Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Overcycler, a DIY 6 voice hybrid synthesizer

I'm now working on a fully DIY synthesizer project, I started it about 3 months ago.

It will be:
- An expander, in a slanted box ( http://www.hammondmfg.com/1595eBI.jpg ).
- 6 voice polyphonic with separate outs, 4 part multitimbral.
- Hybrid , two 12bit DACs per voice (wavetable oscillators for now), one SSM2044 filter, and 1/4 of SSM2164 VCA.
- Using a 20x4 characters LCD / 16 keys keypad / 10 potentiometers user interface.
- Using relatively simple hardware, strongly based on the KISS principle :)
- Having a strong character, each stage will allow some overdrive (filter, VCAs, ...)

I learned a lot while working on the Prophet 600, and I thought it could help me design a slightly different synth from the usual analog ones, more or less inspired  by the PPG Wave.

Nothing groundbreaking, Mutable Instruments have done this for a while, but I had an unused set of SSM2044/SSM2164, and I wanted to see how far I could go in simplifying a polyphonic hybrid synthesizer.

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