The LM13700 is a bonafide classic synth chip, plus it’s cheap and *still* available decades after it was originally introduced. Ok, it’s no longer the state of the art, and its noise and distortion figures are pretty poor, but that’s actually a part of its charm. It’s definitely got that “vintage sound”. So let’s have […]
Replacing the LM3914/LM3915/LM3916 with a PIC Most designs you see for audio level LED bargraph displays use the LM3914/LM3915/LM3916 series chips that are no longer made. However, the chips are simple, so we can replace them with a PIC and build a nice LED bargraph driver on a single chip. So why do you need this thing? […]
For this post, I’d like to take you through the process of designing a pedal, from initial idea to completed PCB and pedal. Everyone has their own way of doing this, so I thought it might be interesting for people to see the way that I work on something like this. Pedal (or Synth) design […]
Or how to get a vintage 1980’s drum machine sound without selling your kidneys! There was a discussion on the SynthDIY mailing list recently about how the early digital drum machines like the LinnDrum or the Oberheim DMX used to change the pitch of drum sounds by simply changing the sample rate. They literally just […]
Here’s something slightly different! Is it an LFO? Is it an envelope generator? Well, it’s a bit of both. It produces a one-off event like an envelope generator, but it has a selection of waves more like an LFO. It works by producing a single “ping” when triggered. A ping is like a mini-envelope. The […]
We’ve recently discovered a bug in the recently-released TAPLFO 3 code (how embarrassing!). The problem only affects the tap tempo feature of the TAPLFO3. Other chips like the VCLFO or STOMPLFO aren’t affected. We’ve fixed the code, and while we were working on it, we also improved the switch debouncing routine to be more tolerant of […]
In the last six months, we’ve been very busy here in the Druid workshop, developing and testing new versions of our PIC-based chips. This work is now complete, so I’d like to introduce the new chips. Why bother? What was wrong with the old ones? Ok, there wasn’t anything much wrong with the old ones, […]
In general, we’re trying to keep noise out of our circuits. Somewhat inspired by this thread on DIYStompboxes, I thought it might be fun to build a circuit that could generate that “vintage background noise” sound so that I could make things sound like they’re being played back off a phonograph cylinder or an ancient […]
Flangers are generally regarded as one of the most complicated pedals to build. A typical design has tons of chips and lots of circuit elements. Flangelicious isn’t like that. By using a microprocessor to generate an LFO-modulated clock signal directly, we can get rid of a lot of the non-signal path stuff and add features whilst we’re about it. […]
Recently I’ve been working on a four second digital delay with tap tempo and delay trails. There are lots of digital delay projects already, but the vast majority of them are based on the PT2399, which limits both the length of the delay and the sound quality. A quick summary of the features: 0 […]
