If you want to dip your toes into the deep, deep water of synth DIY but don’t know where to start, [Atarity] has just the resource for you. He’s compiled a list of 70 wonderful DIY synth and noise-making projects and put them all in one place. And as connoisseurs of the bleepy-bloopy ourselves, we can vouch for his choices here.
The collection runs the gamut from [Ray Wilson]’s “Music From Outer Space” analog oddities, through faithful recreations like Adafruit’s XOXBOX, and on to more modern synths powered by simple microcontrollers or even entire embedded Linux devices. Alongside the links to the original projects, there is also an estimate of the difficulty level, and a handy demo video for every example we tried out.
Our only self-serving complaint is that it’s a little bit light on the Logic Noise / CMOS-abuse side of synth hacking, but there are tons of other non-traditional noisemakers, sound manglers, and a good dose of musically useful devices here. Pick one, and get to work!
This is absolutely fantastic. Little DIY synths are a hobby of mine and this site has a LOT of designs I haven’t seen before. These kinds of project aggregations and galleries are a great source of inspiration for new projects.
Hacker: which Linux distro do they run?
Musician: do they use period correct components?
Funny, with all the DIY projects i had only one made it to this database?
The About section lists criteria for inclusion, and a procedure for including more projects via a GitHub pull request.
Was this based on the link to them I posted last week? Or did somebody just happened to find them?
Who knows. In the past they’ve said thanks to people for tips, but I sent one a few weeks back that became 2 articles and never saw a thanks. Maybe they quit doing that.
We try to always thank our tipsters.
The one exception is when the original hacker sent in their own work, which was the case here. If you also sent this one in, George… well, thanks too!
And you too, John.
But now that I think about it, why shouldn’t we also thank the original hacker when they send in their own work? It’s long standing practice to omit the “thanks” in those cases, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less thankful.
So, thanks to [Atarity] too!
No thanks needed, I was just curious because it’s a fairly obscure website (that happens to be loaded with goodies!). I was impressed by the quality of the many projects, so I try to mention them often (but haven’t been in a while, I love the synth stuff, but can’t do anything with it)
Thanks, Elliot, for publishing this!
OK this wins the HAD corner of teh interwebs today.
It missed my Stylish Trucker Belt Buckle Music Synthesizer and related Vectorscope Synth. Both are on GitHub.
Interesting but the first project I looked at the documentation was missing. The second project I looked at was filtered to use an ESP32, One project was listed but it was instead made with an STM32.
Elliot, your awesome series of articles about CMOS synths 10 years ago, started my journey into DIY and electronics.
Thank you!