newbie help electronic instruments

[k0872]

I would like to build an electronic bagpipe chanter that emulates the sound of the scotish bagpipes and maybee is midi compatible, it will need an output jack to be played through an amplifier, I would like it to be tuneable(raise and lower the pitch) and maybee change the drone notes independantly.<p>I am an instrument maker(violins) and have some electronic experience, I would be gratefull if you could point me in some starting directions.<p>My first one should be simple but i have some great ideas for future developement.<p>regards<p>
gerard

[haklesup]

I'm certainly no expert but I always thought that with a good MIDI keyboard you could "sample" any sound, shift the pitch for each key then play it back using the keyboard. Certainly you could do this with a bagpipe sound. Sampled sounds I would imagine could be downloaded from music sites and many consumer models already have the sound built in.<p>Depending on the keyboard, I would expect these features to be all inclusive to the keyboard or divided between the KB and some kind of midi program running on a PC.<p>On the other hand, if you want some sort of circuit which generates a signal that resembles bagpipes when played over a speaker, that would be something else. I would imagine it would take the summing of several oscillator circuits to produce a tone like a bagpipe but it would still sound unnatural. <p>DSP or digital signal processing is a general direction you might follow for processing your own complex waveforms but that is a complicated technical route requiring in depth hardware and software knowledge. Most of what you would need is already built into sound cards anyway.<p>How natural do you want it to sound? Perhaps you should study (deconstruct) the waveform to understand what kind of circuit is required to reconstruct it.

[paulrevelcet]

Just a few quick questions, what form do you want this to take, in other words, do you want it to resemble bagpipes or something else? <p>Do you want it to be portable and free of the computer?

[Enzo]

Oooooh, I envision a pump action generator to make the power for it, and that would be hidden in a bag, so you have to squeeze the bag to play the thing.<p>MIDI is just a communication protocol between pieces of equipment. Not all MIDI is sample related. In fact there was some MIDI lighting control gear in days past. Sort of the music equivalent to Ethernet.<p>But MIDI might be a good idea. Make the faux pipe a MIDI controller and have a sample player elsewhere controlled by the "canter" switches.<p>Inventing something to generate Bagpipe sounds from scrath would be a project alright. MIDI would require it be computerized, because MIDI sends control codes, not musical information. SO if you use a microprocessor, you can intertwine the sound generation and MIDI function, but if you just want to create BP sounds, you would have to add a MIDI generator circuit for it to communicate that way.<p>SInce MIDI is used for one thing to play another, do you want the sound generator to be controllable from something else, like a keyboard? Or do you want to play on a MIDIfied canter and be able to control either bagpipe sounds or possible other sounds in a sampler?<p>Yamaha has over the years made a number of electronic wind instruments. Basically MIDI controlles that are played like a clarinet. The valves had switches, and there was a pressure sensor at the mouth piece. I forget the model numbers, and I am sure they have updated the products since my involvement over a decade ago. But that might be an area to explore for insights into what is needed for such things.

[k0872]

thanks all for your posts, much research to do, there are comercial products available,<p>http://www.deger.com<p>being the most advanced, but still room for mush improvement.<p>I think it would be a fun project.