doepfer A-100 in a suitcase

Recently I bought a doepfer A-100 system and modified it to fit in suitcase kind of rack. This wonderful modular adds a lot to my entire work.


Fotography by: chinasart.com

live sequencing

I finally found my sound. Gain up until it nearly distorts and you have a nice saturated boom on every channel.

A recent live Jam with all my analog gear...

...braught this little thing to life. Hope you like it.

Waste Your Time! by monobot

How to get fat analogue sounds

A great monophonic analogue synth like the Dark Energy sounds great, no doubt. But it still has only one VCO. So there is for example a suggestion how to fatten up the sound of the Dark Energy with the help of some Doepfer modules: http://www.amazona.de/index.php?page=26&file=2&article_id=3322
By adding two more VCOs the sound get's fatter and richer. There are a lot of sound examples on the site that excited me and got me thinking how I could get that cheaper. Because building the proposed Doepfer minicase would be something around 430 €. That's a lot!

So I decided to make it with two monotrons. I modded both to be able to control them via cv pitch and gate and connected both to the cv1 and gate output of the Dark Energy.



After mathching the pitch range with the trim potentiometeron the back of both monotribes I did some testing and it's a nice combination. I made a little jam later on. It's hard to get the monotrons in correct tune with the Dark Energy and with each other, because the pitch potentiometer of the monotribe is very sensitive. But the thing about fatter sound through more VCOs is that it sounds fat because the VCOs are not exactly in the same pitch. Adding filter or pitch modulation to the monotrons opens a wide range of possible sounds together with the Dark Energy that also has Frequency Modulation and other cool stuff.



More pictures of both monotrons added to some kind of hounsing with a 5V Power Supply and jacks for pitch, gate and cutoff.

40106 DIY CMOS Noise Synth

Today I finished the work on the 40106 one chip synthesizer. The result is more a noise machine than a synthesizer, but it's a lot of fun tweaking it and making various noises. I guess I will never hear a sound twice out of this box. There always comes out something different.


The inspiration came from the great website of Beavis Audio Research where the 40106 chip is explained with several schematics to use it as an oscialltor. http://www.beavisaudio.com/Projects/CMOS_Synthesizers/

I use all 6 possible oscillators from this one chip. The wiring of my result came out more of a trial process when soldering it together. There is almost nothing you can do wrong with this chip, so I took several condensors, leds and pots and soldered them together when i had the feeling the current wiring sounds nice. So i went from the first osciallator, added the second and so on. I feed the synth with 12V.

Here is a sample track i recorded. The sound source is only the 40106 noise synth, fed into Ableton Live and added one delay, one reverb, a HPF and a LPF.

End Of Summer by monobot

By the way. The 40106 chip costs only 0,40 €!

CV to Resistance, or how to pitch the Monotribe

While I'm very buisy at the moment and still don't have the time to draw the schematics for my Monotribe Pitch control Mod, here is a short explanation of how to get CV turned into resistance and use it in parallel to the Monotribes own Ribbon Controller, that is nothing else than a 10K pot.

Maybe the best source for understanding how you can change CV to resistance is this page: http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=midiboxfx_-_midifiying_analog_gear

I used the most simple way explained here. That is this one taken from www.midibox.org:


I think that the vactrol method is a better choice for that, because it's more safe for the Monotribe circuit, but I had none, so i decided to use this method and it worked out nicely for me. I connected the monotribe Ribbon Controller connections to this schematic. The pot seen here i replaced with a 1K resistor.

The Monotribes Ribbon Controller is the same as in the Monotron, so if you want to find out how it is connected, you can yheck out the officialy released schematic of the monotron here:

http://www.korg.de/fileadmin/_korg/_produkte/synthesizer/kr_monotron/MONOTRON_Schaltunterlagen.jpg

When i'll get my Doepfer LFO, i will build up the CV control for the monotribe once again and draw the schematics and post it on this blog. Sorry that you have to wait, but time is very short at the moment.

Monotribe MIDI In/Out

Check out the great work of Gameboy Genius for adding MIDI In/Out to the Monotribe.



And his very detailed tutorial: http://blog.gg8.se/wordpress/2011/08/14/monotribe-midi-and-me/