Monday 15 December 2008

Trobetronic40 - DIY Noisemaker

Introducing the Trobetronic40 - my first DIY synth project, built for a mate's 40th birthday out of parts sourced from a knackered Korg PolySix, Thingamagoop box and various cheap components.



I'd been keen to get into a bit of soldering action since reading Nicolas Collins' excellent Handmade Electronic Music last year, but always found excuses (work, life, making music, the wife etc.) to put off my first project. The turning point came in November when I bought a Thingamagoop and realized the circuits it contained were pretty much exactly the ones Collins describes.



Bread-boarding the circuit took about 20 minutes, the soldering about five hours, housing it about an hour and finding the right screws for the PolySix switch about four days. It was fun, but this might be my first and last DIY project. Life's just too short for this kind of nonsense ...

Here's a short video of the Trobetronic40 in action and here's the schematic.

BTW there was a certain karmic quality to the build: the mate in question was also responsible for blowing-up the original P6 back in '95. Happy Birthday Mike and look after this one, OK?

3 comments:

mubotics said...

NICE!
that thing rocks
got a schem?

Anonymous said...

Please post a schematic when you can; it's an excellent project.

Navs said...

Cheers! Post updated with schematic.
Let me know if I've got anything wrong. Also, do you know of a simple OSX circuit design app? I tried Eagle, but couldn't figure it out...