There will be some opportunities for organized  hardware hacking at this weekend’s Music Hack Day Boston in the form of afternoon workshops.  All the details are on the Music Hack Day Workshops page.  Here’s just a teaser to wet your appetite.

Electric Eels Workshop by Noah Vawter with Justin  from Burnkit 2600.  This project introduces a mobile platform for melodic and percussive electronic music instruments.  It encourages playing them more like traditional instruments- electrical energy is produced on a note-by-note basis from its players’ movements.

Atari Punk Console Workshop –  Jimmie Rodgers will lead a workshop on building Atari Punk Consoles. The Atari Punk Console is a simple synthesizer with a wide range of sounds. It is so named because the sounds generated are similar to those of the early Atari consoles.

Atari Punk Consoles

Pen Plotter & Chiplotle workshop -   While not exactly hardware hacking, it is definitely old school. Douglas Repetto  and Brian Whitman  will show you how to plot your beautiful music visualizations or whatever else on quite possibly the sexiest of all paper output mechanisms — early 1980s HPGL pen plotters!

The sexiest of all paper output mechanisms

Programmable Audio Effects in a Sketch Environment with LeafLabs’ Maple – by Okie Williams. In this 2 hour workshop you will learn  how you can use Maple with a little extra circuitry (op-amps, resistors, capacitors) to program your own audio effects in an Arduino-like sketch environment and focus mainly on programming effects instead of hardware.

Audio and Guitar effects on Maple

Example of a guitar effect