Arduino has always had a special relationship with musicians. Makers in the community have been wiring up theremins and building MIDI controllers from scratch for decades, driven by the simple idea that if you want to play an instrument, you should be able to build it . It worked for Brian May, right?

When we launched the Arduino ® UNO ™ R4 board, we noticed the experiments were evolving in step with the technology. Gustavo Silveira , a composer and self-described “nerd musician”, had already built his iconic XT Synth – a hybrid guitar-violin-MIDI controller – by learning everything he knew from the community and giving it straight back. Tigris Li used UNO R4 to build a custom DJ controller. And Clatters Machines , the Italian duo devoted to making “noisy machines for music lovers”, prototyped their very first product on an UNO and never really looked back.

And these aren’t outliers.…