synthesizer project

[giftiger_wunsch]

Please, please stop twittering on threads, this is a techinical Forum.

And how exactly was that a technical response? I'm not going to have this conversation with you again EricGibbs. If you want to go have a flame war with others as mature as you, then I suggest you use IRC.

 

[Mr RB]

Here's a thought, why not just generate the notes with a PIC, running from a xtal so the notes are accurate?? It's a simple as one chip and a xtal, and a MIDI connector and maybe a resistor.

I wrote some code a while back for a PIC 16F876 that receives the standard MIDI (note on/off) serial signal and generates the note using software. Because of time limitations I didn't get around to fully testing it but I can provide the code if anyone wants to use it to make a synth note generator (instead of talking politics).

I think I even coded a PIC MIDI 8note polyphonic generator, also untested but should be working. The source code will be around here somewhere.

 

[audioguru]

Maybe you could use an electronic "toy organ" from The Dollar Store as an accurate top octave generator. They play all 12 notes in a musical octave. I think they play only one note at a time.

 

[giftiger_wunsch]

Maybe you could use an electronic "toy organ" from The Dollar Store as an accurate top octave generator. They play all 12 notes in a musical octave. I think they play only one note at a time.

Sounds rather like another thread where someone used a 555, several different-value capacitors, and corresponding press-buttons to make a mini toy organ, unfortunately a very painful-sounding one since it used square waves.

What was your opinion on that again AG? "Stamp on it and then bury it"?


Either way the OP of that thread basically did what Andrew's trying to do, except I'm guessing Andrew wants a rather more pleasant sound.

 

[MrDEB]

lets help this sir out

here is a link that has several circuits, parts, kits etc. for your synth
Music From Outer Space

 

[audioguru]

The Music From Outer Space site has demos of some weird noises that are not music and also has some music sounds. Variable filters and drum sounds are used.

A member here called Dr. EM has a site with a lot of wonderful synth music. He made the synth himself.

 

[keckclip]

Hi, I just built my first synth circuit for a class project using a ICL8038 VCO and a PIC18 to read MIDI note data. Once read into the PIC there are two options that I'm aware of for converting that digital data into a corresponding voltage to send to the VCO: 1) create a lookup table that will convert the note number to an appropriate value for a DAC to convert or 2) send the byte directly to the DAC and use an exponential op amp that drives the VCO. I used the second option, which wasn't as accurate (roughly one octave of properly tuned frequencies) and required quite a bit of fine-tuning but I did learn a whole lot I know this might not pertain directly to your approach but I found this to be the easiest for a fist-time diy synth project.

Hope this helps