For National Science Day this past February, I got roped into coming up with an exhibit to showcase at the Louisville Science Museum. I decided to base my project on Makey-Makey, and ended up having a ton of fun with it despite myself.

If you haven’t heard of makey-makey, it’s basically a very accessible dev-board that allows users to create switches that can trigger various events. The board has a bunch of PIOs, many of which can be clipped onto with banana clips. A switch is then closed by simply connecting one of the PIOs to ground through some conductive object. To the computer, the board basically just looks like a keyboard, and each switch corresponds to some preprogrammed keycode.

In my case, I decided to make some really janky instruments and just let people jam out. So I made a drawn keybaord, a set of bongos, and, my favorite, an electric guitar. Makey-makey already had a web interface for the bongos and the keyboard, so I just used those and called it a day there.

Here’s the pencil keyboard:

And the bongos:

The guitar I decided to get a little fancier by plugging it into Ableton and chaining together some plugins. The PIOs were each attached to a different aluminum covered ‘fret’, and the circuit was closed when the player touched a fret, and an aluminum covered string flap attached to ground.

Ableton already has a piano keyboard built in, so I just had to match up the keycodes for those with the frets to get a chromatic scale. I kicked it up another notch by chaining in guitar rig to get tons of crazy effects- wah, delay, auto faders- much to the delight of the next generation of rock stars who cambered by. While I was there, I decided to also chain in the Cthulhu plugin for a massive array of arpeggiators. So sick. I made the video below to show it off.