Synthesizers can make some great music, but sometimes they feel a bit robotic in comparison to their analog counterparts. [Sound Werkshop] built a “minimum viable” expressive synth to overcome this challenge. (YouTube)
Dubbed “The Wiggler,” [Sound Werkshop]’s expressive synth centers on the idea of using a flexure as a means to control vibrato and volume. Side-to-side and vertical movement of the flexure is detected with a pair of linear hall effect sensors that feed into the Daisy Seed microcontroller to modify the patch.
The build itself is a large 3D printed base with room for the flexure and a couple of breadboards for prototyping the circuits. The keys are capacitive touch pads, and everything is currently held in place with hot glue. [Sound Werkshop] goes into detail in the video (below the break) on what the various knobs and switches do with an emphasis on how it was designed for ease of use.
If you want to learn more about flexures, be sure to checkout this Open Source Flexure Construction Kit.
Ages ago I made the same thing in analog. It was quite simple: a ribbon controller on pivoted arm would provide the note, which you could wiggle left and right to make the vibrato. Pressing it down against a stiff spring would change the amplitude of the signal, which would drive it against a diode clipping circuit that was built to be very “soft”, so it would gradually round it off, changing the oscillator waveform from a saw/triangle to more of a sine wave. This had a similar effect as pushing it through a low-pass filter, except it would eventually clip it to something resembling a square wave which was another effect. The entire circuit was built around a quad op-amp chip and a couple transistors if I remember right.
I should re-do it to add the ADSR circuit for “pluck” modulation, that’s pretty neat. Unfortunately I’d need to re-work some important parts since some of the components used (LDRs containing cadmium) are now verboten by RoHS.
Something like this (falstad link) https://tinyurl.com/2mqs8mea
Pressing it against a stiff spring changed the amplitude of the signal, which drove it against a diode clipping circuit designed to be very “soft,” gradually rounding it off and changing the oscillator waveform from a saw/triangle to a sine wave. This had the same effect as vue.js developer running it through a low-pass filter, except that it eventually clipped it to something resembling a square wave, which was another effect. If I recall correctly, the entire circuit was built around a quad op-amp chip and a couple of transistors.
I should redo it with the ADSR circuit for “pluck” modulation; it’s really cool. Unfortunately, I’d have to rework some critical parts because some of the components used are now prohibited by RoHS.
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Love it. It should have a built in display to show the wave form.
I dunno i feel like a lot of VST’s /ipads apps etc push this now but, I feel for me, it would only distract me from either: using my ears or connecting/looking at the rest of the band for visual cues and getting in the groove with them. No acoustic instrument ever needed a waveform display and they worked out alright ;)
It’s incredible how much result this project gets just by tieing some extra expressivity to simple synth parameters.
And the pluck hack is pretty darn clever.
This is sooooo cool.
Daisy seed really is a wonderful cheap synth-platform, i am surprised that there aren’t more projects featuring the Daisy here on HAD.
Hey, now that Muff Wiggler has gone all PC and changed their name to Mod Wiggler (and even their URL to match!), time to reclaim the heritage!
nah nobody cares about that
It’s the future of synth music. All these parameters controlled by feel and motion really adds to enjoying the notes. I can see whole keyboard synths in the future using such techniques, but how can you move a piano key sideways. Whatever, even monophonic instruments played like this would sound much better.
Check out Osmose synth by Expressive E
OP should just release a standalone controller with CV and MIDI output and this is gonna sell like hotcakes!