MATRIXSYNTH

Beyond the Point

Another EMS Synthi album on Amazon. You will find samples.

via THE SYNTHI

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flickr by gardenque
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Paper KORG MS20

Rhymes With More Awesome

flickr by _mpd_

full size

"Meet my new Voyager -- Whitewashed cabinet with Electric Blue LEDs."

Synthjam Afternoon

YouTube via verstaerker
"Jam with Machinedrum & Modularsystem: Mainly Livewire AFG & Cwejman DMF"

PLL Arabesque

YouTube via boobtube356
"Doepfer A-196 PLL attempts to track a pulse width modulated A-111. An A-147 is the modulation and clock source. The result passes through a Cwejman VCEQ-3."

Oceanus Poly Dub Siren aka the Beep Slider

YouTube via xd515
"This is an analogue 10 step sequencer with 2 VCO'c and a few other bits! Makes some unique Siren sounds. I have made 3 ( and only 3 ) of these. If you want one, drop me a mail xd515@tiscali.co.uk Cheers Oceanus"

Oberheim LeDX

YouTube via rolandsh1000

"Short demo of a modified Oberheim DX. The mods are: moved Pitch pots, added Decay pots, new Volume sliders, and all controls have integrated LEDs.

The great thing about the DX is that it has a pretty open architecture and the big control surface. The uP generates trigger signals for each voice channel that are pretty easily accessible. The control surface, however, only had volume sliders and the pitch control was put on the back of the unit where you can't see what you're doing.

So in this DX, I added controllable Decay to all channels by utilizing the preexisting holes in the PCB. I also brought the stock pitch controllability to new Pitch pots mounted on top of the unit, where you can see what you are doing rather than reaching around the back.

As you can tell, the most obvious thing I did was to use potentiometers that either had or could integrate LED's. I was inspired by CMS's Arp Lumina who swapped out all the sliders on a stock Odyssey for ones with integrated LEDs - do a websearch and find the pics - it's a great mod because it looks cool AND improves the functionality! Anyway, these type of pots are all available at Mouser, but you can't just plug and play with them. The sliders all have center detent, so you have to open them up and remove the ball bearing & spring from the slider. I also had to Dremel out some of the DX's upper panel PCB to make them fit where the old Noble sliders were and adapt the mounting thread holes. The rotary pots are really designed to be board-mounted, not panel-mounted, so they have T1 LED's that are held in by silicone. It actually works pretty well.

To get each button to map to an LED, I had to build some combinational logic decoding of the triggers for each drum sound. Not hard, but a lot of wire-wrapping.

I'm not showing pics of the inside because, while the externals are pretty, the innards are NOT! ;)"

stribe1 demo

YouTube via soundwidgets
"Using Scalar with 2 Stribe1 prototypes."

Xarp-56 Polysynth

"Xarp-56 (pronounced "harp") is a 56 string harp of Karplus-Strong string models. (56 voice polyphony).

The synth supports two ranges, one an octave above the other. The higher range is implemented by generating two samples for every DAC enable and decimating 1:2.

Each string model is an integer length 18 bit wide digital waveguide. Keyboard follow is applied to the bandwidth of the reflection filter.

Note that the highest note has 5.051 cents of tuning error. The rest of the harp tuning is better than 5 cents. I cannot hear the error in that one note.

This synth is targetted at a Xilinx Spartan-3A DSP 1800 Development board with a Cirrus CS4344 24 bit stereo DAC.

Ver_b: mono output signal to both channels."

You can find the project source and a sample here. No image as of this post.

via Scott on the SDIY list:
"The sound clip is a piece of Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" that I adapted for this instrument - the entire clip is played on one Xarp-56 instrument.

Verilog source is provided if you're interested.

While you listen, remember that this it is a single integrated circuit that is doing the DSP computations to make the sounds you're hearing."