Breadboard Synthesizer

About the only thing more fun than fiddling with synthesizers is building them. Or at least taking a flying stab at it. Now, I’ve certainly built my share of fairly basic synth parts… mults, an AS3340 VCO, amps, and so on. I’ve even recently made a perfectly adequate Eurorack-compatible power supply. But I decided to kick it up a notch a couple months ago when I built this:

Maybe “decided to” is a bit strong. It just sort of happened, after having watched Moritz Klein’s superb DIY VCO series, his filter, his arpeggiator, and so on. Would you be surprised to learn that synths on a breadboard connect just as easily as synth modules? Derp.

By the time I puzzled out a CD4017-based 16-step sequencer I realized I had something pretty nifty on my hands. Add an envelope generator and a simple clock and you have more or less all you need for a fun little groove-box—all crammed into a series of breadboard knit together by hot glue and tangle of wires. I will be spending some time trying to turn it into a standalone semi-modular sort of deal, and perhaps even a synth module. It might lose some of the rustic charm in the transition, but ought to be a bit sturdier and easier to control—at minimum.

I’ll see if I can’t post a few more things about this thing. Certainly some schematics are in order. You’ll notice perhaps that while the quantizer bears some resemblance to Moritz Klein’s it is also a great deal different. It is perhaps my only true innovation (for lack of a better word), as much of what you see here is cobbled together from datasheets and various schematics floating around.

Certainly I’ll be documenting the journey from breadboard to enclosure in the coming weeks/months/years. It’s something that’s occupied my thoughts a lot lately, and will demand a willingness to launch myself pretty damn far outside my comfort zone’s tight radius. Stay tuned, and carpe diem!

A Brief Sojourn in the Land of Synth DIY

So I’ve been a little low-key with the whole blog thing, of late. Sorry, team. We crusty old-timers need plenty of beauty sleep and smoothing down the wrinkles erupting all over my body is a time intensive process, especially given that the joints are taut as bowstrings. I blame the microdoses of Viagra in the drinking water.

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But in my free time, between brushing cat hair off my dentures and filing down my corns, I have embarked on a rather interesting journey: I’ve decided to pick up synth DIY as a hobby. Yeah, another one, amirite? The learning curve has been fairly intense and quite intimidating, and, as I have long maintained, have no idea what I am doing. This mantra of mine is especially true of electronics, where my experience is limited to some rather weak Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects. However, after a few frustrating months, I have breadboarded a VCO! See above (the blog consultant I spoke to said to put a picture towards the top, even if it is just a cat picture, because nobody reads anything anymore.)

This is a fairly simple VCO, if ever such a thing can be said. In fact, it is somewhat lazy, relying largely on the AS3340 (a knockoff of the famous CEM 3340) which requires very little in the way of effort to get sound out of it. Well, sort of. If anything, it is a godsend that it takes care of the 1v/oct tracking for you, which is one of the tricky bits of building an oscillator. This design is based on a subset of the AS3340 reference schematic, which is pretty straightforward after you spend a couple semesters in trade school learning how to read schematics. Just kidding—a few hours of Googling is enough to get up to speed.

Naturally, if you want to get up and running without knowing what you are doing (an approach I often endorse) there are some pretty excellent tutorials from LookMumNoComputer (perhaps most famous for his Furby Organ, which is probably the niftiest thing on the Internets so far.) If you are going down that route, be aware that he is using the rather more expensive CEM 3340, so be sure to pay attention to the values used in the AS3340 reference schematic, if you are an old cheapskate like me.

Anyway, whatever your approach, it won’t be long before you’ll end up with some dope, clean waveforms, as pictured here:

See the blurred oscilloscope in the background? Cool.

See the blurred oscilloscope in the background? Cool.

Do the kids still say “gnarly”? Because I think that looks gnarly. In any case, expect some more writeups about this in the coming months. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll have an Etsy storefront and some PCBs for sale on the Thonk or whatever.

Carpe Diem!

The Stag Funeral

Well a fresh Neolithic Ceremonial Headdress release has “dropped” as the kids say. It has a sort of scatological ring to it, doesn’t it? Regardless, I am pleased to present The Stag Funeral, my latest release under the Neolithic Ceremonial Headdress moniker. Much like previous releases, it’s a sort of ambient record that’s hard to slot into a specific subgenre. Besides the drone-y bits and characteristic mangled field recordings that have become part of the NCH sound, there’s also a few tracks that lean rather heavily into percussion, and then some bits that stray into a contrapuntal melodic style. In short, it builds on to many of the things that made the previous record so unique and interesting to listen to. Also like the previous record, it makes great background music for your desk job, a walk in the park, or a midnight drive.

For modular synth nerds who are super curious, I can speak briefly about the rack and modules used in the production of The Stag Funeral. As with the previous record, I wanted to keep the rig I recorded on fairly small: 6U of 84hp with a complementary row of 1U tiles. For most of of the album, the configuration looked something like this:

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The first thing that that jumps out at you is probably that the only sound sources (not counting the audio rate signals from the Wogglebug) are two Antumbra Atom modules and the MakeNoise Morphagene (which can also be characterized as a DSP effects module). For those of you not familiar with the Atom, it is essentially an 18hp version of Mutable Instruments Elements, a modal synthesis module, that provides a huge pallete of sounds that range from eerie to dark to beautiful. Learning to keep this module reigned in is a bit of a chore, but well worth it. I certainly tried to keep things out of the “really weird” end of the spectrum for the most part (after all, the album has to be listenable, doesn’t it?) but still managed to eke out some very expressive stuff.

Probably the most ballsy move is taking up 36 of my precious hp with the Intellijel Rainmaker, the delay module to end all delay modules. Much has already been said elsewhere about why this module is so incredibly magnificent. I was a little hesitant to bring it into the fold, given that I find the Intellijel Shapeshifter very un-fun to use for anything beyond a basic dual wavetable VCO on account of its extreme reliance on menu diving, but my experience with the Rainmaker has been very pleasant. Despite its appearance as a menu-diving monster, it’s actually very straightforward to use and doesn’t take long to acquire a decent understanding.

Some tracks swap these components variously—some use the Shapeshifter instead of the Atoms, some use the Make Noise Erbe Verb. I’ve swapped out the single Ornament and Crime and replaced it with two 8hp “micro” versions of the module as built by some dude on Reverb.com. All in all the setup was pretty good for my intentions, and I’ll probably continue to use some variation going forward.

The biggest godsend to my new setup was taking the mixer outboard… sort of. It’s still a Eurorack mixer (the WMD Performance Mixer to be precise), but I installed it in its own 3U 54 hp case that also has two rows of 1U tiles. This allows me to transition easily between this portable rig and my studio rig without sacrificing all the WMD PM bells and whistles (figurative bells and whistles) that I’ve grown to rely on.

To summarize, it’s all so incredibly awesome, am I right? Feel free to leave a comment or such if you have questions, or simply wish to showing my work with praise. Or horrible insult or whatever. Anyhow, I’ll try to be a little bit more active on this blog this year. Given that I receive only a handful of visitors in any given month, I’m usually fairly content to keep my thoughts to myself. Naturally, I might have some more visitors if I improved the content, so I suppose that’s on me, right? Anyway, thank you for listening, and carpe diem!

The Nerdy Gurdy - Conceiving a New Voltage-Controlled Drone Instrument

Rediscovering an Ancient Instrument

I recently learned of a peculiar instrument born in the Middle Ages called a hurdy gurdy. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's perhaps best conceived as a viola with a hand-cranked wheel that is used to excite its strings, producing a tense, persistent drone. A set of levers or buttons control a melody on one or more dedicated strings called "chanterelles." The sound created by this incredible device is comparable to a bagpipe fused with a viol da gamba. Its workings are best explained by a pro as in the video below:

Patty Gurdy makes some exceptional videos about the hurdy gurdy, and is part of a pretty neat metal band besides. Given that she has the most tricked out hurdy gurdy the world has ever known, and given her special expertise with the instrument, the music featured in her videos is not often representative of the typical hurdy gurdy sound, which has a distinct Ren-Faire flair, and often tracking towards pirate music, such as is heard in Bear McCreary's incredible score for the television series Black Sails.

It's interesting that such a complex instrument comes out of the 11th century and was a not-uncommon folk instrument for hundreds of years in various forms across Central and Eastern Europe through the Renaissance. To produce a hurdy gurdy requires a fairly high degree of craftsmanship that I'd have not thought within reach of the average Teutonic serf.  Today, a professionally built fully featured hurdy gurdy costs roughly the same amount as a down payment on a new car, give or take, though if you like to play eBay Roulette, you can find much cheaper ones.

Send in the Drones

And while I dig Medieval and Renaissance music, I'm not sure if it it fits in with my oeuvre. That said, there's something rather interesting about the sound of this instrument that might lend it to the sort of experimental/drone/dark ambient genre as well. Phill Niblock's piece Hurdy Hurry (left), crystallizes this idea splendidly, subtly evolving the interplay of the various strings over the course of fifteen minutes. Like most drone music, it's something of a niche sound, sure. It is a little reminiscent of Gyorgi Ligeti's Atmospheres in the way it transforms an acoustic sound to something otherworldly.

Reinventing the Wheel (and Soundboard, Chanter Lifter, Trompette, Etcetera)

A strange idea took root while researching this music-making machine. What if I were to build one? I don't mean one of these carefully crafted works of art and meticulous Renaissance recreations. What about creating something hurdy-gurdy-ish? Something that included some of the elements of a hurdy gurdy, but responded to voltage control, such as from a modular synth system, or some other kind of controller. The wheel could be driven with motors, and an array of servos could control the chanter lifters. The resulting contraption might not look much like a hurdy gurdy (nor even sound like one), but I think the idea still has some merit, at least insofar as it presents some interesting challenges. I think I'd like to call it a "nerdy gurdy." Over the next few weeks I'll try to sketch up some ideas and evaluate the feasibility. Stay tuned.