Well, I did a lot of soldering lately alongside with preparations for next school season. I finally soldered and built the 2 Highly Liquid MIDI-Retrofit-Kits into my “La Dictée Magique” and my SK-5. There are still some minor issues who have to be cleared, bad soldering and the like. The problem about the Highly Liquid products is not that they are badly made or not well documented, but I somehow miss a user-forum or something like that. Because if you look through their site you are just given a minimum of information. (Highly Liquid Site) I´ll put some pictures up, but I´ll probably update my old Wordpress before that (yes, still haven´t done that).
And my Gakken SX-150 arrived yesterday. Fun, little thing. I will probably do something circuit-bending-vice with it. Yep, flaaps (flaaps blog gave me a PCB “SHEcho” from General Guitar Gadgets. I already started soldering some resistances on it, but still need to get all the different ICs. So lot of things happening here. Will keep you updated. CYA.
So I´d already posted about the Gakken DIY-Synth SX-150 that I ordered. They also did a Mini-Theremin-DIY-Kit. I´d be getting that perhaps too. But on my researchs about the Mini-Theremin I dicovered some really funny movies involving the Mini-Theremin and cats. Watch here:
More and more things come up in the DIY area of electronic music that tend to make everything easier for the aspirant electronics experimenter (as noted in another post with the littleBits). Now a really interesting project comes from a collective, called the “machinecollective” . They present a prototype of a modular open source control surface. That means that you can (end of september) order different bare-bones control surfaces. I can already see my next circuit bending project with one of those control surfaces. You don´t have to find the casings, solder wires, fasten potis; everything is ready to be connected.
So here I found something really cool on www.engadget.com. Some prefabricated tiny circuits with different purposes like joystick, triggers and so on. They snap together through magnets, that´s also where the current goes through. This all seems pretty neat for some simple DIY-synth construction. I have put myself on their mailinglist to get updates an so on. More info in this video:
So having read on several blogs (Trash_Audio) about the Thingamakit, somehow the big brother of the Thingamagoop with some additional features, I have ordered one. As it seems it will take some time before it arrives here at home. But as soon as I got it I´ll inform you about the construction process and if it will work afterwards ^^.
Here is an excellent page with excellent schematics and examples for basic CMOS sound modelling: sea moss
So go get yourself some ICs, Elkos, resistors and a breadboard and go crazy with your first DIY-synth. I´m right now experimenting with a 40106. But actually he does strange things, that he is not supposed to do. Trying to get bhind that mistery. More to follw soon on this topic.