/r/synthdiy
building, modifying and repairing synthesizers
rules:
1. No transphobia, racism, or bigotry of any kind.
2. Try to keep it on topic.
3. It’s chill to share and sell your work here, but (a) it has to be DIY-related—something that other users can build or use to build—and (b) you have to make an effort to be a human being participating in a community, and not just a marketing account. Moderators’ call on that one.
Flair Filter
Related Subreddits:
Wiki:
/r/synthdiy
Anyone know how to exactly export their own customs samples to be used in hagiwo’s sample drums? I completely understand making audio into a RAW file, but it’s converting it into array data In PROGMEM format that I don’t really understand. I know he provided a link in his page for PROGMEN Sakuzo-San but I don’t know what that is exactly or how to use it. Any help?
So I've got an LFO that I made, and I don't even remember where I got the clock sync algorithm from. It worked okay with an lfo with a 16-bit phase accumulator, and even better with a 32-bit one, but it inevitably goes out of phase due to the lack of any dedicated phase correction.
The formula in my non-math-literate pseudomath:
sec_in_us = 1000000
bit_width = 32
update_rate_hz = 1000
((sec_in_us / period_between_clock_ticks) << bit_width) / update_rate_hz
Essentially, this makes it so that if you got exactly 1 << 32 then one cycle takes a second.
With this, I'm wondering how I can do what the title says and keep this thing in sync. I think that if I subtract the result * update_rate_hz
from the ((sec_in_us / period_between_clock_ticks) << bit_width)
, I'll get the 'error', but I don't know what to do after that.
I'm open to other means of doing the clock sync if the method I've given above is completely alien. If anyone's got any suggestions at all, I'm happy to hear! Thanks!
Hello all! I am almost finished with the first iteration of my “fixed” 104hp 6u rack. This project is based on this quote “How little money can I spend while getting a beast of a machine that can do pretty much anything?” ~Faust
Yes…I just quoted myself! This project cost a lot of time and money but is a QUARTER of the price that a consumer bought rack would cost. But hell! The time it took to build this whole thing more than made up for that price difference.
I started out with no knowledge about electronic DIY except having experience soldering when I was 13 (I was 21 when I started this project) and now just about a year later I can proficiently make Pcb layouts based on schematics and modify those schematics to morph them to my desires. It’s pretty fricken rad if you ask me. If I were to see my today self a year ago I’d tell you to kick rocks and stop trying to be funny.
I know there’s a lot of people that want to get into modular but don’t have the money and just watch YouTube fantasizing about how good it would feel to turn those knobs. Really I don’t blame them for not making the leap, this shit is expensive as fuuuuuck. This is all just a long winded way of saying YOU GUYS GOT THIS! It takes a lot of time and determination but in the end it’s so worth it for both the savings, accomplishment, and knowledge gained through the process. You just have to take the first step!
Also I am here for anyone that has questions about anything. I don’t know everything but I will do my best to point you in the right direction wether that’s towards a solution or someone that knows better than me.
PSU UPDATE
As you all can see in the video I got the PSU working and have stress tested it up to 60% of the theoretical max current. (About 3A +12V and 2A -12V) and it runs flawlessly. I did have to make some modifications to the design which makes it quite bulky at the moment. The DC-DC converters we’re getting EXTREMELY HOT like fuck I need to turn this off before everything melts hot.
So, I got some heat sinks and 2 60mm pc fans and rigged it all together with some card board…voila, I’ve been running it for about 2 hours and it is pretty much room temperature maybe a bit warmer.
I also made the mistake of switching out the Pcb footprint for the 5V converter right before ordering the pcbs and not double checking it. Long story short I have 2 pins flipped so the 5V doesn’t work on V1 of the MEGA PSU so that means the usb terminals are useless crying face
But ladies and gentlemen…that’s the process. We try, fail, adapt and overcome. It’s how we learn, and how we evolve our skills. I recently lost my job so I cannot make a version 2 of the PSU for at least another month or two due to needing to save my money for more important things.
So stay tuned for that. I appreciate all of your guy’s support and help throughout this journey I have a lot more planned. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week!
I got a Vox Jaguar that is partially working. I replaced all of the electrolytic caps, and replaced the 2 wire 120VAC power connector with a 3 wire (computer power supply style) connector. This is the schematic for my power supply.
My question is, is it safe to connect the middle ground wire of the 120VAC adapter to the case of the power supply, which is also the ground of the output rectified voltage of the power supply, and the case of the housing holding the OFF/ON switch?
I don't have any experience with these types of circuits so I thought i'd ask here.
Truly just need help understanding what parts needed and such along with basic understanding of how to piece it together if I did. Really want to get into this as a hobby.
I want to use the Raspberry Pi Pico for its USB host capabilities and want to power any USB device connected to it. I will use it for receiving MIDI signals from the USB device. The MIDI will then be sent over serial to a Teensy 4.1.
The Teensy 4.1 will also use its own USB host header, so the whole circuit will have two USB host ports.
I want to power both the Pico and the Teensy with external 5V, to begin with using a bench power supply but then probably via USB-C PD.
My questions about this:
Hi,
I am working on a setup where I need to achieve an 8kV voltage supply to drive HASEL actuators (a novel actuator). Currently, I only have access to two bipolar high-voltage generators (shown as picture), each capable of outputting ±5kV. They have two terminals: one high voltage output terminal and one high voltage return terminal. I am considering connecting these in series to reach the required 8kV.
I have connected the two HV generators in series, where the ground (real ground) terminals of both generators are shorted. One generator outputs +4kV, and the other outputs -4kV, giving a total of 8kV across their outputs. However, I have a critical issue: this configuration doesn’t allow me to use both ground terminals effectively. Grounding is crucial in my setup because the HASEL actuators tend to retain residual charges after operation, and an accessible ground path would allow for efficient charge dissipation.
I attempted a connection similar to batteries in series, where the output terminal of one generator was connected to the ground terminal of the second generator. Unfortunately, this setup didn’t yield the expected higher voltage.
If anyone has experience with series connections of high-voltage generators or knows of a way to achieve an 8kV output while also making use of the generators' ground terminals for charge dissipation, I would be extremely grateful for your insights!
Thank you in advance!
hello everyone :)
i am about to write my thesis about a topic along the lines of DIY-synths (also: tinkering, maker education, circuit bending etc.)
for this i want to conduct interviews with experts in the field
so far i have identified several people with larger youtube-channels and other projects
to bring more diversity into my research i am now looking for female or nonbinary people for my interviews which are experts in the field
do you happen to be such a person or perhaps could recommend one? (be it via youtube or other portals)
thanks a lot and have a great day!
edit: wow, i woke up to all your lovely responses today - thank you so much! :)
HI Can anyone advise what resistor value this looks like and the capacitor?
I don't have a schematic so am literally going off a still from a video thanks
Hello! Basically I want to convert old gutted 3.5 octave 41 keyboard that has a reed switch per key into a standalone synthesizer (It's a Formanta Mini soviet keytar, stylish as hell and keyboard feels nice to play)
I am not very experienced with any microcontrollers though...
In search of arduino projects of digital synthesizers that use the abundance of mega's inputs to connect one key per input and use other pins for parameter control and whatnot.
Or is it maybe simpler to fit two modules inside, one mega module with keys and pots as a midi controller (may need help finding such projects) and another one as some one of the many MIDI controlled arduino synthesizers? With optional benefit of midi output
Hi folks,
I've been working on a little DIY synth board. As you can see below, U6/U7 are very large chips, MIDI optoisolators for the two TRS MIDI inputs above. The spec sheet is here, they are Lite-On 6N137S-TA1-L. The schematic is also below (or in GitHub).
Can anyone suggest a physically much smaller opto-isolator for MIDI input please? This is just a test board, so a big one is fine, but I'd like to eventually make this board smaller and with 5 MIDI inputs (and outputs). If the suggestion is not compatible at the schematic level, I would appreciate an example schematic.
Thanks!!
I am trying to reverse engineer the MFOS Eight Stage Phase Shifter however I am struggling to understand how the phaser stage works.
this is what one stage looks like
I assume it is some sort of all pass filter however I can't find anywhere else which has this configuration with the C22 feeding back into the input. Also there is no buffer stage after each ota which is used in the configuration where an ota is used with an opamp like this:
the allpass that I am used to. I assumed that R would be replaced with the ota
Would anyone be able to explain how this works? Thanks
How complicated would it be and what would be the method for porting Ableton Link for Arduino? I’ve seen that the Torso developer created a library for the ESP32, but that seems to have been taken down from Github now for unclear reasons.
Here’s the link to the Ableton Link repo: https://github.com/Ableton/link
Other threads that might be of help for understanding the feasibility:
https://github.com/Ableton/link/pull/68 https://github.com/Ableton/link/issues/87
based on this article https://www.electrosmash.com/tube-screamer-analysis
gotta love electrosmash
You've probably seen these cheap handhelds that can emulate most things from an Atari to a PS2 depending on how nice the chipset is. I recently got one and set it up as a frontend for a "headless" Dirtywave M8, this is relatively easy to do since you can sideload programs and most of these handhelds have USB OTG for either wireless connections or peripherals. ArkOS (a custom firmware for linux handhelds) features a utility called Portmaster to get non-emulator programs onto the device, this is the loader for the M8 port.
What I'd like to see is something similar to the miniDexed project, using Portmaster to launch Dexed rather than running it baremetal off a Raspberry Pi. The UI would be limited, but it could fit quite a bit more than the 32 characters miniDexed can do. A keyboard/controller could be connected through the OTG port and most of these handhelds come with a 3.5mm jack for stereo audio out.
I'm sure the audio quality wouldn't be great, and it would probably be limited to one tone generator, but I like the idea of having a single device that can run M8, LSDJ, Nanoloop, and Dexed. These devices being already built, cheap, battery powered, and extremely portable is a plus too.
I don't have much application development experience, but I'd like to get an idea of the hurdles that would be involved with making a go at this. I'd be in over my head, but I feel like all the pieces are right there spread across a few github pages.
So I have a little VCO set up and now I'm trying to control it with a keyboard. I don't actually have a CV source so I made a little voltage divider and button setup. I put in 9V, and divide it to 3V using resistors and then capture the output using an audio jack which controls the VCO.
I basically want to expand this into a 2 octave keyboard but I'm not sure what I should make the resistor values or how to connect the buttons together. I'm really new to electronics so when I tried looking it up online I was a bit overloaded with info lol. Much love and appreciate everything
I'm looking for a main board for the Roland JD-800.
I aim to preserve the main CPU code using a logic analyzer.
Not everyone likes Planet Drone - but that's ok
I am an ambient/drone guitarist, and I mostly use Reaktor via Ableton for my effects. This post is to determine if a product exists or if I’ll have to build it myself. If it’s the latter, hopefully someone has some advice.
I watched a video a few years ago with Squarepusher showing an interviewer around his home studio and at one point, he was showing off a pretty large expression pedal setup he uses to control his bass sound, and I’m guessing he somehow has this big board of EV5 expression pedals routed into Reaktor.
The video in question is here https://youtu.be/zEofbwt0zRY?si=aoFAf5xQ__8HG1CX and the part I’m talking about is at around the 7:10 mark.
Now for the questions. Does a product that receives multiple signals from expression pedals (TRS connections) then send them through USB already exist, or would I need to build such a device? Would it be feasible to get my hands on one of those DIY Arduino kits and use TRS jacks instead of linear pots, which I would then be able to plug passive expression pedals into? What considerations would need to be made if building this?
I’ve never “built” anything but I’m not completely uninformed on the science behind it, so I think I could figure it out if I had to build it.
Any thoughts?
I've been pulling my hair out over a Rangoon build, and I'm chasing what looks like a short somewhere in the 3.3V circuit. I have removed the STM chip and the regulator from the board using hot air and wicked the areas to remove the possibility of bridges there, but it is still reading 990 ohms to ground everywhere in the 3.3V circuit.
Because its such a specific number, I'm leaning towards bad component as opposed to solder bridge/actual short as I would expect the number to be much lower.
Does anyone have any recommendations as to where to start checking? The only idea I have is to start removing components 1 by 1 and rechecking to figure out where the problem is.
One last question, the LM1117 regulator is reading about 600 ohms between the output pin and ground when removed from the board. Anyone happen to know if this is normal? The datasheet looks like it has resistors between the output pin and ground internal to the regulator, so I think it may be ok but I'm not sure.
Thanks in advance!
I recorded a short video on my phone to make it at least a little clearer.
I currently have a patch which I use to play a live Set. For this I generate a kick with the sallen key Filter from befaco resonating at a lower frequency and given some AD envelope in the adjustable input. After this i have an VCA and various soundshaping and filtering in my kick patch. I really like the sound of the kick that comes from the sallen key Filter and use it a lot for my music.
Before I start playing I tune two oscillators and the befaco Filter to the same note. While playing the filters frequency drifts away and often ends up one half note higher then before. Sometimes the tune only lasts for 5 mins. Since I am working with a lot of melodies I would like to have a stabil tune for a longer time.
Does anyone have an idea what would help me to stay in tune? My setup is mostly self built and I thinking of some kind of self regulating module. My idea would be to generate some DC voltage from the resonance frequency, compare it to some value and use the second CV input of the Filter for an automated adjustment..? Although I was thinking about using a single power supply only for the Filter? I have two in my setup to separate digital noise from the filter which is audible its noise spectrum. Currently I have also other modules on this power supply. May hope would be that the usage of only one power supply for the filter module would reduce any influence of other modules.
I am happy about any input that helps me with this problem. Thanks in advance.