Axehole

This is one of the stranger MIDI-controlled devices we’ve seen, from people that like to play with Tesla coils and MIDI.

According to Steve Connor:

I finally gave in and decided to post footage of me testing my OMG super secret musical DRSSTC. I designed it last year as a paid commission for a Danish arts group who wanted a chorus of six musical coils that could be played by MIDI. I made a single prototype to test it here, but they ran six coils together in the final system, built by Finn Hammer over in Denmark.

http://scopeboy.com/tesla/finns/ musical_test_raw.mpg

http://scopeboy.com/tesla/finns/dazed-and- confrazzled.mpg

What I made was an adaptor board that connected the internal tone generators on a Roland JX-8P synth to one or more DRSSTCs. The board converted the volume envelope to burst length, so the harder you pounded the keys, the bigger the sparks got. Hitting a high pitched note hard would blow the fuses, and the MIDI arrangements had to take this into account.

Since it was a paid job, I guess I’d have to get their permission to show you the schematics, but I think I’ll get away with pimping the movies now. I don’t think I ever posted them on the forum before, although I might have posted in the #hvcomm chatroom.

via: MAKE