It’s customary to have a topic on a forum where new users can introduce themselves. Here goes.
About me.
I’m Bitnik on MuffWiggler Forums where I’m new and quite chatty, but to reiterate the important stuff I’m very new to modular and as I’m not made of money I’m going to build my own gear. I’ve ordered a couple of Kosmo PCB+Panel kits and a Frequency Central power PCB and an AC wall wart to feed it. I’m using an old bookcase rather than building my own cases.
Another early project will be a midi adapter for CV, because I’ve got midi keyboards to spare. Meanwhile I have access to a Moog Theremini (bought by my son) which has a single CV output, and I’ll also be having fun with a 50cm membrane potentiometer.
Hi,
Just got back into music gear recently. Been playing with some tape loop stuff on old cassette recorder, some stuff with monome norns and pocket operators. Wanting to learn more about building modular synth gear here starting with the simpler projects (simple oscillator etc.) and I built a ring modulator recently which was fun!
cool bitnik sounds good! im working on some carts, if ordered in the right places these modules can turn out rather cheap, I was doing the maths, the LFO is about £12 in parts at rapid, the only things for example that are a bit annoying are resistors as you usually get them in packs of 100 for £2 but if your building a few modules it does end up rather cheap! ill aim to add cheap tricks onto the forum etc. but cool!
Your great advantage is that you’ve built many circuits so you have a good instinct about what builders need. I’ve got a lot of resistors and capacitors, but for any one build there will inevitably be stuff that doesn’t quite work.
It’s the radical difference between component cost and module value that drives me towards DIY. I’m a software guy who built an entire career on letting others do what I regarded as “the boring stuff.” Now I’m retired I get to rethink all those early decisions, and I have just enough electronics skills to make this kind of project very easy.
I’ve been making pretty terrible music for years using DAWS - mainly Reason - but bought a Korg Minilogue XD in early December. I know I should be getting a breadboard out and making my own, but I’m too old and lazy to mess about with that.
I understand about 5% of the technical stuff Sam does, but it’s always properly entertaining. I look forward to getting misty-eyed in a coupla years, once Sam’s a fixture on TV shows. I’ll be reminiscing about when he was a young, fresh-faced Youtuber who I Patreonised with a few quid every month. I’m not kidding - the world needs a techno-music-technological-version of Brian Cox. If the BBC ever does ‘Tomorrow’s World’ again, he’ll be a shoo-in.
Brian Cox’s music was bloody awful, by the way.
PS: I use my given name, Andrew Torrance, on the Patreon, for reasons I can’t quite recall.
I’m a software developer by trade, and by night I have way too many hobbies. Was really into “music” making back in 2014 for like a year, and ended up buying a bit too much stuff. Sold off the MS20 mini… that I now regret.
Later spent 2 intensive years building and flying FPV racing drones, ended up going on a trip to Norway diving down the mountains at 100+ km/h before that hobby subsided for me.
Once you’ve flown proper mountains the local fields of Stockholm dont seem that entertaining to fly any more…
But, the drones improved my soldering skills a lot! They break all the time! So here I am, having seen Sam live in Stockholm this recent tour, and built an atari punk whose signal is so hot out my audio interface cant silence it… I want more!
Hoping to even go as far as maybe making some Eurorack adaptions of Sams schematics… as I already have some of those by now.
Hello friends-
I’ve been a fan and Patreon Patron of Sam’s for a bit over a year and I can tell this forum is going to preoccupy me. I’’ve played and been into synths for 30+ years (but I’ve never practiced enough to be any good) and only got into DIY in the last couple. I’m obsessed with experimental electronica and “west coast” synths currently-Buchlas and Serges and my Voltage Research Lab and 0-Coast, etc. I try to keep everything Eurorack spec’d (but my desktop monsosynths seem to be multiplying like Furbies lately.) My projects so far have been pretty mundane-a clock unit, a clock divider unit, digital+analog noise unit, some 3.5-6.3mm converters, and an Arduino stab at the big knob sequencer. I love working with 4000 series logic noise chips, but they’re not great for 1v/octave. I have used them to makes some rudimentary drum units though.
Hi Max. I’ve heard the term ‘west coast synths’ used before. I suspect I could look up Google for this, but I’m lazy and would rather ask you directly. What does it mean?
My pleasure! First off, they’re not really official terms, more of a slang thing. The idea is that “East Coast” synths tend to follow in the Moog template of using some combination of enveloped voltage-controlled filters and amplifiers to subtract from a wave produced by a voltage-controlled oscillator, while “West Coast” is more the Buchla philosophy of modulating the voltage-controlled oscillator with other voltage-controlled oscillators, perhaps throwing a wave folder in, and letting a low-pass gate (sometimes controlled by a function generator) handle the rest of the sound shaping. There is also usually an element of randomness (“woggle”) associated with West Coast.
Thanks Max. I’m a complete newcomer to analogue synthesis. Some may say (having only recently bought a Minilogue XD) I’m not yet even on the first rung of the ladder.
Hey all,
I am another software guy by trade. Make music for myself mostly, I typically like synthwave and the like. Have / still use DAWs and VSTs for this. Delving into the world of DIY modular. After a few years of buying and trading in various hardware synths, i realized that i could be spending that time and money learning a skill. I already have reliable software synths, so to me I feel like I have nothing to lose here. I have had some ideas in the past of midi interfaces etc that do what i could not find on the shelf. Hopefully one day I can do that! I am taking it rather slow, but its always the most fun to me learning new things. Like, how cool is it to make something that can make music. That’s some meta art shit right there.
Big fan of Sam, listen to a big playlist of his tunes at work every day. Thanks Sam, your energy and videos really make a difference for newbs like me.
i’m a fan of what sam is doing since the 1st time i saw it, which wasn’t too long ago, so i need to catch up on quite a few videos & stuff all over the place…
i also really need to thank sam for making me smile a lot again lately, because he’s such a nice & funny guy indeed!
what to tell about me? well… when i was 30 years old back in 1997 i had some really crazy ideas (a bit like sam somehow… )
my “claim to fame” could be that i once visited the musikmesse in frankfurt am main (because i’m from germany & it’s not as far away as the namm… ) where i met dieter doepfer, told him about my meetings with oskar sala in his studio in berlin & a certain florian schneider there too before, where i had the crazy idea that doepfer could build a new (mixture)trautonium… & he did not much later! (some modules & a ribbon controller for them especially…)
i was way too stupid to do this myself - building synths or modular systems or actually anything! - so i thought “that guy can certainly do this!”
fast forward into 2014 i’ve finally built my own little studio & make my very own weird electronic music there almost every day since then… i still can’t solder or build modules or else… but love them & people like sam, who can!
this year i also do my own radio shows since 25 years already, which is one of the very few things i think i’m quite good at…
btw: just recently i did a track called “bATARI leakAGE” where i’ve sampled about 4 seconds of sound made by sam on a yamaha cs-80… & also sampled some of his explanations, what things do to make sounds… because i think it fits perfectly into that track… hope he doesn’t mind?
anyway… i can send him the link to that track, if he would like to hear it before anybody else…
well… i’ve rambled on here for already way too long, so… that’s my intro for now…
c u soon again… most likely…
LSR (a.k.a. “jack of all trades” or simply olaf, which is my real name )
Hi There! I’ve been making music since 1991 when I was 14. Have had a lot of hardware over the years, but switched to software mostly some time shortly before I moved from my native Denmark to the US in 2002. I started collecting hardware again early in 2019, but @lookmumnocomputer singlehandedly got me into building my own modular system. So, thank you!
I have been into electronic music for decades now since I first started DJ’in back in the late 90’s. Gave that up in the 00’s when DJ’ing with a laptop became the norm and got into synths, my first being a Roland SH201 (which I still have, its got a genuine Supersaw after all, and you can stack 4 of em in unison). Since then my collection of hardware has grown to include a Dave Smith Mopho SE & Tetra, my Moog Sub Phatty, a Novation Circuit, a 0-Coast, a full Eurorack system in a Make Noise 7u bus case (along with a currently spare Make Noise 104hp powered skiff that the system outgrew last year), a couple of old Yamaha RX drum machines (soooooo cheesy and 80’s, lots of fun but a bastard to program) and more recently my Kosmo DIY system, which is currently under construction. Still havent actually done much in the way of recordings though despite playing for a good 12 years or so, as I doubt anyone really wants to listen to my self indulgent ambient nonesense, lol.
So far I have the case and power sorted, and have a VCF, an LFO and three of the 3340 tuner VCO’s which are waiting on some pots to ship from Thonk before I can plug em in (this week hopefully). I also have a spare pair of the VCLFO10 boards which I am combining with a Buchla 281 Dual Function Generator PCB from Toppobrillo and some attenuverters and logic under one panel with some normalisations to make my own expanded version of the Make Noise Maths/Befaco Rampage (which I have both of and use in pretty much every euro patch I make, I love those west coast style function generators).
I also prototype my own PCB’s with my desktop CNC machine, which is a sort of fun all of its own . So far though these have been fairly limited experiments that have just done things like make LED’s flash in a sequence or my egg timer, but I hope to get some synth stuff done soon.
Looking forward to making a contribution to the discussions and learning more with you all, and equally looking forward to the new modules each month, its going to be an exciting year!
Hi everyone,
I’m pretty fresh faced when it comes to modular synths, but I’ve been following @lookmumnocomputer for years now and have always been a fan of his stuff. I’m from Aus and I’m just starting to record and release my music (which severely jumps genres), I’m super keen to jump on the bandwagon with these projects.
. So far though these have been fairly limited experiments that have just done things like make LED’s flash in a sequence or my egg timer, but I hope to get some synth stuff done soon.