This guy made a keytar instrument out of his Nintendo Entertainment System, and he is using it to rock out — oh, and it still plays games.
Greig Stewart has built a keytar using his old NES, the ’80s-era machine that revived the home-console market. This enables the Scotland-based programmer to play the system like a guitar while getting the digital-sounding notes that classic-gaming fans will instantly recognize. To get the NES fully working as a keytar, the mad musical scientist also combined the console with a controller from the music game Guitar Hero and a toy keyboard.
“The sound comes from the original RP2A03 sound chip in the NES, giving it that classic 8-bit sound,” Stewart wrote in his blog. “All of the available sound channels are utilized.”
Stewart also included the open-source miniature computer Raspberry Pi to get all of the components to work together.
Once he finished the NES keytar, Stewart naturally started jamming away on his 8-bit remix version of the theme song for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Check it out for yourself in the video below: