toy synth

[noystoise]

 just finished this last night. its pretty fun to play. too bad i have to ship it out on monday

[strssmmnt]

beautiful! do you have a clip maybe?

[noystoise]

circuit bent synthesizer

[3rdness]

wow, that is head hurtingly excellent!

[phantompowers]

That is quality. I'm guessing you have rammed it full of 555 timer chips and a 4017? Plus some other circuitry magic I've yet to come across.
Can any of the keyboard notes be sequenced? I've just breadboarded a variation on the 'Baby 10' sequencer and just about understand how that works with the control voltage but I can't figure out how you can sequence keyboard notes.
Can anyone illuminate me?

I've got one of these keyboards and can't help thinking if you are going to modify/bend it to that extent. you might as well do it to a keyboard with full size keys.
I've got a mate who is a great keyboard player and he loves the sounds I can manipulate from these machines but he says they are all virtually unplayable because of the key size. Mind you, he is a right moaning bastard!

Nice one, great piece of work.

[phantompowers]

Sheeeeeeiiiitttttttttt! Wow, Ive just been checking out your site with all the descriptions on how you did it. I need to do a shit load of homework!
Nice one, great site.

[noystoise]

thanks! yeah, this one was hard to let go of. i can see what you mean about the size of the keys. the thing is the toy keyboard circuit that the synth was built around didnt have the best response unless it was clocked pretty high. if you played one note too close to the next it wouldnt scan it. that was kind of annoying. i would love to build another one of these around a better keyboard. maybe something polyphonic. so far i havent found anything polyphonic that only has one basic square wave and no annoying built in envelopes.

about the sequencer though, have you tried just gating the key points from the sequencer outs? might work. then you could use a 12 position rotary switch to get a full octave for each output. thats what i am going to do next time. tuning the steps by ear is kind of annoying while the sequencer is running. rotary switches are kind of spendy though.
good luck either way.

[phantompowers]

Cheers for the reply. I like the idea about the rotary switch for each octave, I'll be trying that out sometime.
By the way, I spent about 3 hours on your site last night, it is a wealth of information and very inspirational.
Keep up the great work.
Respect.