Rob sent us this vid from the Atari Punk Console workshop he tought @ Interaccess. Is it just me, or is the cacophony of 15 APCs noising at once actually kind of nice? The students look pretty enthralled by what they’ve made – very well done. More: Atari PCB console End of Summer special – […]
MAKE Japan editor Hideo Tamura was kind enough to send us one of the new Gakken SX-150 Analog Synthesizer kits. Needless to say I was very pleased to receive it. The kit comes as part of the latest issue of Otona no Kagaku (Science for Adults) magazine/book(aka ‘mook’). Though unable to actually read the issue, […]
Folks who were at the Bay Area Maker Faire may remember Lorin Parker and Electric Western. They were in the steampunk area, next to The Contraptors Lounge. Now the man who brought you the tube theramin and the steam-driven synthesizer is about to unleash his Phantastron kit on the world, a tube-based voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). […]
While not conventionally musical, the Electrochemical Synthesizer’s process for generating sound is unusually interesting – Pressing a key causes salt solution to flow over a copper and aluminium connection generating a low signal which is filtered by a capacitor and then amplified, creating a complex white noise, with amazing fluctuating oscillations. The device demonstrates how […]
From the MAKE Flickr photo pool Flickr user [fluxa] put an Arduino board to work outputting control voltage to a DIY SoundLab synthesizer. While the PC software has yet to be released, the Arduino code is pretty straightforward – using a pulse width modulated output through a simple resistor/capacitor filter. – CVAirSequencer Project on Flickr […]
If you’re interested in building an analog synthesizer then the VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) circuit is the best place to start. Oscillators form the core of the instrument, generating basic waveforms which are then shaped and shifted by accompanying components like LFOs, VCAs, and filters and then delivered to our ears as tasty electronic audio […]
(photos by CookieM) Japanese kit-maker Gakken has just released a special special edition of the Otona No Kagaku publication focussing on music synthesizers. The issue includes an SX-150 stylus-input analog synth kit which appears to require relatively little effort in the way of assembly (a feature which may be a demerit in the eyes of […]
