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 €!