumichi Tosa is the founder of Maywa Denki is a Japanese design firm that creates wonderful nonsense gadgets, like this musical backpack that makes music when you move your arms.

As you can see, different positions correlate to different types of sounds and tempos. There's no explanation provided for how the machine works, but that's completely unnecessary. It's a nonsense machine, after all.

[Maywa Denki via Dezeen]

Tenori-On Makers Interviewed, Neither Can Play Music

Adrian Covert — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:00:00 EDT

PingMag did an interview with the creators of the Tenori-on that was overlooked when published, but there are a few interesting tidbits from the interview, like the fact that neither of the creators are musicians.

Yu said it took three years to develop the Tenori-on, and another three to get Yamaha on board with the production process. When throwing around design ideas, shapes like triangles were considered, but appeared too difficult to make usable, so they stuck with the square shape. Other interesting design aspects include making the Tenori wide enough so that the thumbs of the average adult hand meet in the middle of the Tenori when grasped, and that it was never intended to be a user-friendly music machine; it kind of just happened. Read the full interview over at [PingMag].