The cheapest synthesizer you can ever build

teledemic.com

47 points·jipumarino··8 comments

Check out Tristan Perishe's beautiful 1-bit symphony. He also builds minimal circuits by hand, and I'm always surprised at how rich and complex the music is.

http://www.1bitsymphony.com/

You can actually do better than this - it's possible to build a switchable pulse, sawtooth and sine'ish wave oscillator from a single op-amp. During my childhood my father was heavily into electronics and electronic music, and one of his interests was designing and buildning his own analog synthesizers. One of his more compact feats for one of his many synthesizers was four three-wave oscillators built on a single TL074 (quad op-amp).

This is what I came to point out. The 555 is a horrible waste of electronics for something as simple as an oscillator. (Also, iirc, 555 timers do nasty things to your rails.)

You can get a better (50% duty cycle) out of a comparator/op-amp, a capacitor, and a few resistors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Op_Amp.E2...

555 timers are much more useful as one-shots, since that functionality is much more difficult to implement with a comparator.

The 555 is probably used because of the influence of the Atari Punk Console(which is typically based on a dual 555 design).

Or with Schmitt Triggers -- I built a little synth around a schematic from Music From Outer Space -- makes awesome Forbidden Planet type noises.

Yeah. Or a single transistor.

Schematics. Now! ;)

Agreed - I would love to see it. The other requirement for this build was that it be resistance-controlled, so you can just throw whatever you want between the sensor leads.

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