70 DIY Synths On One Webpage

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!

Simple MIDI Thru Box

midithru

[Aris] has quite a few MIDI devices that only have in and out ports. To chain together multiple devices, the MIDI slaves must have a “thru” port. Instead of daisy chaining, a better solution is to build a thru box to split the signal from the master. [Aris]’s thru box design uses an optocoupler on the input, which connected to 74HC14 hex inverting Schmitt trigger. The schematic shows three outputs, but there’s room for adding two more. A useful bit of kit for only a two hour job.