Simple DIY Synth

[MarkOne]

I don't know how many of you follow Sam from the Look Mum No Computer YouTube channel, but he recently put up a video taking you through the breadboarding of a fairly simple 2 oscillator analogue synth.

I found this really interesting and may well end up making something like this. I'll be interested in the follow up videos where he plans a delay and a sequencer circuit - And hopefully we'll see it go from breadboard to PCB

It is quite long at an hour and 20 minutes, but I think it's well worth it.

Link Here

[Martin Walker]

That filter does sound good!

[MarkOne]

That filter does sound good!

It really does!

In fact for a simple sawtooth only and with a really stripped down VCA with just a release control, I thought the whole thing sounded great!

I’ve just been reading up on the Curtis VCO chip and it looks pretty trivial to add a square wave output with a pulse width control.

For people who don’t want to commit an hour and 20 minutes, Sam has put chapter markers in the description.

[Martin Walker]

For people who don’t want to commit an hour and 20 minutes, Sam has put chapter markers in the description.

Sam's projects seem to be getting less personally bizarre, and more widely useful to others

[Arpangel]

As part of my therapy, when I was recovering from being mental, I was sent to a community centre, where a guy got us to make a one oscillator mono-synth in a day, and then we had to take part in a concert with all the other "patients" when we all finished it, but this was Camden, and it was supposed to teach us how to be creative. All I can remember is pushing a resistor through the board straight into my thumb, and bleeding profusely.

[James Perrett]

My son is designing and building his own modular synth and we've taken some of our inspiration from the Noise Toaster

http://musicfromouterspace.com/analogsy ... OASTER.php

I've no idea how that one sounds but it is a good starting point for our own ideas.

[Folderol]

Interesting design, although I'd question the use of a transistor as a noise source. Back in the day I got better results from a Zener diode. Oh, and a true Zener effect diode has to be less than 5V otherwise it's an avalanche diode with a poorer noise performance.

P.S. experiment with the resistor value for 'best' noise

[Arpangel]

My son is designing and building his own modular synth and we've taken some of our inspiration from the Noise Toaster

http://musicfromouterspace.com/analogsy ... OASTER.php

I've no idea how that one sounds but it is a good starting point for our own ideas.

Looks cool, sweepable oscillator, looping EG, cool.