I found a site the other day and it’s a wonderful mixture of circuit bending and stand alone DIY electronc stuff.
Named after the friendly ghost
I was led to it by a drone box link I found somewheres and when I found the schematic I was intially perturbed by the apparent complexity but upon further examination and drawing it out in a slightly more comprehensive manner it’s not actually too hard to understand.
If dull electronics observations and circuit analysis aren’t your thing then go here
but if you don’t mind that kinda stuff then open this
It looks complicated but once you break it down to discrete blocks it’s actually quite simple and fun filled.
One section of a 40106 hex inverter (remember the simple synth by Tim Escobedo?) acts as a master clock then this is fed into 4 sections of 555 timers (a 556 is just two 555’s in one package) so you get 4 lfo signals. The 10k’s to transistors and diodes hanging off various junctions are the indicators and don’t need to be there if you don’t want gizillions of flashing LED’s. Then theres a switch at the end to invert ot otherwise the LFO output and another switch to turn the lfo signal on and off. At this point the rest of the 40106 sections come in as the drone signals so each oscillator has it’s own LFO which can have the LFO inverted or otherwise and on or off. These signals are the mixed with an incoming signal and go into a summing amp with a low pass filter tacked onto it.
Pretty straight forward stuff really and quite simple for what can be acheived. I think what I’d add myself would be a momentary switch on the output of each oscillator to ground the signal and with the 4 it’d be quite playable as a stutter effect.
Then we go into a distortion module which is basically a fuzz face circut that has a mixer built around it which also looks kind of complicated but once drawn out with a bit of space around it it’s quite simple.
Last in line is a parallel set of band pass filters that can also be mixed into the signal and from there it goes to a volume then out.
I’d have to say that this is very elegant way to acheive alot in a very small space and you’d almost need 4 classic analog synths with some keys taped down and four sets of hands to acheive the same thing.
Notice also that the Master clock output has a bunch of outputs called in, out and thru. At this point you can modulate the clock signal with whatever… could even have a mic input?
This is the designers page on what goes on with all the controls
And theres even a forum for builders!
Good Golly… don’t you just love the internet?