This one is Ray Wilson’s DIY synthesizer website.
I first saw him on youtube, screwing around with an echo rockit noise box. I was hypnotized.
I found his site and was hooked. I spent the next couple years making synthesizer modules at a manic pace.
The magical thing about Ray’s site is is his teaching style. He gives the circuit schematics, but also explanations of how/why they work in language that is pretty easy to understand. He really approaches electronics from a practical standpoint rather than what you’d get in an intro class somewhere. This website was my introduction to electronics, and it can get you far when it comes to understanding analog design and signal processing.
You can really get a feel for Ray’s personality from his writing on the site. He died in 2016, and I weirdly get a little choked up when I look at that echo rockit page. His website was a right-time-right-place thing for me, and it helped change the trajectory of my life in a very real way.
Anyways. Check out Music From Outer Space, and like Ray would say, Good learning…
Oooh this is a really interesting one, it seems to overlap a weird period of internet history. I for one have never seen a website simultaneously link to FB and Twitter, and also to web browser download pages. It’s like learning that Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born the same year, makes you feel like the timelines are wrong and shouldn’t overlap, yet they do.
Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born the same year
Woah.
I started building my modular synth about a year before he died. Very much inspired by his schematics and tutorials.
Same for me. I learned so much from his circuit descriptions. I ended up building a sound lab mini synth in eurorack format, plus a bunch of his precision VCOs, VCAs, and a mixer.
What format did you build?
Euro rack - but after moving it across the country 6 years ago, I started using it less and less. This year I decided to sell it off, I’m three modules away from being eurorack free, for better or worse.
Very cool. I used to build guitar effects pedals in middle school and high school. I’m going to have to try some of these.
Does he have a list of which ones work with a keyboard? Can they all use a keyboard? And does he have any circuits for converting a midi keyboard into an octave per volt one? It shouldn’t be too hard with something like an arduino, right? Just need a way to output a variable voltage.
They run on 1V per octave control voltage. Lots of keyboards can output that natively, the arturia keystep is what I have because it has some sequencing capabilities as well.
There are tons of circuits out there for midi to CV conversion. Arduino is harder than you’d expect because it can’t output straight analog so you need to interface with a DAC or filter of some kind. Temperature compensation is also pretty important. Obviously not insurmountable problems, so there are lots of DIY designs of varying quality. Here’s the second one I found on a search: https://github.com/elkayem/midi2cv
You can have a really good time with the sound lab mini synth 2 and a sequencer or keyboard. It has 2 voices so you can animate a drone and sequence/play over the top. Or use it to drive spectrally rich audio into a bigger system for processing with mutable modules or whatever. Sky’s the limit :)
If you want a relatively straightforward, but still really cool project, the echo rockit is where it’s at. Makes a great effect and is still a fun stand alone noisebox.
