Building a Synthesizer from Scratch: Part 1 - Reverse Avalanche Oscillator

in #music7 years ago

My good friend @sortna called me the other day telling me to bring my old Traktor S4 controller over to his place for disassembly. The reason being that we would be building a synthesizer from scratch using some of the salvaged parts from the controller combined with parts he had acquired.

The first thing I did when I arrived was starting to disassemble my Traktor controller. It had lots of interesting salvageable parts once I got it open. The parts that I know will be useful to us are fader strips, led displays, sensors, several types of audio interfaces and a ton of knobs.

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The next step for most of these parts will be de-soldering and removing the solder that keeps all these components stuck to the PCB.


We followed the instructions from a youtube video made by "LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER" and the schematics he provided to build the oscillator:

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Sortna had been out buying a soldering iron, cables, breadboards, potentiometers, resistors & transistors. Here's some photos of the progress of him putting the oscillator together:

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This is the finished reverse avalanche oscillator, we plan to run it with 12-18 volt batteries. The next phase is to build a rc-filter and a second oscillator for the synth.

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The winter season has kicked in fully over here in Norway now, so I have to pack myself up with way more clothing then I tend to prefer. Especially for just a 15 minute short walk like this.

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Cool @Xtetrahedron

Looking forward to hear the sound of this synth :D

Me 2 @joklahoma !
I have a feeling our imperfections during the building process will give the sound a nice color and character to it :)

This comment has received a 2.07 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @joklahoma.

This one is from yusynth.net Isn't it? He is a sdiy ( Synthesizer DIY ) Man from France! He' doing great things. You can find Schematics on his sitefor VCO's (Voltage Controlled Oszillators) and LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator).

really appreciate your depth of knowledge on this subject from core of my heart.

Your post is so beautiful .I like your post.If you like my post,then give me a vote from you.

Hey there @ovronil
I posted this 1 minute ago, you can not have had time to check it out properly and make this comment. Please don't spam on my posts...
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It is amazing how you know your way through all this electronics.
It looks as if you do this so casually....

And about the weather... Norway is at its best when the air is cold, but cristal-clear!

Cool project. I salvage old gear a lot for new builds. Old equalizers are great to reuse for a synth front panel.