Tag Archives: Music

Razer’s Pompompurin Kraken Kitty V2 headphones Brings Sanrio charm to gaming

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Razer is adding another Sanrio character to its growing lineup of gaming accessories, this time giving Pompompurin the starring role on its Kraken Kitty V2 BT wireless headphones. The Pompompurin Edition takes the familiar feline-inspired headset and reworks its appearance around the yellow Sanrio character, complete with distinctive ears and themed detailing. It is scheduled to arrive at Target online and in stores on October 4, 2026, priced at $140.

Rather than simply applying printed artwork to an existing headset, Razer has incorporated Pompompurin’s visual identity directly into the hardware. The headband features the character’s signature ears and brown beret, while additional artwork appears underneath the headband. The result is a character-inspired object compared to other conventional gaming headphones with a decorative skin.

Designer: Razer

Underneath the playful exterior, the cans retain the core hardware of the Kraken Kitty V2 BT. It uses Razer’s TriForce 40 mm drivers, which separate high, mid, and low frequencies for clearer audio, along with Bluetooth 5.2 and a dedicated Gaming Mode designed to reduce wireless latency. The audio accessory is compatible with Windows PCs, Android and iOS devices, making it suitable beyond a traditional gaming setup. Communication is handled by an integrated HyperClear cardioid microphone rather than a protruding boom mic. Razer says its pickup pattern is tuned to prioritize the user’s voice while reducing sound from other directions. The headphones also support 7.1 surround sound for positional audio, although that feature is limited to Windows 10 64-bit and newer systems.

The visual side is equally configurable. Razer Chroma RGB lighting illuminates the earcups, with support for more than 16.8 million colors and a range of effects. The Pompompurin edition additionally supports stream-reactive lighting, allowing the illumination to respond to emotes, alerts, and other activity during streams. Comfort comes from hybrid fabric and leatherette ear cushions, while the headset weighs approximately 325 grams. USB-C handles charging, and the battery is rated for up to 40 hours depending on configuration. Razer’s broader specifications list up to 40 hours with lighting enabled and up to 60 hours with Chroma RGB disabled.

The Pompompurin Edition truly carries a collectible identity, and at that price tag it is an absolute buy for fans. Like other themed Kraken Kitty V2 BT editions, this pair of cans stands out for its character-focused design, as much as its gaming features. For sure, an eye-catcher on the streets for onlookers!

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Madkids Empire Is Turning Intimidating Synth Gear Into Pure Play

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Most musical instruments communicate one thing very clearly before you even touch them: you have to earn this. The arrangement of knobs, the wall of technical labeling, the thick manual sitting smugly beside the unit. It is an initiation ritual disguised as product design, and for most people, it works exactly as intended. They back away.

Madkids Empire, a studio founded by a designer named Xam, has built something that works in the opposite direction. Their collection of analog synthesizers is covered in illustrated surfaces, organic silhouettes, and, deliberately, Chinese annotations that describe functions through metaphor rather than engineering terminology. Instead of telling you what a knob controls, the labeling hints at what it feels like. It is the difference between reading a recipe and being handed a fork.

Designer: Madkids Empire

The visual language alone is worth paying attention to. Each instrument looks less like a piece of audio equipment and more like an illustrated landscape you could reach into. Wooden frames and brass details soften what would otherwise read as industrial objects. The shapes curve and flow in ways that suggest something natural rather than manufactured, which is intentional. Xam builds the design around the circuit itself, starting with the technical structure of the sound and then finding a natural concept that mirrors it. A lake. A mountain. A tree. The interaction you have with the synth is meant to feel connected to that concept, so patching a cable or turning a dial carries a kind of environmental logic, even if you could not explain exactly why.

The result is an instrument that looks like you are supposed to explore it, and the collection does not disappoint on that expectation. The flowing silhouettes and playful interfaces do not just look inviting; they function that way too. Xam has said that what they want users to understand is that musical knowledge is not the entry point. Curiosity is. When someone hears a sound they like during experimentation, they have made something entirely their own, something they arrived at through play rather than study. That reframing matters more than it might initially seem.

Most design conversations around synthesizers orbit gear obsession and technical hierarchy. How many oscillators, what filter topology, which vintage unit did it draw from. Madkids Empire does not seem particularly interested in that conversation. The chaos baked into these instruments, and yes, chaos is a deliberate design choice here, provides feedback that evolves with what you are doing. Unlike randomness, which offers no relationship between action and outcome, the unpredictability here responds to you. You become part of the system. It is closer to improvising in a new environment than operating a machine.

That philosophy has a real audience right now. The broader design and tech world has spent years talking about removing barriers and making things accessible, but the actual execution is usually just simpler interfaces with less functionality. Madkids Empire took a different approach: keep the depth, remove the intimidation, and replace the instruction manual with the experience of discovery itself. The instruments are not dumbed down. They are just designed with a different entry point in mind.

The aesthetic choices also position these synths somewhere unusual on the cultural map. They are not vintage recreations chasing the warmth of a classic unit, and they are not sleek minimalist tech objects trying to disappear into a desk setup. They are objects you would notice on a shelf. Objects that invite a question. That sense of presence, the feeling that a thing has a personality before you interact with it, is genuinely rare in hardware design.

Xam has built something that sits at the crossroads of instrument, sculpture, and game. The synthesizer as landscape. The knob as terrain. Whether or not you ever make music with one, the thinking behind Madkids Empire’s work is the kind that deserves to travel beyond the synthesizer community and into a wider conversation about what it means to design something people actually want to touch.

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Someone Built a LEGO Bedside Radio With 1,400 Bricks And Inner Circuitry

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Remember when clock radios had personality? Before phones ate every function a bedside table used to need, you had this chunky little box with dials that clicked, buttons that thunked, and a display that glowed just enough to bug you at 3am. That exact vibe is what 91-Brickdesigns set out to capture with the Legosonic BSR-12, a LEGO Ideas build modeled on the radio alarm clocks that ruled nightstands in the late 70s and early 80s. And they didn’t just nail the look, they nailed the fidgetiness of the thing too.

Around 1400 pieces went into this build, and a big chunk of that count is doing unnecessary, delightful work. The toggle switches have actual spring mechanisms so they click when you flip them. The sliders drive a gear underneath just so they feel smoother in your hand, despite doing literally nothing. Even the snooze button is a running joke, since pressing it accomplishes exactly zero. It’s the kind of overbuilt charm we loved in the LEGO Classics Computer a while back, cranked up another notch.

Designer: 91-Brickdesigns

The front panel alone is a lot to take in. You’ve got three round dials up top that turn but don’t actually control anything, a row of colored indicator lights, and a genuinely functional time-set system where you spin the big dial and lock it in with a couple of chrome buttons. Next to that sits a flip clock style display frozen at 20:58, glowing like it just woke up from a nap, and a tuning window with a red needle you can slide across a fake FM and AM band using a little wheel on the side. None of it plays actual music, but every piece of it looks like it should.

Pop the top cover and there’s a full circuit board hiding under there, with brick built resistors color coded the way real resistors are, a couple of capacitors, and a chip sitting exactly where you’d expect one on an actual PCB. Slide the ventilation grille open and there’s a speaker cone waiting behind it. Flip the whole thing around and the back has a proper spec plate, an AC input, and an on off switch that wouldn’t look out of place on a real appliance from a Best Buy circa 1983. My favorite detail might be the plate itself, which reads “Made in Two Tiles, Legany,” because apparently even fictional radio manufacturers deserve a pun.

This isn’t the first time we’ve watched builders chase this exact strain of nostalgia. The JVC pyramid TV that hit LEGO Ideas earlier this year leaned on the same appeal, and LEGO’s own Icons Retro Radio proved there’s real demand for gadgets that remind adults of a time when electronics had weight and character instead of just a glass slab and a charging port. The Legosonic BSR-12 fits right into that lineage, except it goes further than most by building the guts as carefully as the shell.

The build currently sits at Staff Pick status with 589 days left to hit its 5,000 supporter mark, on the way to the 10,000 votes needed for LEGO’s official review. If you’re the kind of person who misses a nightstand that made noise when you touched it, head over to LEGO Ideas and give it a vote.

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PAC-MAN Shrank Into a Tiny $28 Synthesizer and It Actually Works

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Some crossovers make obvious sense. Some don’t. The Otamatone Melody PAC-MAN is the rare kind that manages to be both completely absurd and entirely logical at the same time. Two icons of Japanese pop culture, each beloved for being a little weird, a little niche, and deeply joyful, have merged into one pocket-sized musical toy that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about.

Let’s start with the basics. PAC-MAN entered Japanese arcades in 1980, and the iconic yellow dot-muncher has barely stopped showing up in culture since. The Otamatone, on the other hand, is Maywa Denki’s strange and lovable musical instrument: a tadpole-shaped squeezable synthesizer with an expressive face that produces sounds somewhere between a theremin and a very distressed seagull. If you’ve ever seen someone play one, you already understand why it has developed a devoted global fanbase. If you haven’t, please stop what you’re doing and look it up immediately.

Designers: Pac-Man and Otamatone

The Otamatone Melody PAC-MAN takes the whole concept and shrinks it into a keychain format, measuring just 1.6 by 3.75 by 3 inches and running on a CR2032 battery. It comes pre-loaded with 11 songs, which you select by pressing buttons on the tail, and you play along by pressing a stem button while squeezing the cheeks to create that signature “wah” effect. Low, medium, and high pitch modes round out the playable range. The packaging includes a keychain attachment, which means yes, you can absolutely wear this as an instrument. That detail matters more than you’d think.

The collection covers the full PAC-MAN roster: the original yellow character and all four ghosts. Blinky in red, Pinky in pink, Inky in that distinctive cyan, and Clyde in orange, each keeping their arcade color identities perfectly intact. The visual translation is genuinely clever. PAC-MAN’s circular body replaces the Otamatone’s face naturally, almost like it was always supposed to go there. The proportions work. The ghost designs translate with equal elegance, their rounded arcade silhouettes sitting comfortably within the Otamatone format. As far as licensed crossovers go, the design team clearly took this seriously enough to get the details right.

Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Otamatone Melody isn’t exactly a sophisticated musical instrument. Compared to the full-size Otamatone, which demands real technique and rewards it with genuinely expressive sounds, the Melody format is more toy than tool. The controls are simpler, the sonic range is narrower, and the whole point is portability and accessibility over performance depth. It exists comfortably in the space between collectible, music toy, and glorified novelty, and it makes no apologies for that positioning.

But that’s precisely where the appeal lives, and I’d argue it’s the smarter design choice. Not everything needs to be serious. The Otamatone was never competing with professional instruments; it was built to be joyful and a little absurd, and the Melody version simply leans further into that mission. The PAC-MAN edition layers cultural nostalgia onto an already culturally loaded object. You’re not just carrying a tiny synthesizer; you’re carrying a piece of arcade history that produces music on demand. That’s a rare combination, and it’s one that will resonate well beyond people who consider themselves fans of either brand.

The broader rollout reinforces just how seriously this partnership has been taken. PAC-MAN has appeared across both the Regular and Deluxe Otamatone formats, with Blinky, Pinky, and Inky joining the full-size Regular line earlier this year. The original PAC-MAN Regular model even incorporates pixel graphics and a pellet motif on its controls, the kind of small, referential detail that collectors notice and quietly love.

At $27.99, the Otamatone Melody PAC-MAN isn’t trying to be a luxury object or a serious instrument. It’s a functional collectible, a desk toy that plays music, a nostalgic artifact that earns its place on your keychain with a little wah and a surprising amount of personality. The fact that it exists at all feels like a small cultural gift: two strange, beloved things that had no obvious business merging, somehow making perfect sense together.

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If the iPod Nano and Game Boy had a baby, you’d get this $85 Hi-Fi Audio Player

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The dedicated music player had a solid twenty-year run: Walkmans, MiniDiscs, the Rio PMP300 (look it up), the iPod in all its generations, and the Zune if you were feeling brave. Streaming services and the smartphone ate all of it, and what survived was a niche audiophile DAP market that mostly traded in expensive, sensible-looking black rectangles with impressive chip specs and absolutely zero personality. That category is fine if you want to spend $300 on a slab, but it left a gap for a well-engineered, genuinely fun music player you’d want to show off rather than bury. Hidizs, a Hong Kong audio brand, decided to fill that gap with the AP30 Music Boy. They designed it to look like a Game Boy, snap to your phone, hang from your neck, and decode DSD256, all at once.

The AP30 is built around a Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC chip, the kind that typically shows up in players costing $200 or more, paired with an RT6863 amplifier and RKNANOD master chip for a signal chain that produces 137mW per channel balanced and an SNR of 127dB. The 68x53x17mm body comes in a lightweight plastic edition at 56 grams and a CNC aluminum edition at 80 grams, running Hidizs’s own purpose-built HidizsOS rather than a general Android build. It supports DSD256 native decoding, PCM 192kHz/24bit, and lossless formats including FLAC, APE, WMA, WAV, ALAC, Apple Lossless, and DSDIFF, plus Bluetooth 5.3, USB DAC mode via Type-C, dual wired outputs, and a microSD slot accepting cards up to 256GB. There is also a built-in Retro Block Puzzle Game, which tells you exactly what kind of product this is. Hidizs designed the whole thing to be worn rather than pocketed, and that premise shapes every decision in the hardware.

Designer: Hidizs

Click Here to Buy Now: $85 $119 (23$ off) Hurry! Only 16 of 480 units left.

Every device you own right now is either trying to get your attention or listening for a chance to sell you something. Your phone buzzes, your watch taps your wrist, your earbuds announce that someone liked your post, and AI glasses are arriving to overlay all of it directly onto your vision. The AP30 runs on HidizsOS, a system crafted for high-fidelity audio, and that is genuinely the full scope of its ambitions. It plays music, adjusts volume through a physical wheel, and the agenda ends there. A piece of technology in 2026 that takes one job seriously and refuses to negotiate with the attention economy is a genuinely radical object, and the AP30 earns that description through hardware and software decisions that are all, unanimously, in service of sound.

The 2.0-inch (296×240) HD IPS screen ensures that browsing your music library, navigating menus, and playing games is a seamless and clear experience, and it is a non-touchscreen display, which means physical controls handle everything. The volume control is a Japanese ALPS wheel, chosen for tactile precision over digital convenience, delivering the kind of satisfying resistance that sliders on glass can never replicate. The backplate carries an engraved whale motif that symbolizes the ocean’s freedom and majesty, tied to Hidizs’s ongoing collaboration with WDC (Whale and Dolphin Conservation), bringing awareness to the beauty and importance of marine life. The aluminum edition is CNC-machined in Pixel Purple and Arcade Black, while the plastic version spans Crystal Ocean Blue, Shadow Black, and Classic White. Both editions share identical internals and the same sharp retro energy.

The 3.5mm single-ended output supports everyday headphones, while the 4.4mm balanced output satisfies audiophiles using high-impedance in-ear or over-ear monitors. Specifically, single-ended delivers 61mW+61mW at 32Ω with THD+N of 0.0008% and SNR of 120dB, while balanced pushes 137mW+137mW at 32Ω with SNR of 127dB and frequency response spanning 20Hz to 90kHz at ±0.03dB. HidizsOS gives you six EQ presets or a custom build, high/low gain adjustment to match headphone impedance, four playback modes, and digital anti-aliasing filters alongside DoP (DSD over PCM) for professional listeners. Even headphones with built-in microphones are fully compatible, making the AP30 a versatile companion for any audio setup. Certified by Hi-Res Audio, the AP30 Music Boy meets the highest standards in sound reproduction, which means the numbers back the claim rather than decorate the packaging.

Hidizs built three distinct ways to carry the AP30: neck strap, bag clip, or magnetic phone attachment. The neck strap turns it into a pendant, small enough to forget you are wearing it, distinctive enough that people ask. A bag clip hooks onto any strap and streams audio wirelessly to earbuds. Slide the AP30 into its magnetic case and it snaps to the back of your phone with a satisfying clack, no extra adapters, no Bluetooth pairing dance, just a clean magnetic connection that turns your phone into a Hi-Res rig. USB DAC mode works over Type-C to any Windows, MacOS, or OTG-supported device, with the AP30 running on its own battery during operation to reduce noise interference from the host device and preserve its battery life.

With support for a 256GB microSD card, the AP30 can store over 8,500 Hi-Res lossless tracks for offline listening, no buffering, no streaming interruptions, whether commuting, traveling, or relaxing at home. Bluetooth 5.3 ensures fast, low-latency, stable connections, and the AP30 permanently remembers paired devices, covering headphones, speakers, and car audio without fuss. The 1200mAh battery charges in about one hour and keeps the AP30 ready when you need it, delivering 10 to 12 hours of single-ended wired playback, 8 to 10 hours balanced, or 6 to 8 hours wirelessly, with a 60-day standby. The AP30 also supports loading eBooks on a microSD card for reading on its HD screen, transforming commutes and waiting periods into enjoyable, productive moments without sacrificing portability. And then there is the Retro Block Puzzle Game, which is exactly what it sounds like, costs nothing extra, and is honestly the reason at least some people will choose this over a more austere-looking DAP.

The AP30 Music Boy comes in two editions: the Lightweight Plastic at a discounted $85 in Crystal Ocean Blue, Shadow Black, or Classic White, and the CNC Aluminum at $99 in Pixel Purple or Arcade Black. Every unit ships with the player, the magnetic protective case, a Type-C charging cable, a Type-C to Type-C OTG data cable, two screen protectors, a user manual, and a warranty and QC card, with a one-year warranty against factory defects covering the device. Shipping begins in early October 2026 (free globally), with retail distribution following in November 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $85 $119 (23$ off) Hurry! Only 16 of 480 units left.

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Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom.

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Picking up the drums has always come with a quiet, frustrating tax. Before you’ve played a single beat, you’re already being asked to make a significant financial commitment, figure out where to put a massive piece of equipment, and accept that your neighbors might hate you. For most people, that’s where the dream ends. Not with failure, but with logistics.

Xiaoyu Yu, a graduate from the Umeå Institute of Design’s class of 2026, noticed this gap and did something about it. Her project, Boxboom, is a rental-based, foldable electronic drum kit designed specifically for first-time players. On paper, it sounds straightforward enough. In practice, it reframes the entire conversation about what a beginner drum experience should actually look like.

Designer: Xiaoyu Yu

The existing drum market is oddly shaped. At the entry level, you get cheap kits that feel nothing like playing real drums. At the high end, you get electronic kits that come closest to replicating acoustic feel, but they’re expensive, require serious space, and carry the weight of a long-term commitment for someone who isn’t even sure they like drumming yet. As Yu observed, the market offers little for true beginners. Boxboom identifies that gap clearly: the problem isn’t that beginners can’t learn, it’s that the tools were never really designed around them to begin with.

The physical design is worth appreciating on its own terms. Boxboom unfolds from a compact box into a fully functional drum configuration. Modular joints allow for quick setup and flexible arrangement, which means you’re not stuck with one rigid layout that doesn’t suit your body or your room. Parts are designed to be replaced individually, a detail that matters a lot for longevity. When a product is rentable, it has to survive multiple users, multiple moves, and the general roughness of being a learning tool. The design accounts for all of that without looking like it’s trying too hard.

What makes Boxboom more than just a folding drum kit is the service thinking built around it. Yu designed a three-sided ecosystem connecting users, rental shops, and drum training institutions through an online booking and delivery system. You’re not just renting a piece of hardware. You’re entering a structure that connects you to learning, not just to ownership. That shift matters more than it might seem. Ownership, it turns out, is one of the biggest barriers to entry, not a lack of enthusiasm.

The research behind the project is just as considered. Yu conducted field research at Umeå Music School and Toontrack, a leading drum sound engine company, to understand how beginners experience rhythm and what it genuinely takes for a kit to support early learning. The design process ran from 1:10 scale models all the way to full 1:1 prototypes, testing folding logic and setup sequences until the physical experience matched the idea. A central Hub integrates a phone holder, power panel, and teaching stick storage dock into a single arm. The whole system is organized around one driving question: how can a drum kit itself teach you to play?

That question is what separates Boxboom from the many beginner-focused products that quietly shrink their ambitions and rebrand it as accessibility. Yu isn’t simply lowering the financial barrier. She’s rethinking the relationship between a learner and their instrument entirely. Most musical tools are designed with the assumption that you already know what you’re doing. Boxboom assumes you don’t, and it respects you for exactly that.

Graduation design projects like this tend to get filed away a little too fast. They show up at exhibitions, earn some well-deserved attention, and then disappear before anyone asks whether they could actually become something real. Boxboom feels like it deserves a longer conversation than that. The drumming market hasn’t seen this kind of structural rethinking in a long time, and the problem it’s addressing is genuinely underserved.

Whether Boxboom ends up in production or remains a concept, it already does something worth noting: it makes you wonder why nobody asked these questions sooner. Drums have always been for everyone. The design just hadn’t caught up yet.

The post Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom. first appeared on Yanko Design.

Tablets Sound Bad, So Motorola Just Put 9 JBL Speakers in One

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Entertainment tablets have come a long way in terms of screen quality, but audio often tells a different story. Most of them ship with a pair of speakers that merely get the job done, leaving users reaching for headphones or a separate Bluetooth speaker the moment things need to get louder. The gap between how tablets look and how they actually sound has never been more apparent.

The Motorola Moto Pad 70 Groove is built around a premise that most tablets don’t dare fully commit to: making audio the centerpiece, not an afterthought. It arrives loaded with a nine-unit JBL Pro speaker system, a 12.1-inch 2.5K display, and a 360-degree built-in kickstand, addressing the kind of everyday entertainment scenarios where a standard tablet simply wouldn’t be enough.

Designer: Motorola

The display is well suited for this audio-first identity. The 12.1-inch IPS LCD panel runs at 120 Hz with a 2560×1600 resolution, HDR10 and Dolby Vision certification, and a peak brightness of 800 nits. It’s a smooth, vivid canvas for streaming content, though the real draw is what’s happening on the edges of that screen, where all those speakers live.

Nine speakers sound like a gimmick until you see what they’re actually made of: four tweeters, three woofers, and two passive radiators, all tuned by JBL and backed by Dolby Atmos. Together, they’re rated to push up to 48W of audio output, which is a lot to ask from a tablet-sized device. It’s the kind of setup that makes you rethink whether you actually need a separate soundbar.

What makes the audio system more interesting is the built-in Bluetooth speaker mode, which turns the Groove into a standalone speaker your phone can control wirelessly. It’s a clever trick for situations where you want music filling a kitchen or a living room during a gathering, without having to keep the tablet actively streaming the content. Dolby Audio further adds Dynamic, Movie, and Music modes for more tailored listening.

The 360° Kickstand 2.0 adds another layer of flexibility. It supports four positions named Lean, Stand, Theatre, and Hanging, each suited for a different viewing situation. Prop it up on a desk for a video call, tilt it back for a movie in bed, or hang it from a hook when counter space runs out. It’s a practical piece of engineering that doesn’t feel like an afterthought.

Under the hood, a MediaTek Dimensity 7400 chip handles daily tasks alongside 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The 10,200mAh battery keeps extended streaming sessions going, and the 45W TurboPower charging keeps downtime short. The all-metal body in Pantone Blue Surf measures 6.8 mm at its thinnest, though the speaker array at the back raises that to 22.7 mm, creating a distinctive ridge. The Groove ships with Android 16 and Google Gemini out of the box, with Motorola committing to updates through Android 18 and security patches through 2030.

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The $599 AI Guitar That Finally Makes Playing Easy

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At some point in their life, almost everyone has picked up a guitar, struggled with a C chord for ten minutes, and quietly put it back down. The fingertip pain. The out-of-tune strings. The YouTube tutorial that somehow assumes you already know what a fret is. Learning guitar has always had a steep and slightly humiliating entry curve, and most of us just gave up. The TemPolor Melo-D thinks that’s a problem worth solving, and the design it came up with is genuinely hard to ignore.

Designed by inDare Design Strategy Limited, the Melo-D is billed as the world’s first generative AI guitar, and even that description barely scratches the surface of what it actually is. On the outside, it looks like a guitar that a product designer and a tech enthusiast co-parented together. The body is sleek, the finish is pearl white, and it has a foldable build that makes it compact enough to take almost anywhere. But the real story is what happens when you turn it on.

Designer: inDare Design Strategy Limited

The neck is embedded with LED lights that illuminate exactly which notes to press, removing the guesswork for beginners entirely. A built-in 2.4″ LCD flip screen on the body handles chord guidance and ambient visuals without you ever needing to prop up a phone nearby. These feel like small details, but they represent a real design philosophy: the instrument itself should carry the full experience. You shouldn’t need a separate ecosystem of apps and accessories just to get started.

What makes the Melo-D genuinely interesting is the AI engine running underneath all of it. The guitar operates in three modes: solo, sing-along, and AI creation. In AI creation mode, you can hum a melody and the guitar transcribes it into a guitar solo. You can type a text prompt and it generates a song. Upload an audio file and it converts the music into playable tabs or chord charts. It even generates personalized backing tracks using emotional tags, so the sound starts to feel like yours rather than something borrowed from a practice app.

The “AI everything” wave has made it easy to be skeptical every time a product slaps the word generative onto its marketing. But the Melo-D doesn’t read as a gimmick dressed up in smart-instrument clothing. The six-string silicone system allows for real, note-by-note playing, which means it isn’t just a toy approximating the feel of music. It’s an actual instrument with training wheels you can choose to remove. The goal isn’t to replace the skill of playing guitar. It’s to lower the barrier enough that more people actually get through the door.

inDare’s design work here deserves its own mention. The studio, known for thoughtful human-centered industrial design, brought a lot of restraint to a product that could have easily become overcrowded with features. The foldable form factor, the integrated flip screen, and the silicone strings all feel like deliberate decisions, not afterthoughts. The Melo-D has also earned recognition at the iF Design Awards, which makes sense, because from a design standpoint it reads as a product with a clear and confident point of view rather than a collection of specs looking for a shell to live in.

At $599, it’s available for pre-order now with an expected ship date in September 2026. For a piece of hardware this layered, that number asks you to take it seriously, which feels appropriate for what it’s trying to do.

Learning guitar used to mean a real commitment: years of practice, a teacher, calluses, patience, and a certain willingness to sound terrible for a while. The Melo-D isn’t trying to skip all of that, but it is offering a more honest entry point for people who actually want to try. Whether you’re a complete beginner or someone who has quietly given up on the guitar more than once, it meets you where you are. And sometimes, that’s exactly the invitation you need to actually show up.

The post The $599 AI Guitar That Finally Makes Playing Easy first appeared on Yanko Design.

3D-Printed Ukulele Transforms Into an Electric Guitar In Just 2 Seconds

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Every kid who grew up watching cars turn into robots has a soft spot for things that are not what they seem. Musician and maker Mattias Krantz never quite grew out of that phase, except instead of turning a truck into Optimus Prime, he set his sights on something smaller and arguably harder to pull off without CGI. He wanted a ukulele that could become a full size guitar on command, without falling apart in his hands. That meant solving three problems at once: growing the neck by roughly ten inches, keeping the strings in tune through that change, and expanding the body into a real guitar shape instead of a symmetrical blob. Each one turned out to be its own small nightmare.

The motivation was refreshingly petty. Ukulele players get less respect than guitar players no matter how good they get, and Krantz wanted to flip that on its head. Getting there took months of failed prototypes and a collaboration with mechanical engineer Adam Damato, who stepped in once the physics of a growing, string bearing neck got too gnarly to solve alone. What began as a joke became a real feat of mechanical design, borrowing tricks from telescoping tools, fishing reels, and an obscure folk instrument. By the end, the ukulele fit in a backpack and unfolded into a stage ready guitar in seconds.

Designers: Mattias Krantz, Adam Damato

The neck telescopes straight out of the ukulele’s tiny frame, sliding one section into the next until it locks at full guitar length, gaining roughly ten inches without ever detaching from the body. A steel core runs through the sliding sections, and the joints are cut so they interlock and brace against each other the instant the neck reaches full extension. That bracing is what lets it survive eighty pounds of string tension without bowing like a fishing rod. Getting there took two failed attempts first. A folding neck, borrowed from an old instrument called the cithara orbo, worked fine on a full size guitar but was useless on a ukulele, since half a neck sat exactly where a hand needed to grip. The telescoping version solved the length problem right away, but only stopped bending once Damato worked in the steel core and reinforced joints.

The strings are custom made, roughly twice the length of a normal set, and thread onto strategically placed rollers hidden inside the neck and body. Pull the neck out and the rollers feed slack forward, push it back in and they wind the excess back up, so the same six strings carry the instrument through both tunings without coming off. That roller system only exists because everything simpler failed first. Rubber bands solved the stretch problem but sounded worse than the ukulele they replaced. A fishing reel style rig using rope worked until the rope itself stretched, turning every transformation into tuning roulette, and swapping in non stretch rope traded that for a rope that kept snapping, once badly enough to take the guitar apart. Custom strings, ordered special and worth a twenty day wait, were the fix that finally held.

The body expands through six independently moving panels that fan outward from the ukulele’s compact shell, each one traveling a different distance and angle so the outline settles into a real guitar’s curves instead of a bloated circle. An early version of that mechanism grew symmetrically in every direction, fine for something like a banjo but wrong for an instrument with a pinched waist. Getting six panels to move independently instead of in lockstep turned one mechanical problem into six. The first panel alone took three attempts before it worked reliably, and even then only about ninety percent of the time. Adding the rest of the panels made things worse, since a hub inside was quietly blocking outward movement and jamming the whole assembly. Swapping plastic components for metal fixed it, and two days assembling hundreds of parts produced a body that finally held its shape.

None of this would matter if the transformation felt gimmicky in person, but the reception says otherwise. Onlookers at Krantz’s street performances wrote it off as just another ukulele until it unfolded mid song and changed their opinion of him. A band let him bring it on stage, and the transformation held together well enough to draw applause rather than confusion. Transforming gadgets are nothing new, but the engineering here, steel joints, custom rollers, six moving panels, earns real attention over a gimmick label. Krantz and Damato spent months on problems most builders would abandon, and the payoff works under tension, every time.

The post 3D-Printed Ukulele Transforms Into an Electric Guitar In Just 2 Seconds first appeared on Yanko Design.

Gen Z Is Buying Old iPods to Quit Spotify. Fiio’s $50 Hi-Fi MP3 Player Does It Better.

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I tried to listen to an album last week. The whole thing, start to finish, like a functioning adult in the 90s. I made it four tracks before a Slack ping, a WhatsApp text, and a push notification from Hinge. By track six I was scrolling through IG. I started with conscientiously listening to an album, and I ended up in a rabbit hole on social media while the music played in the background. My phone is a magnificent piece of engineering that is somehow terrible at the one job I keep handing it.

Plenty of people figured this out before I did, and their fix was buying a discontinued Apple product from a stranger online. TikTok has north of 100,000 posts tagged for iPods, refurbished sales have grown as much as 15% a year since Apple killed the line in 2022, and some kids are using them to smuggle music past school phone bans, which is the most resourceful thing I’ve heard all year. The FiiO Snowsky Echo Nano is that same instinct, available new, for $49.99, with a DAC chip nobody was putting in fifty dollar hardware five years ago.

Designer: FiiO (Snowsky)

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Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined the term “friction-maxxing” in a January essay for The Cut, and it went viral quickly enough to earn her a Wikipedia page inside six weeks. Her argument is that tech spent fifteen years making life easier, providing every song, every movie, every TV show episode at your fingertips for a simple (but steadily increasing) subscription fee. No looking for CDs, no scrolling through files, no visiting sketchy websites to download MP3s It was a simpler alternative, it killed torrenting for a vast population overnight… but Gen Z’s had enough. Friction-maxxing means picking the annoying option on purpose, and the Echo Nano is that philosophy machined out of aluminum. You load your own files. You turn a physical dial. You stare at a 0.91-inch monochrome OLED physically incapable of showing you album art,leave alone a notification. The screen’s poverty is the whole product.

Everyone will call this an iPod, which is kind of understandable and also kind of wrong. The proportions are a vertical stick with a hexagonal cross section and a lanyard bracket built into the top like a tiny roll cage, which is Sony Network Walkman DNA rather than Cupertino’s. Apple built a rectangle for your palm, Sony built something you wore around your neck, and FiiO clearly went shopping in the second closet. The knurled anodized dial handles power, volume, screen, and playback with one thumb, sitting as the only piece of jewelry on an otherwise stern slab of CNC’d aluminum-magnesium alloy. Visible screws at both ends read as a small political statement about whether objects should open. Seven colorways, including a coral and a teal, are the one honest Apple quotation, straight off the iPod Mini.

The 360mAh battery delivers around seven hours, and Reddit’s verdict on that figure has been a collective ‘meh’. Seven hours covers a commute and a workday rather than a weekend, and you will top it up more often than something this small should demand. Weigh that against $49.99 and what the money actually buys, because Spotify and Apple Music run roughly $12 a month, which is $144 a year, indefinitely, for a library you never own. An independent CS43131 DAC, DSD256 hardware decoding, and a dedicated audio-grade crystal oscillator would have meant flagship spending half a decade ago. Storage climbs to 256GB via microSD, and there’s a 3.5mm jack, which at this point qualifies as hospitality.

A used iPod Classic on eBay runs about eighty dollars for a fifteen-year-old machine with a spinning hard drive and a battery on its farewell tour, with higher-capacity units sailing past $150. The Echo Nano costs less, arrives new, charges over USB-C, and does the same single job with better silicon. It also works as a USB DAC for your phone or laptop, a funny hedge for a device sold on escaping your phone, and probably an accurate read of how anyone actually lives. Nobody is abandoning the smartphone. They’re carving out one protected activity and building a small aluminum fence around it, and fifty dollars is exactly the right price for a fence you’re allowed to walk away from.

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The post Gen Z Is Buying Old iPods to Quit Spotify. Fiio’s $50 Hi-Fi MP3 Player Does It Better. first appeared on Yanko Design.