my first synthesizer

Today I started the first stage in what may become online collaborative synth music performance system, I built a very basic synthesizer.

My design is based on one kindly posted on hackaday which I built on stripboard (very badly). It produces a simple square wave using a hex inverter IC and a capacitor and resistor, the hackaday article also details how to build in an LFO and other bits and pieces however I’ve saved for the next version which intend to package in a nice box al la amazing rolo.

I have often noted people having difficultly locating reasonably priced parts for this type of project online, all parts for this project were sourced in the UK from http://www.bitsbox.co.uk who I found to provide exemplary service for a very good price, especially if you order only a small number of items.

The next version will have more controls and in parallel to this I’ve just received an arduino, this will be used with a digital potentiometer to control the synth parameters in the first instance via a GUI probably written in java or processing and then eventually PHP.