What’s a “compander”? It’s a simple way to make your circuit quieter! So how does it work? Let’s say we’ve got a fairly noisy effect, like a BBD. The basic idea is that you make quiet signals louder before you put them through the effect, and then you make them quiet again after the effect, […]
How do you synchronise your modular synth with MIDI equipment? MIDI provides the MIDI clock message, but you need something to convert this to a format an analog modular synth can understand. Most MIDI-to-CV convertors will do the job, but that can be expensive. Here’s a cheap way to do it. The Druid MIDICLK chip […]
There are a number of situations where it is useful to be able to crossfade between two different signals with a single control. Examples might be a wet/dry control on a delay effect, or a waveform knob on an oscillator that goes from ramp to square continuously. The simple and obvious way to do this […]
This project is a development of my earlier VCADSR envelope generator. Whilst that chip had both GATE and TRIGGER inputs, this chip replaces the TRIGGER input with a MODE CV that allows selection of normal ADSR, Gated looping, or full LFO-style Looping modes. Standard ADSR mode generates the shape you expect, and allows CV control […]
A single chip 1V/Oct voltage controlled digital oscillator, with 20 waveforms in a scannable wavetable. The VCDO uses a PIC 16F1847 microprocessor to create a versatile and simple voltage-controlled 8-bit digital wavetable oscillator. All oscillator parameters are controlled by 0-5V control voltages. The chip has a native exponential control response, making interfacing with 1V/Oct control […]
2018 Note: Obsolete! This chip has been superseded by the TAPLFO 3 The new chip adds several features, has additional waveforms and improved resolution, and also no longer requires a crystal. It’s an improvement in pretty much every way! Head over and check out the data sheet. This simple Tap Tempo LFO is based on the […]
A clone of a classic using my PIC code by J-P Desrochers Jean-Pierre Desrochers wanted to copy the response of the Moog 911 envelope generator using more modern technology. He asked me if it would be possible to tweak the response of my PIC envelope generator to do this, and I told him that it […]
A pure white audio noise generator using an 8 pin PIC 12F675 This pages describes a simple digital noise source that produces pure white noise over the whole audio band – out to more than 40Khz, in fact. With filtering, you can derive pink noise and other colours. The circuit diagram included below was developed […]
A CEM 3312 / SSM 2056 clone using cheap PIC microprocessors This page describes a cheap clone of the CEM 3312 and SSM 2056 voltage-controlled envelope generator chips. Both of these chips include voltage control of A, D, S and R, but both include other inputs too. The CEM 3312 chip has a input which […]
This voltage-controlled LFO is based on the PIC 16F684, which is a pretty basic chip. Nonetheless, this LFO has more features than your average LFO. For a start, it can produce 7 basic waveforms, and also includes a noise source. It can also morph its waveforms under CV control, well beyond basic PWM. There is […]
