Synthesizing sounds from scratch is all well and good, you just use a bit of maths. However, the latest build from [Daisy] eschews such boring concepts as additive or subtractive synthesis, instead going for a sample-based approach. This build is based around the Daisy Seed microcontroller platform. It was actually inspired by an earlier project […]
There are a million and one MIDI controllers and synths on the market, but sometimes it’s just more satisfying to make your own. [Turi Scandurra] very much went his own way when he put together his Diapasonix instrument. Right away, the build is somewhat reminiscent of a stringed instrument, what with its buttons laid out […]
The usual input device for playing a synthesizer is the good old piano keyboard. However, you don’t have to stick to such pedestrian interfaces when making music. [Daisy] has a fun build that shows us how to put together a ribbon synth that makes wonderful little noises. Naturally, the heart of the build is a […]
Are your Eurorack modules too crowded? Sick of your patch cables making it hard to twiddle your knobs? Then you might be very interested in the new Euroknob, the knob that sports a hidden patch cable jack. Honestly, when we first saw the Euroknob demo board, we thought [Mitxela] had gone a little off the […]
How it started: a simple repair job on a Roland drum machine. How it ended: a scratch-built FM drum synth module that’s completely analog, and completely cool. [Moritz Klein]’s journey down the analog drum machine rabbit hole started with a Roland TR-909, a hybrid drum machine from the mid-80s that combined sampled sounds with analog […]
If you want to dip your toes into the deep, deep water of synth DIY but don’t know where to start, [Atarity] has just the resource for you. He’s compiled a list of 70 wonderful DIY synth and noise-making projects and put them all in one place. And as connoisseurs of the bleepy-bloopy ourselves, we […]
A piece of musical history is the Maplin 4600, a DIY electronic music synthesizer from the 1970s. The design was published in an Australian electronics magazine and sold as a DIY kit, and [LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER] got his hands on an original Maplin 4600 that he refurbishes and puts through its paces. Inserting conductive pegs […]
[Filip] got his hands on a sweet old Hammond X5 organ, but it had one crucial problem: only half of the keys worked. Each and every C#, D, D#, E, F, and F# would not play, up and down the keyboard, although the other notes in between sounded just fine. Those of you with an […]
In this tremendously educational video, [Linus Åkesson] takes us through how he develops a synthesizer and a sequencer and editor for it on the Commodore 64, all in BASIC. While this sounds easy, [Linus] is doing this in hard mode: all of the audio is generated by POKE, and it gets crazier from there. If […]
[Bea Thurman] had a retro music conundrum. She loved the classic Greengate DS:3 sampler, but couldn’t buy one, and couldn’t find enough information to build her own. [Bea’s] plea for help caught the attention of [Eric Schlaepfer], aka [TubeTime]. The collaboration that followed ultimately solved a decades-old mystery. In the 1980s, there were two types of […]