With the Drum kit – Kit AI by Spikenzielabs you can build an electronic drum kit. The bundle contains all of the electronics, including the piezo sensors for the drum pads. You build the drum pads yourself, and then connect the Drum Kit – Kit AI to your computer to play sounds using your favorite audio software, or use the MIDI-out port to a connected drum synthesizer.

Roberto De Nicolò (aka Rodenic) has realized an useful tutorial video showing what he has called FingerDrum. Roberto has applied a piezo sensor to each finger of a glove, allowing the triggering of individual drum sounds from his midi expander. If you think the glove is unconfortable, check out the FingerPad and turn your mouse pad into a drum pad.

This is for the uber-cool geeks who want to specially set up a pre-dinner concert for their loved ones.

Using an SRF05 and an Arduino Uno get that beautiful musical effect with the perfect smile!

Also get the code from Github, plug it in, load the sketch and play!

via [Michele] and [Larry]

As part of the National Robotics Week coverage of iheartrobotics, the Vibratron:

[...]the newest member of the RobOrchestra. This amazing musician was built by club members with a total budget of $1000. The Vibratron uses an Arduino Mega to control 30 individual solenoid gates which drop steel balls onto the vibration keys. Using the Arduino Mega they were able to avoid complications with multiplexing I/O lines. Notes are read in using a MIDI shield to receive standard MIDI signals from a sequencer or keyboard. The balls are recirculated using an Archimedes screw to raise them to the bucket at the top.

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Some time ago [ant.b]  from the Arduino Forum manage to reflash the Atmega8u with other LUFA Firmwares. [Dimitri Diakopoulos] has recently developed a similar approach for his HIDUINO project. Very good explanation & references.  Diakopoulos succeded to make Arduino show up as a MIDI Device:

LUFA powers the HIDUINO project in that it handles most of the low-level USB-HID implementation while exposing an API for developing other HID-compliant devices like MIDI.

The USB-HID specification has a specific type for MIDI input and MIDI output, which nearly all commercial musical controllers on the market use for class-compliant (driverless!) MIDI I/O.

Check out guide for ISP flashing, on the project page hosted on googleCode.

via [HackADay], source [HIDUINO]

Arduino sending MIDI messages to control some other geeky machinery for electronic music, on breadboard.

Lately SimplenZAR becomes a self-made shield.

Late again an Arduino is developed just to fit that shield and set the original Arduino free to for the next project. Bravo!

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Amazing Accordion sending MIDI under 100$ (instead of 6,699.00$), as [Dmitry Yegorenkov] shares on Arduino Forum and published on GitHub.

I like to play accordion & have a dog. People say dogs are singing with squeezeboxes and some people find it funny. Not for me. I know that my pet hears note harmonics much better then me & suffers from high pitches very much. I could not really practice at home just because of humanennes. That sucks. I like to play accordion. Programmers see cycle here. Let’s get out.

THIS IS IT.
It plays to headphones, produces MIDI output, etc. etc. It costs $6,699.00 on e-bay (buy now offer) on November 17, 2010. In the US I can buy Peugeot Partner for the same price. In Ukraine where i live both are 1/2 times more expensive. For that money i’ll get beautiful device to practice at home and no service centers available within 400Km radius. Weird.

Code and Schematics-ready on [Accordion Mega's Github]

Even if you can find many projects using Arduino and MIDI, not many of them are so well described as [zambari] project. The AVbrain controller was developed to stay on top of a complex AudioVisual Hardware scenario.

Found (and supported from day one) on [vjforums], The AVbrain feautures:

- Following MIDI clock
– Recording and playback of 40 note long MIDI sequence
– Sending custom strings of MIDI messages in sync with MIDI clock including:
– CC information to fade video on Edirol V4 (synced to PAL)
– CC information to fade output on Edirol V4 (synced to PAL)
– CC information to fade video layers on Korg Kaptivator (synced to PAL)
– NoteOn data to trigger light flashes via MIDI-DMX converter
– Triggering audio loops on Korg ESX1 so they could be longer than the pattern played on ESX
– Triggering AR and Filter envelopes on Sherman Filterbank
– OneKnob functionality extending Korg ESX1′s ability to only control one part at time. With AV-Brain you could learn a NRPN message, assign it to a knob and use independently of device’s state.
– Fade up or down relative volume of all the channels on ESX1 – Filtering MIDI messages
– All sequencer tracks can be synced to 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 beats
– All sequencer tracks can be re-synced manually and still follow the tempo (to compensate for video delay)

via [vjforums] source [EQ-AV]

Thanks a twit of some days ago, I discovered this video by [neutron7]

Now there are 2 envelopes, LFO, random, and velocity modulators for the filter and the wavetable position and sync pitch.
This only has 32K of wavetables, instead of 256.
MIDI controls are temporary, it will have pots for everything.
current code (for 3 weeks)
http://codeviewer.org/view/code:d6d

sounds trippy good