The glockenspiel

This post is part 2 of 3 of  The Mindy Python's Confined Band

So I got back to the glockenspiel, trying to use all the bars I had from PV Productions.

At first I had the idea fo making a vertical glockenspiel or lyra:

but I wasn’t happy with dynamics of the motors in this ‘solenoid-like’ configuration and decided to go with a conventional (horizontal) glockenspiel:

The sound wasn’t great but since I believed I could make it better just by adjusting the metal bars configuration I went to the the software part, mixing tools like Rosegarden, qmidiroute to find a way to proper map some MIDI songs to the limited amount of notes I had:

After hollydays, back to home, I got disappointed with the metal bars.. I could not get all them to vibrate as they should. So I ordered a real (but inexpensive) glockenspiel – it would sound as it should with the bonus of having more notes so I could better map some music files.

So a 12-bar MIDI glockpenspiel was now possible:

I’m very happy with this improvement. It still is the only non-100% LEGO instrument on the band but it allows me to play several kinds of music because most musics use at least of MIDI track that can be played on it (usually a piano or an organ but sometimes other instruments do map very well to it).

I still think I should extend the range to a 16- or even 20 bar glockenspiel but will have to wait for the other main instruments in the band to be completed because each extra hub I add requires an extra Bluetooth LE session and I am not sure how many my laptop can handle (I can add extra BLE dongles but the ‘pybricksdev’ tool doesn’t seem have a way to specify the HCI device, I guess it assumes there is just one).

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