I’ve made a lot of terrible Arduino synthesizers over the years. Only a select few made it off the breadboard. Only one still works.
So consider these museum pieces in the collection of janky, late night answers to questions like “what would it sound like to ‘arpeggiate’ based on the Collatz sequence?” Or “what if the goal of an instrument wasn’t musicality, but its ability to produce extremely rich spaceship screams?”
[drone synth]
There’s a lot of sound happening across the audio spectrum here. Use good speakers.
I made this for a friend of mine who helped me with a repetitive stress injury. Below is a video of him using it when it arrived in the mail without instructions or warning. He’s the best. The synth itself is just a doubling of a simple phase modulation synthesizer built with the fantastic Mozzi library.
In 2020 I spent a few months designing, coding, and soldering cheap, digital prototypes for a variety of standard eurorack modules: VCO, VCA, envelope generator, sample-and-hold, etc. The results were fun but not really worth the effort of building them.
The next year, in 2021, I spent a few months designing, coding, soldering, and fabricating an improved iteration. It was a single, flexible eurorack module that could toggle between the different base functions: a VCO on Friday and a Euclidean sequencer on Saturday. I got close. I ran out of my $100 budget well before it really worked properly off the breadboard though.
Written on: December 8, 2024