The first thing we had to think about when starting this project was; ‘how do you make a saxophone look amazing, while still keeping an awesome sound?’. The saxophone is a highly sensitive musical instrument and even the smallest change can effect the sound in a big way.
We knew that we did not want to start from scratch building a custom body for the saxophone, as this is extremely complex, so we spoke to the guys at Vibrato Saxophone. They custom make Polycarbonate saxophones with silicone pads in a huge variety of colours and even transparent models. After many conversations with the inventor, Piyapat Thanyakij, Vibrato agreed to sponsor Ellie as an endorsing artist and this gave us a body that we could now customise.
Once we had received the body the real fun could start; designing how the lighting on the saxophone would work! We looked into a few different options including LED tape, UV paint and even laser light but the hands down winner was EL Wire, now we had to think of where to put it. The saxophone has a very distinctive shape, and we wanted to enhance this with the EL Wire, so we tried tacking it to the most noticeable parts of the saxophone, the bell and the body.
This gave us an awesome look with the wire really standing out well against the Vibrato Sax’s white body….
…Next in our sights is a custom Soprano Saxophone to go along side the alto, and we are looking into using Adafruit NeoPixels for this, but thats another story, so watch this space!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
