Collaborate Disseminate
Modular synthesizers have been around since the early 1960s, delivering huge tonal possibilities from their impressive and imposing patchbays. In 1996, the Eurorack standard was launched, and has become the go-to choice for enthusiasts new to the world of modular synthesis. [Rich Heslip] is just one such enthusiast, and has …read more
Eurorack synthesizer builds are known for a lot of things; simplicity isn’t necessarily one of them. However, not everything on a modular synthesizer build has to be inordinately complicated, a mess of wires, or difficult to understand. [little-scale] has built a neat and tidy module that might just find a place in your setup – the Chromatic Drum Gate Sync. The handy little device is based on a Teensy, and uses its USB MIDI libraries to make synchronizing hardware a snap.
The device has 12 channels, each responding to a single MIDI note. A note on message is used to …read more
Continue reading An Easy Way To MIDI Sync Your Eurorack Build
Eurorack has taken over the synthesizer community, and hundreds of people are building their own eurorack modules. [Michael Forrest] designed and built his own Eurorack sequencer module that doesn’t use weird things like capacitors and chips to store a signal. Instead, he’s doing it with stepper motors and some clever engineering.
The basic idea of a Eurorack sequencer is to somehow store a series of values and play them back repeatedly. Connect that sequence to a clock, and you get the same pattern of sounds out of your synth. This can be done digitally with a circular buffer, in the …read more
Winter NAMM is the world’s largest trade show for musical instrument makers. It is a gear head’s paradise, filled to the brim with guitars, synths, amps, MIDI controllers, an impossibly loud section filled with drums, ukuleles, and all sorts of electronic noisemakers that generate bleeps and bloops. Think of it as CES, only with products people want to buy. We’re reporting no one has yet stuffed Alexa into a guitar pedal, by the way.
As with all trade shows, the newest gear is out, and it’s full of tech that will make your head spin. NAMM is the expression of …read more
Continue reading The Coolest Electronic Toys You’ll See At NAMM
With the release of the Teensy 3.6 and the associated audio processing libraries, it’s never been a better time to get into DIY synth and effects projects. [Scott] is a musician and maker of electronic musical instruments, so he decided to leverage the power of the Teensy and make a delay module that really can’t be done any other way.
The function of this delay module is somewhat similar to a multi-head tape-based delay, only it’s completely impossible outside of the digital domain. There are four ‘read heads’ on a circular buffer. The first three heads play small loops within …read more
Don’t worry, the rhythms themselves aren’t random! That would hardly make for a useful drum machine. [kbob]’s creation does have the ability to randomly generate functional rhythms, though, and it’s all done on a breadboard.
The core of this tiny drum machine is two Teensy dev boards. One is an FM synth tuned to sound like drums, and the other is a random rhythm generator with several controls. The algorithms are from Mutable Instruments’ open source Eurorack modules. The entire thing fits on a breadboard with JIGMOD modules for the user interface. The machine runs on lithium batteries in the …read more
Continue reading Modular Drum Machine Creates Random Rhythms
