What material to learn for making synthesizers? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: Mint.
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2011, 05:54:14 am
content: Well I recently found out that I am interested in synthesizers. Now I would like to start making them. What material would you recommend I would read before building anything. I am currently reading Electronics: A First Course by Owen Bishop. Which is just a read about general electronics. I assume I would have to learn more about audio circuits such as amps and others.

author: BravoV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2011, 06:52:46 am
content: Your request here brings back nostalgic moment of my youth back many-many moons ago when I tinkered with the legendary Texas Instruments SN76477 chip.->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN76477Not sure if this could help at learning stage with this dinosaur age IC in the current digital era that you can almost synthesize any wave sound you can imagine.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2011, 06:57:43 am
content: Are you talking about audio music synthesizers?If you are the way to get started is the software solutions. You still have to interconnect the various modules together just as if you were doing it in hardware, but the modules are all implemented in software. Learning how to build sounds is quite a skill - it take a lot of work.I am sure there are also very good commercial programs.If this is what you are looking for, I would suggest you install Linux on a PC and start trying out the different JACK-based open source programs. Jack is a low latency sound module connection program that is also compatible with Midi. A lot of work has gone into optimizing the recent Linux kernals for low latency Audio and it is ahead of Windows for sure. There a a large number of free programs you can try.If you have a Windows PC with some spare disk space, and you don't have any other fast PC available, using the Wubi installer (http://wubi.sourceforge.net/) is the easy way to go. It allows you to install one of the Ubuntu Linuxes inside a big windows file, and it turns your PC into a dual boot PC - all without needing any special Linux partitions. If you have a MAC, then I am sure there are some brilliant and boring programs you can buy for a lot of money.The sound modules these software synthesizers use are the same as modules you could build in hardware, with the difference that they are free and instant. But if you hit on a sound you really love, you may want to implement it in hardware if it means you can get a cleaner sound.If you are talking about Synthesizers meaning Waveform Generator-type synthesizers or RF frequency Synthesizers, that is a different story.RichardEdit: Some Free Synthesizer links:http://bristol.sourceforge.net/http://code.google.com/p/amsynth/

author: Mint.
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 20, 2011, 08:11:55 am
content: Something like this:

author: Mint.
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2011, 08:45:22 pm
content: bump

author: steff
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2011, 08:51:10 pm
content: There's an excellent mailing list "SDIY" for synth-building enthusiasts that will be of interest. It's also a good keyword for google searches, as there are lots of web sites documenting people's projects.Paia make a complete MIDI monosynth, the Fatman, as a kit too.Be warned that the analogue electronics in a typical pure analogue synth is quite complex - I'm currently trying to get my head around the Sallen-Key filter and it's giving me a brainache, to be frank.

author: oPossum
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 26, 2011, 04:30:16 am
content: Watch the Aaron Lanterman videos...Electronics for Music Synthesis 2010

author: tbscope
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: December 26, 2011, 11:18:29 am
content: The absolute basics are oscillators and filters.Simple oscillators are not difficult to understand or create. So are the basic low pass or high pass filters.You don't really need to know all the science behind it to get started. I've had an electronics set for children that had some very basic oscillator circuits using a few transistors, capacitors and resistors. If you don't know a lot about electronics it might take a little while to understand it, but usually you have something like a vibrator. Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivibratorfor example. This will generate some sort of waveform. After this you use filters to shape the waves. Example: you generate a rectangular wave, with a first waveshaper you can turn it into a saw tooth wave. With even further waveshapers you can turn it into a sinus. Popular starting points are 555 timers.There's a very good book about operation amplifiers that explains a lot about filters. It's the Filter or OpAmp cookbook I think.The basics always remains the same, but if you want to use a synthesiser in a non ideal environment, you'll get into trouble with tuning etc...This makes the designs a bit more complex as you need to add control circuitry that handles temperature changes for example. This is something you learn later when you get comfortable with the basics.And if you want to make it possible to control some parts of the circuit remotely, you need to handle the control voltages too.Other basic building blocks are exponential converters to convert something like a linear control voltage to an exponential frequency scale. This is important if you want to play notes. At this point you also want to know about triggering notes.

author: im_a_human
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 31, 2011, 08:06:47 pm
content: Hi, im very interested in synthesizers and im building my own using a dspic and a homemade Z80 computer to control it, but anyway i think theres some interesting bits of circuitry in the PICSYNTH shown here...http://picsynth.000space.com/and heres a youtube demo of the PICSYNTH...Heres the schemetic...http://picsynth.000space.com/schematic.htmlIve had parts of the circuit built on bread board minus the PIC sound generator bcos thats a custom programmed software job that you have to buy but the other bits are all usefull as a starting point for synth design.I should add you can use whatever oscillator or sound generating circuits you like with it.