Weird Instrument of the Week: The Power Pad!

As the line between electronic musical instruments and video games continues to blur, crackerjack MIDI junkies are giving older game controllers a new lease on life.  DrAges over at YouTube has linked his old NES Power Pad to a keyboard via an Arduino development board.

After a little programming, the Arduino board converts the Power Pad’s controller output signals to MIDI note data, which could theoretically be routed to any sound module. In this case, it’s running to a simple keyboard that contains some drums samples. Now he can tap out some funky, if quantized, beats via little more than a pair of fuzzy slippers.

Pretty cool! For more game controller-to-MIDI mayhem, check out The Guitar Zeros.