Although many students learn music through established pathways of ensemble participation, these routes can be limiting or inaccessible for those who love music but cannot - or choose not to - participate in band, orchestra or choir. In this workshop we demonstrate how deep musical knowledge can be constructed outside traditional pedagogical models by engaging learners in maker-centered workflows that integrate low-cost electronics and free, open-source software. The workshop is structured in two parts. First, we introduce foundational theoretical and practical approaches to maker learning, drawing from education research and recent original scholarship. Maker learning emphasizes the construction of knowledge through the creation of personally meaningful artifacts, integrating concepts and skills across multiple disciplines (Clapp & Jimenez, 2016). This approach is grounded in Papert’s theory of constructionism (1991), which holds that learning is most effective when individuals externalize and share their mental models through physical or digital creations. Within this framework, maker music emerges as a method for constructing musical knowledge through hands-on engagement with sound-making systems (Hughes, 2018; Treß, 2024), typically involving microcontrollers, software, sensors, and interfaces (e.g., Aaron et al., 2016; Benedict & O'Leary, 2019; Hancock, 2014). In the second part of the workshop, participants create simple yet fully functional audio patches (“programs”) using the open-source visual programming environment Pure Data (Bianchi et al., 2021). These patches respond in real time to physical input from the environment, running on custom-built hardware costing less than $100. Using either a distance sensor or a joystick controller, participants manipulate sound in ways that require direct engagement with core musical concepts such as timbre, pitch, articulation, and dynamics. Pure Data’s visually explicit programming model makes these relationships immediately perceptible, supporting exploratory learning through iterative experimentation. This demonstration reflects workflows we have successfully implemented with both high school and undergraduate students. Taken together, this workshop demonstrates how music educators can facilitate meaningful encounters with sound that bridge the arts and sciences, while expanding access to musical learning. The individual, project-based nature of maker music allows makers to explore music in which they are interested, make musical decisions, seek help and feedback when needed, and construct and share personally meaningful musical artifacts. By embracing maker music as a viable model for deep musical engagement, educators can offer compelling, contemporary pathways to musical knowledge that exist alongside and beyond ensemble-based paradigms.