An excellent thread detailing a build of the ‘Workshop Oscillator Machine’ (WOM) via Bugbrand. The WOM is a tone generator/oscillator designed around an NXP Hex Inverter and an NXP Hex Schmitt Trigger. What i particularly like about this kit is that it’s designed with the intent of usage in workshop and educational events and includes all required parts. Although i have not personally built this kit, I suspect by looking at it that it’s a nice balance between ease of build and functionality. And if you were so inclined Bugbrand includes the schematic on their site so you could always wire one up on your own, sans pcb, and see what happens.
Cavan Fyans at the time of writing this is a PhD student at the Sonic Arts Research Centre. His personal site along with detailing his extensive academic work also outlines a number of his DIY electronic instruments. My favorite is the “Tape Box 2” which as the name suggests is an updated version of “Tape Box 1″. It’s perfectly simple, does what it should, and doesn’t distract with excessive controls, knobs, and gimmickry. I also have to give him a thumbs-up on his use of high quality pictures documenting his work online. Nothing makes me more disappointed than a thumbnail that leads to a picture of… a thumbnail.
This is from another ElectroMusic.com user named ‘RF’. ‘RF’ [Nick] has built a monster DIY analog synth built mostly from MFOS kits from Ray Wilson. RF’s site gives a great deal of information on where he got started when looking to explore DIY synthesis. One of these days I’m going to take off 5 years and photograph all of these synths and publish it in a luxurious hard cover volume with nothing but gear-porn quality photos.
This post by ElectroMusic.com user Rich Decibels highlights a industrial grade Tone/Drone generator based around the 40106 Hex Schmitt Trigger. He also provides the schematic for your benefit. This looks like a great build for a beginner which will provide immediate sonic enjoyment. Check out his blog for a handful of his other awesome projects (like a home-made oscilloscope).
Usually I will just post a couple images with brief descriptions of the process behind a project I post. But with the completion of my mods to the MFOS Weird Sound Generator I wanted to offer up a couple of the dos and don’ts I learned while working on this.
Dos
Do buy an Alesis Quadraverb on eBay for 10 bucks and use the 1 space rack case instead of buying something new.
Do save the seemingly useless Alesis front panel because you never know… you might need it (and I did).
Do take the time to measure twice, three and four times.
Do be prepared to find out that your measurements might still be wrong.
Do go with your instincts and spend the extra cash to make it look nice.
Do use pre-tinned solid wire (and save a lot of time).
Do drill or punch starter holes.
Do look up parts you’re unfamiliar with in Mouser’s four inch thick hard-copy catalog. It’s far easier to get an idea of what your actually buying sight unseen.
Don’ts
Don’t waste three weeks comparison shopping at on-line front-panel design shops. You spend a lot of time learning stripped down versions of proprietary CAD tools that can be enormously frustrating and in the end the price difference isn’t that significant.
Don’t do anything less than 2mm on the width of the front panel.
Don’t ever go back to stranded wire.
Don’t pass by the $20 Quadraverb and waste two and a half weeks looking for a better deal. 18 days is worth the extra $10 bucks compared to the money you save from buying new.
Don’t rush.
And lastly, Don’t do this:
When you can do this:
This is a nice shot of the whole unit which shows the excellent work the folks at Front Panel Express did on this. If you’re considering spending the coin on a custom front panel and on the fence about it I can say without reservation that my expectations were exceeded and I will never doubt that it was money well spent. Just make sure you have your measurements right. I made a couple mistakes which I was able to work around without major issue but it was at the expense of several days time figuring out alternative solutions.
Sometimes you don’t want to have to spend hours researching designs and finding parts to build a project… sometimes you just want to buy everything you need at once, solder it up, and have fun without the worry of troubleshooting your design. At those times a kit is perfect and in this case that’s just what I did.
I’ve posted about MFOS before. They manufacture a number of kits from entry level to advanced synthesis kits. I decided to go with the ‘WSG’… or Weird Sound Generator. Ray Wilson has some excellent designs that are really fun to put together. I managed to get this up and running in a weekend without any hassles and it sounds great. It’s basically two squarewave generators with LFOs and a resonance filter. If your just starting out this is perfect… and even though I’ve been doing this for a while it was still a ton of fun. Ray’s taken all the hard work out of the process and made DIY synthesis simple, straight forward, and well documented.
He provides all the documentation you could need including wiring diagrams, pcb templates, schematics, block diagrams, and parts lists so I won’t duplicate that here. I’ll just add some comments on the build and a video of the finished project at the end of the post…
Here we have the parts list laid out…
Most of the components have been soldered to the PCB at this point. All the parts are included in the kit and none were missing.
The finished PCB sans ICs.
I used a aluminum enclosure from an old broken gemeni turntable mixer I bought off of ebay. I’ve had great luck finding things like this for 10 bucks or less sometimes and they’re perfect when you need spare knobs, op amps, or enclosures. I just flipped it upside down and took of the rubber feet. Holes were drilled using a step bit (these are a must have for drilling good holes in aluminum enclosures).
Here is everything wired up.
This is the PCB finally wired up. One complaint about this is that the holes on the PCB for all the wiring are placed all over the PCB which makes for really messy wiring. I found that extra care was required to make sure the wiring didn’t bend too much and come detached from the PCB. It seems like using headers would be a much easier way to go about this the next time around.
When I put this together I first soldered the hookup-wire to the board, then to the components on the panel which makes it really difficult to keep things neat and tidy. Next time I will wire up the panel first, then complete the board, then make my connections to allow for a cleaner layout.
Just a tip for beginners… don’t shrink the heat shrink tubing until you’ve tested your work and are certain it works. It’s a major irritation to have to remove heat shrink tubing after you’ve already… well, shrunk it.
I’ve posted about some of the work Rare Beasts has done before, specifically the Wicks Looper. This is another one of his recent creations. The “Strobetronic Noiselab”. I can’t say I’m a fan of the $475 price tag for what appears to be PVC pipe. Swanky botique prices notwithstanding it looks like a boatload of fun. StrobeTronic NoiseLab by rarebeasts on Etsy.
I happened across Ryan’s excellent DIY synth and immediately recognized the housing he used for it. It’s a Victoreen Radiological Survey meter. You can find these in abundance on eBay for pretty cheap (which is exactly what I did). Hats off to Ryan on this really cool modification. You can find images and more about Ryan on his site Pickleinn.com
I don’t know much about this one except what is written on Matrixsynth
This one in via John L. Rice. It’s a Living VCO made by Peter:
“I’m not a MOTMer & I make my own panels, so I don’t have much to add to this debate. I did however finish wiring my Living VCO module today. Its still on the bench being checked over and is not integrated into my system yet but is looking and sounding good so far.
I managed a FRAC format panel design that has all the stock features and fits pretty comfortably (for me) on a 5U frac panel.
Here’s a pic of the module taken some time ago before beginning wiring.
peter”
