“Booglitchoo” Synth Prototype

Here we go… I’ve optimized the way I’m using power, love the way the dual jfet opamps (TL082) sound, and have the mixing elements mostly decided.

To be done on this prototype:

  1. use either capacitor switching or a simple 4017 sequencer to change up the textural possibilities of the oscillator
  2. add switches to the voice modulator to allow for “skipping around” pitches instead of only up or down changes
  3. CV input

I went through quite a few opamps before finally deciding on the dual jfets, and now I really dig how they’re working with the complex waveform of the four NAND gates (NTE4093)… I use it first as a multipole low-pass filter to shape the sound of the chained oscillators.

Because of the nature of the sounds I don’t find much use for the vibrato section of the voice modulator (HT8950), but don’t mind at all because it reduces the component count and I’m finding an incredible amount of possibilities already. You’ll also notice I’m using my fingers on a couple of resistors to change the pitch… I discovered this by accident, but really like the gestural aspect of it so much that I’m planning on building a touch interface into the final design. 🙂

The whole thing is finally mixed into another dual opamp, with a follower/buffer and a high-gain resonant Q notch filter to add some harmonics and really cool sweep possibilities.

Excited to have this core design done, LOVE playing with it! Now it’s just a matter tweaking and expansion.

New improvisations on SoundCloud

Freely improvised one-takes. Instrumentation includes homebuilt instruments, sampled objects and looping hardware.

This music sharing site is a great tool for posting various non-published tracks, as well as released stuff, and has a nice embeddable player and comment system. Really nice for being able to just slap some stuff up, I have one friend who has recently been doing the same with sessions on his new Serge Modular Creature, and another who posted “in progress” snapshots of a track he is working on.

Feel free to download and remix, just give the proper attribution. 🙂