Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Making Music with Tesla Coils: ArcAttack”.
So what would you say came first for you guys? Were you guys, musicians first or uh gear heads first, probably gearheads yeah! Well, me more so. Musicians like we’ve been in bands ever since we were young kids, but we’ve always been tinkering too so yeah i’ve been. I started playing the guitar when i was 16, but i was soldering when i was five. We are here with joe and john deprima, with probably the coolest musical instrument on the planet. If you get one look at this, it looks like it might be: a giant musical torture device. But what exactly is it? Well, it’s a tesla coil. It’S a solid state, tesla coil that has been modified to play music through its lightning output through its electrical output and so explain exactly what arc attack is. Then architect is a musical performance group that builds things and has crazy, lightning machines that play music and we zap people with electricity, and we have a generally good time. We have a good time doing it now. What do we got behind us here? We have a robot that plays the drums and some bananas each one of these drums. You can see they have these pieces that are called rotary, solenoids and they’re kind of being controlled by this device right here that takes midi data and outputs.
A little uh pulse width modulated, burst to the drum that controls how hard that actually strikes it. So not only can we control when it hits the drum, but we can actually control how hard it hits the drum. So where did the notion come from to use a tesla coil to make music? Well, the first time that i had the idea to do this was when i met a friend of mine for the first time, actually, my friend steve ward, back in 2003, who was one of the pioneers of uh, uh, solid state, tesla, coil technology and the way That the early machines work is that they had a knob that would control the pulse rate, and then they had a knob. That would control the duty cycle and it was just a box with two knobs, and so my first notion was to grab the knob and try to play a a melody with the frequency sweep and at that point i realized that once you understand how the solid State tesla coil works actually making a play. Music is a pretty trivial matter.
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