Tag Archives: Synthesizer

Building A Wavetable Synth

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Every semester at one of [Bruce Land]’s electronics labs at Cornell, students team up, and pitch a few ideas on what they’d like to build for the final project. Invariably, the students will pick what they think is cool. The only thing we know about [Ian], [Joval] and [Balazs] is that one of them is a synth head. How do we know this? They built a programmable, sequenced, wavetable synthesizer for their final project in ECE4760.

First things first — what’s a wavetable synthesizer? It’s not adding, subtracting, and modulating sine, triangle, and square waves. That, we assume, is the …read more

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MIDI DAC for Vintage Synth Hacks

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A lot of classic synthesizers rely on analog control voltages to vary parameters; this is a problem for the modern musician who may want to integrate such hardware with a MIDI setup. For just this problem, [little-scale] has built a MIDI-controllable DAC for generating control voltages.

It’s a simple enough build – a Teensy 2 is used to speak USB MIDI to a laptop. This allows the DAC to be used with just about any modern MIDI capable software. The Teensy then controls a Microchip MCP4922 over SPI to generate the requisite control voltages. [little-scale]’s video covers the basic assembly …read more

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Adding MIDI Out to the Casio PX410R

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Since the 1980s, MIDI has been a great way to send data between electronic musical instruments. Beginning as a modified serial interface running through optoisolaters and DIN sockets, these days, your hardware is more likely to carry its MIDI data over USB instead. This is great if you want to hook up to a computer without a cumbersome interface, but not so great when you want to connect a bunch of instruments to each other.

The Roland Integra 7 is a rack mount synthesizer with classic MIDI ports. [adriangin] wanted to control the synthesizer over MIDI, but their …read more

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Adding MIDI Out to the Casio PX410R

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Since the 1980s, MIDI has been a great way to send data between electronic musical instruments. Beginning as a modified serial interface running through optoisolaters and DIN sockets, these days, your hardware is more likely to carry its MIDI data over USB instead. This is great if you want to hook up to a computer without a cumbersome interface, but not so great when you want to connect a bunch of instruments to each other.

The Roland Integra 7 is a rack mount synthesizer with classic MIDI ports. [adriangin] wanted to control the synthesizer over MIDI, but their …read more

Continue reading Adding MIDI Out to the Casio PX410R→

Gecho Pocket Synth Looper

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[Mario] wrote us with his synthesizer project that’s currently up on Kickstarter. It looks like a good amount of fun to play with, as you can see in the video on the Kickstarter page. But it’s also built to be easily hackable.

On the hardware front, it’s a tiny four-layer board that’s crammed with parts. At the core is an STM32F4 microcontroller and a DAC. Indeed, the build was inspired by other folks’ work on the STM32F4 Discovery dev kit that has been used to make some pretty interesting synthesizer devices. [Mario]’s version adds two stereo headphone outputs, two microphone …read more

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Gecho Pocket Synth Looper

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[Mario] wrote us with his synthesizer project that’s currently up on Kickstarter. It looks like a good amount of fun to play with, as you can see in the video on the Kickstarter page. But it’s also built to be easily hackable.

On the hardware front, it’s a tiny four-layer board that’s crammed with parts. At the core is an STM32F4 microcontroller and a DAC. Indeed, the build was inspired by other folks’ work on the STM32F4 Discovery dev kit that has been used to make some pretty interesting synthesizer devices. [Mario]’s version adds two stereo headphone outputs, two microphone …read more

Continue reading Gecho Pocket Synth Looper→

Sporty Cars Making Fake Engine Noise

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Following the monumental emissions-cheating scandal at VW, further horrible revelations demonstrate just how corrupt the modern automotive industry has become: many cars make fake engine noise. And we’re not just talking about those darn sneaky Priuses.

Ford, BMWs, Porsche, and yes, Volkswagen are all doing it, to different degrees. Some of the systems, like the one in the BMW M5, play engine sounds at low volumes through the stereo system. As you’d expect from a BMW, it’s an overly-technological solution: they have built essentially a BMW engine-sound synthesizer that responds to the tachometer and gas pedal data from the car’s …read more

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The Most Flexible Synthesizer is DIY, Raspberry Pi

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[Ivan Franco] sent us this great synthesizer project that he’s working on. Or maybe it’s more like a synthesizer meta-project: a synthesizer construction set. You see, what Pryth has is a Raspberry Pi inside that’s running a custom distribution that includes SuperCollider to generate the sound, OSC for the communication layer, and a Teensy with up to 80 (!) multiplexed analog inputs that you’ll connect up to whatever hardware you desire.

With the computer inside the box — the Raspberry Pi in question — you can easily make this system into a standalone musical instrument, without tethering it to your …read more

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Not Just Another Alarm Clock

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Even though [Stefan] sent in this link with the heading “Another Sunrise Alarm Clock“, it’s anything but plain. Sure, from the outside it looks like a simple and refined design, but the story of getting there is hardly straightforward.

Take that nice-looking luminous dial. [Stefan] made it himself, using the same techniques that he’s used for making his own watch faces. (Amazingly, he prints them out on a color ink-jet.) This is a sunrise wake-up clock, but if the bright LEDs don’t wake him up, there’s also a vintage DIY synthesizer project stuffed in the box in place of a …read more

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The Music of a Sunset

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What would you do if you suddenly went blind and could never again see the sun set? How would you again experience this often breathtaking phenomenon? One answer is music, orchestrated by the sun and the Weather Warlock.

Built by the musician [Quintron] (builder and inventor of insane electronic instruments), the Weather Warlock is an analog synthesizer controlled by — you guessed it — the weather. It translates temperature, moisture, wind and sunlight into tones and harmonics with an E major root chord. UV, light, moisture, and temperature sensors combined with an anemometer set up outside feed the weather data …read more

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