Well, you’re poking about AO’s site and perhaps making music here. You probably like DIY stuff, eh? After all, instead of just listening to Pandora all day, you’re making some of your own music.

I love me some DIY. Here are some other types of do-it-yourself things involving music, mostly hardware:

  • fEarful™ Bass Cabinets. Build your own bass guitar or double bass amplification cabinet (you’ll need your own amplifier in addition to the cabinet). The plans are free, and the threads on TalkBass.com are copious. Being that TalkBass is a huge forum, if you have a question during the build, ask away. Someone’s bound to answer. While doing this woodworking is pretty time-consuming, you’ll save a lot of money in sweat equity if you do it this way, and the chosen speaker drivers are supposedly killer for great tone and lots of headroom. Small, lightweight, and loud. That’s a triple threat.
  • PAiA Audio Projects. There are tons of projects here. You can build a full-on analog synth with MIDI capability, a theremin, guitar stomp boxes, studio gear, mid-side microphones—the list goes on. Some of the projects, like the Quadrafuzz (which I’ve built), are designed by Craig Anderton, one of the biggest names in DIY music electronics. If you like the smell of solder, and you don’t mind putting together some relatively easy projects, check out PAiA.
  • Line 6 ToneCore Developer’s Kit. Now we’re talkin’. I like woodwork, and I like solder, but this is just cool. Having designed DSP effects over the years, this is some cool stuff. In short, you get a guitar stomp box that you can program with your own DSP effects. Yes, you have to know something about DSP, but that’s what www.musicdsp.org is for! Not for the faint of heart or for the luddite, but if you have a mind for a little math and a little research, this is an incredibly cool thing—a platform for your flights of FX fancy.

A little Google-fu will give you tons more options for Guitar Stompbox kits, tube amp kits (guitar or hi-fi), speaker designs, and the like. If you do music, enjoy the process of making something, like to learn, and can afford to spend time in exchange for cash, DIY audio projects might be worth it.

Advertisement