Electronic Snare Drum Project (Part 2)

I have been working on the electronic snare drum project from time to time in between waiting for components. But I missed a vital part for this project to. I had some trouble finding a 566 VCO The switch makes it possible to switch off the envelope for the filter and make the noise sound constantly. Later on I added a little mod replacing a 1M resistor for a pot meter to be able to adjust the length of the noise sound. I think this is a useful mod.

Last week I finally received the missing 566 from a seller I found on E-bay and I was able to complete the whole pchip. It is used for the shell generator. The shell generator will be build on the left part of the bread board. In this picture on the right you can see the completed snare generator complete with envelope generator, VCA and filter.roject. You can see it in the picture on the right. I did kill a 2N3906 in the process by the way because I mismounted it :) Ah well. I have enough of those. I played around with the potmeters and this drum module is actually very versatile. Not only suitable to make a snare drum sound, but you could also make a kick or toms with it. I'm very happy that it all works now. Always very satisfying :)

After this I ran the module through my Mooger Froogers for some fun results. As promised I will try to make a little video of it later on. What I need to do now is build this whole thing on a PCB off course and design a front panel for it. Too bad that I actually have to tear it apart for this, but well. At least I know it works and I really learned a lot from this project. Another thing I still need to do as well is add a manual trigger button that can work on the other modules as well that I'm building. I would like it to work next to the gate input. More soon on this project :)

PC Function Generator (Part 1)

The last Velleman kit that I'm building for now is a Function Generator that can be controlled by the same software that came with the PC Oscilloscope. They can also work together. The Function Generator will do a frequency sweep and the oscilloscope draws a nice graph of the result. In this way you can test a filter for example and get a nice graph of the filter response. Even though I also have a hardware function generator this one is also capable of generating much more complex waveforms that are very suitable for error tracing and testing audio equipment.

The kit looks a lot like the PC Oscilloscope. It actually has the same enclosure, just with different front and back panels. I started inspecting if I had all the parts and it looked OK. The first thing I noticed is that this thing has a lot of power regulators and that all the resistors are of the 1% type. Further more nothing special. The PCB layout is quite neat, but when I started soldering I found out soon that the ground isles are very big. I needed to heat the parts that are connected to ground way longer than I'm used to before the solder started to flow.

I started building this PCB today. Here is a picture where you can see the documentation in the back. It is very clear and again most components are on a roll in the right order. Even though I managed to solder R14 in the place of R41. They were actually next to each other. I took a lot of trouble to desolder the resistor and put the new one in place when I found out later that R41 had the same value. A lot of work for nothing. Well I learned one thing. Next time first check if it really needs to be taken out when I make a mistake.

And here is another picture with all the IC sockets in place. I decided to deviate from the instructions here and solder them before the capacitors. If you look closely at the picture you will see that there are two very odd size IC sockets on there. I never saw those before. But they will hold two IC's as well that I never saw before. Well so far it is all very straight forward and I hope it will work. I'll try to finish it as soon as possible because I can't wait to get it finished. Somehow after the problem with the oscilloscope I lost confidence a bit and I'd like to prove it wasn't me I guess ;)

VU Meter (Part 2)

I showed you the front panel before that I made for the Velleman VU meter kit that I build. Well here you see the front panel with the led holders and leds in place. Looks nice doesn't it? Can't wait to see it working. I did make a very little mistake. You can see that the space between the lower two leds and the rest is a bit larger. Probably I skipped 1 click on the grid. Well I don't really care it is not worth producing a whole new front panel only for this. I'm still missing jacks they are also in the Bridechamber package that is still in customs.

Here is a picture of the back of the front panel. I'm still figuring out how to attach the PCB to the front panel. The normal Bridechamber pot brackets won't work here. I think I'll see if I can find some thin aluminum or steel sheets so that I can make my own brackets. Then I won't have to wait on them any more as well. I'll let you know when I figure it out. If anyone has any idea's I'm open for them. I could not get the AD converter for the Oscilloscope by the way. So I decided to send it to Velleman and let them figure it out. I can only wait and see what they come up with.

OceanoGraphy Fan Movie

And here is another fan movie made by Mike from Cosmic Frequencies:

Two More Front Panels

Today two more front panels arrived from Schaeffer. I designed them both myself. Left is the panel for a stereo mixer I'm building based on the MFOS stereo mixer PCB. On the right is the front panel for the VU meter project. I showed you the design before and here is what it looks like. I was a bit anxious that the holes for the led holders were to close, but I just tried it and it fits perfectly :) I saw on the tracking system that my Bridechamber package is now in customs, so hopefully I will be able to start finishing some modules again soon. I need potbrackets especially and they are in that package. In the mean time I'm building a lot of PCB's. I'll update you soon again.

Headphones Repaired

When I'm in the living room I often work with my headphones on, listening to some music. I have a pair of closed headphones for that so that my surrounding isn't bothered by me and vice versa. Usually I prefer open headphones btw, but anyway there was a lose wire in the somewhere because sometimes on one ear I lost sound and when I fiddled with the cable it worked again. So I decided to take it apart. One of the wires was loose on the plug, but the wires were to short to solder them back. So I extended them for about a centimeter, put it back together and it works perfectly again :)

Digital PC Scope (Part 2)

After I completed the PCB and build it in the case, I started the calibrating process. I had a little trouble and didn't really understand why. I fiddled a bit more with the trim potmeters and finally calibration succeeded. But it didn't go as planned actually. Then I hook it up to my function generator and saw that it actually did some very strange stuff. I used my other oscilloscope to find out what was wrong, but I could only find correct signals on the PCB. I'll try to explain to you what I saw by showing you three pictures from the software. The input is a pure sine wave:

As long as I stay below the 0 Volt line everything looks OK.

When I try to center the image by shifting its Y position a bit up this is what happens:



You can see that part of the positive signal is actually shown as negative values. Very strange. I measured the whole analog circuit and up to the A/D converter it all looked good. I looked on the support desk of Velleman and found a post with the same problem. There it turned out the AD converter chip was broken. Well I couldn't find the same chip easily so I decided to contact Velleman about it. I'll keep you posted on the progress. I don't think I can solve this problem myself since I don't have spare parts and I have no idea what happens in the digital domain.

WWF Tweet about OceanoGraphy

Recently I handed my OceanoGraphy CD to the Dutch brand of the WWF (WNF -> Wereld Natuur Fonds). It seems that they listened to it by now and liked it a lot :) I'm very proud to see that they did some communication about it to their contacts over Linked In and also over Twitter. I hope this cooperation will grow to be something very nice. I would love to hear my music in some nature documentary in the future. Well we'll see :)

Pacifico Fan Video

Hi, my #1 USA fan Mike from Cosmic Frequencies made this very nice video for me. Enjoy :)

Digital PC Scope (Part 1)

This is the other Velleman kit that I found, that I was very enthousiastic about. It is an digital oscilloscope that you can build yourself. It connects to a PC through a printer port and comes complete with software. It has the option to record signals and also has a spectrum analyzer build in. And of course the great thing is that you can save images from the screen. That would be great to post on this blog from time to time. I was very curious so I started building it right away when I got home with it.

Here is the content of the box again in the picture on the right. In front you see the PCB and the software on CD. And behind that a neat looking plastic case with aluminum front and back panels. Like the VU meter kit most components are on a roll again in the correct order. But this kit is a lot more advanced for sure than the VU meter kit. I would not recommend this for an absolute beginner. The good news though is that they also sell these completely assembled. So you can just but them when you are looking for a cheap oscilloscope.

After a few hours of work this was the result. The PCB is finished already. You can see the BNC connector on the front. This is the input of the oscilloscope on the right is a test point that is needed for the calibration process. I need to get a 9 Volt power adapter for it. That was obviously not included. Next thing was to build it into the casing. There was a little tricky thing there because another power regulator needed to be attached to the back panel and then soldered from the top of the PCB. I managed, but it was not very easy to reach.

Here you see the PCB in the case. There is a piece of foil included that needs to be wrapped under and over the PCB to get rid of outside interference. I think they could have done a bit better on this, but well when it works it's fine by me. It is inside the case anyway so you won't see it. OK next thing is hooking the power up and see if the unit wants to communicate with the PC. But not today :) I had enough for one day. I'll let you know the results very soon. Good night to you all.

More Front Panels Arrived

After my initial test with the YuSynth VCO front panel that I ordered through Schaeffer, I decided to make some more panels for projects that I'm building. In the picture you can see this VCO panel with the potmeters already in place together with a front panel for a Buchla clone of a resonant low pass gate that I'm also building. I'm still waiting for jacks and mounting brackets from Bridechamber thought, but Scott has confirmed me now that they have been shipped. So hopefully I can finish them soon.

And today this stack arrived. On the bottom is a front panel that I designed for the Hip Bass Drum project that I did. And on top of that two YuSynth LFO front panels and two YuSynth ADSR panels. They all look great. I'm so happy that I can do this on my own now. The only thing I still can't do on my own is creating PCB's. Soon I'll go to my old employer Bird Electronics again to etch some PCB's. But I'd like to be able to do this on my own as well. So I'm looking into what I would need for that as well now. But first I'm going to do another nice batch of YuSynth PCB's next week at Bird Electronics. I'll try to take some pictures again in the process.

VU Meter (Part 1)

Last week I visited my local electronics shop again to pick up some parts and found out that they also sell a lot of nice electronics DIY kits from Velleman. I never though much of those, but when I browsed through them recently I did find some interesting stuff. To start with I found a stereo 15 led VU meter kit. I though what would be neat to integrate into a mixer module I'm building, so I decided to check it out. As you can see it comes in a neat box so it looks promising. So time to unpack.

And here is the content of the package. It is all very well documented and even suited for beginners I think. What is especially neat is that all the PCB components are on a roll strapped together in the right building order. So you can't even go wrong picking a wrong component value as long as you stick to the documentation. It also came with a plastic kind of front panel that I didn't think was very suitable to fit my modular. But more about that later on.

And construction was very easy, but then I hooked it up to my electronic snare drum project and saw that only the left side was working. After close inspection I found that while bending one of the Elcos I damaged a PCB trace. So I repaired that with some wires on the bottom of the PCB. And then it worked like a charm. It is nice to have some kind of level indication in a modular setup I think. The only problem with this kit is that there are two potmeters on the PCB to calibrate it and they are 1 turn. So it is very touchy. I think 25 turn would have been better there.

I was thinking about integrating this VU meter into a mixer that I'm building, but I found out quickly that 15 leds in a led holder takes more space than I thought. So I decided to design a separate front panel for it. You can see that in the picture on the right. I just hope I left enough room between the led holders. Well we'll see :) I gave it also outputs so that I can easily chain it somewhere in between an audio signal path. I'll let you know how it turns out eventually. If you are interested in any of the front panel designs I'm doing by the way just let me know and I'll send you the FPD files. This was a nice in between project while I'm still waiting for parts to arrive to finish up some other projects. I already picked up another Velleman kit as well that I will tell you about very soon. If you are interested in them just look at http://www.velleman.eu

OceanoGraphy CD presented at WWF

Last week I visited the Dutch WWF (Word Wildlife Fund) Head Quarters to hand over a copy of my OceanoGraphy CD. As you know the WWF officially endorsed this album and also their logo is on the back. I'm still very proud of this. In the picture on the left you see me with Marlou who made this all possible. Thanks Marlou! Now I just hope that they like it and that they are also going to do some promotions for the CD :) A part of the revenue of the CD is donated to the WWF as well. So do buy the album, because it is for a good cause!! We also discussed some future possibilities so who knows what this will bring :)

Classical Project Postponed

I have some sad news. I know some of you are looking forward to my Classical Project, but I decided to postpone it for a while. There are several reasons for that. I thought I was almost finished with this project. I started it in 2006 actually, but today I tried to open the files and lots of stuff isn't working anymore. That means I have to recreate a lot of stuff and I rather spend this time on creating new original Synth.nl music at this moment. Also my record label is not interested in this project since it is now my own music, but just covers of existing music. So I'm putting it aside for now and will decide later what to do with it. In the mean time there are still 5 tracks on my website for you to enjoy. I hope you understand.

The Hip Bass Drum (Part 1)

Today I build a very nice project called 'The Hip Bass Drum'. I it found in an old article from the Polyphony Magazine published in 1983. I had all components except for the 4739 opamp. I replaced that one by two LM741's. I decided to build this one right away on an experiment PCB. As you can see in the pictures it is full with holes and islands. You can solder them together to create the necessary wiring between the components. It is just a matter of looking at the schematic and making all the connections manually. The advantage over the bread board I use earlier is that you don't have to take it apart afterward and build it anyway on a board like this. It is only less easy to correct mistakes. But since this is a very small module I took the risk :)

Here you see a picture of the PCB from the top with most components installed. Since this module has a lot of external potmeters I decided to wire it right away with wires long enough to reach a front panel that I will eventually make for this module. I only mounted the Led on the PCB, but that one will go on the front as well. It lights up when to modules receives a trigger. After this I hooked up the power from my lab power supply to do the famous smoke test and it all looked OK. After that I got some potmeters from the stack I received from Mouser last week.

After hooking the potmeters up I attached a mini jack to get some audio from it. The first thing I noticed it that the trigger wasn't really working. Well I forgot to attach a resistor to ground. That was an easy fix. Then it sounded like only one of the two audio generating circuits was working. It sounded like the impact module worked, since I recognized that sound from the Snare Drum Module I'm building, but I couldn't hear the oscillator that should create the kick sound. After some debugging I found a resistor that I forgot to hook up on one end. And yes then It sounded like a kick :) I fiddled a bit with the potmeters and it sound very nice. A very usable module. I'll start making a front panel for it and I will also add a manual gate option and maybe a output level potmeter. If you are interested in the article, just send me an E-mail.

Moon Modular 553 Midi to Clock Module

I'm still building a lot of DIY synthesizer modules, but I recently also bought a module that I could not buy as a kit. It is a 553 Midi to Clock Module that I bought from Moon Modular. It receives midi clock and outputs a clock signal that can be used to clock the sequencers I'm building. With this module I will be able later on to synchronize my midi setup (from my Sonar software sequencer) with the modular setup. If you are interested in this module you can find more information on this URL: http://lunar-experience.com/553.html

Here you can see a picture from the right. It just barely fits in my cabinet. As you can see it is very shallow. The module looks very nice and is professionally build. Moon Modular has more interesting modules. Be sure to check them out. The only challenge I have now is that this modules came with a synthesizers.com power connector. And even though I have a MOTM 950 with a power distribution board with the right connectors, it didn't come with a cable to connect it. So I ordered some connectors and will make this cable myself.

Electronic Snare Drum Project (Part 1)

I was so enthusiastic after reading the Eletronic Drums Cookbook that I decided I just had to try some of the stuff out. So I went to my local electronics shop and bought a whole bunch of components. Normally I only order what I need for a specific project, but then you keep waiting long time before everything arrives. And I'm in such a period now, waiting for stuff. So in the mean time I can do some experiments on the stuff I learned from the cookbook. In the end there is an example of a Snare Dum Module so I decided to go and give it a try and build it from scratch without a PCB. I never did that.

I got also a breadboard for these kind of experiments. You can see it in the picture on the right. It is full of holes as you can see where you can put your components in. Every little line is interconnected so you can use those to hook stuff to each other. It is very easy to experiment and change values while you are going. On the board I got a trigger optimizer now that takes a 5V gate on the input and outputs a conditioned 12V pulse that the drum modules can use. There is also a led on there that lights up when it gets a gate.

In the picture on the left I'm a bit further. The snare drum sound will be build up from three sound sources: an impact generator, a snare generator and a shell generator. The impact generator is below the trigger conditioner. Below that in the middle is a little audio mixer that mixes the three sound sources together. In the right top is a noise generator with a low pass filter that I'm building now and that will form the snare generator. Below that is a VCA for that module. On the left you see the same VCA for the shell generator that will be in the upper left corner. It is already generating some sound. The noise generator, the mixer and the impact generator are operational already.

Electronic Drum Cookbook

Since I'm very into electronics again I decided to look for some interesting books about electronics for audio. An interesting read I came across was the 'Electronic Drum Cookbook' by Thomas Henry. A very interesting read I can say, with some nice examples in the form of schematics that are explained in detail. Electronics knowledge is necessary though to be able to read it. It is great to catch up again with the stuff I learned when I was in school about 600 years ago :) If you are interested in the book look on this URL then: http://www.magsmoke.com/thomas_henry_drum_cookbook.asp

My First Front Panel Arrived

Last week the front panel that I designed for a YuSynth VCO arrived from Schaeffer. It really looks great, so I'm very happy with the result. It is in MOTM style and I took some stuff from different designs to get this one together. The text and other symbols are actually engraved, so it looks very professional. The only thing I found out is that the holes that I made for the potmeters are a bit too big. No real problem. I had this before with some panels from Bridechamber. The trick is to use an extra ring, but you need to be careful to get it centered. If you like this design and want to use it as well. Just E-mail me and I will send you the .fpd file. You can download the software from here: http://www.schaeffer-ag.de/de/download/frontplatten-designer.html. And then you can make adjustments for yourself and see what the price is right away. When you are satisfied just click order and wait until it arrives :) Very cool. I must warn you though that it is not cheap. Especially the extra lining I did around the potmeters makes it expensive, but I like to have some soft of scale. If you leave that out (and you can easily delete that) it will cost a lot less. Well I'm planning to do more front panels this way if I can't get them anywhere else. For my friend Hans I'm also looking for an Eurorack panel for a Wogglebug. If you know where I can find that please let me know.

Join the Synth.nl News Mailing List !

If you want to keep updated on new releases, radio shows, interview, reviews etc you can now join my new mailing list. You will never miss important news, since I will send it to you by E-mail. Joining is very easy. Read how on: http://www.synth.nl/mail. You can also join me on facebook, myspace or twitter for updates. But I think the mailinglist is the best option if you are only interested in music stuff, since I write a lot about my studio and DIY projects as well on the other channels. Well you are into that that fine of course :)