As you know, I recently built the YUSynth Saw Animator. When I had the panel made from Big Blue Wave in the UK, I also made a few others. The Yusynth Quadrature VC-LFO and the Yusynth Noise generator Sample & Hold. Since then my direction for my system has changed, I sold the quad lfo and decided to combine my Synthesizers.com Q110 & Q117 into the yusynth panel instead of building the kit. I used a little bit of my wife's nail polish remover to adjust the panel and had to get rid of the manual gate on the Q117 and the output volume on the Q110(used a jumper to set it to full). Other than that I am quite happy with the outcome.

Being in a do it yourself mood, I decided to take on another project I've been toying around with. Also, since I know had extra panels from last project, I couldn't resist. I started out with the Q116 Ring Modulator panel, measured up some new holes and drilled them out. Rogers silk screening didn't want to come off with nail polish remover and I had some extra holes from the Q116 left over. So I covered the panel in blue painters masking tape and spray painted it black. I then cut the holes out with an x-acto knife. When i bolted in the pots and jacks some of the tape wrinkled, but for a prototype its beautiful. The Q112 pcb board is the same as the Q113, after troubleshooting a bad TL074 IC chip, I added the extra potentiometers and jacks. Works great and saves space!

Here is my first DIY module for my modular synthesizer. It was made from a kit I bought from Bridechamber and the panel was custom built in the synthesizers.com format which matches the vintage Moog modular synthesizer.

The Module is called the YUSynth Saw Animator. Here is the description from Yusynths website: The Saw Animator module is a very interesting module when you whish to get that FAT sound, usually obtained with two or more sawtooth VCOs, but you are short of VCOs. You can get this typical sound with only one sawtooth VCO, thanks to Bernie Hutchins (JAES, 1981). The Digisound 80 has this wonderful module and Scott Bernardi designed a version of its own. The present module is a somehow simplified but yet efficient version. To get the best of this module, it must be used in conjunction with a mixer. I chose not to integrate a mixer within the module in order to benefit from the dry outputs which are very useful when used with a LFO instead of a VCO. When used with a sawtooth LFO and inputing fixed CVs in the MOD inputs, one can achieve some interesting phase shifted modulators such as quadrature modulation. Well the possibilities are numerous and it's up to your imagination.

Looks like there is now around 7 of these in the world, as I made one this last weekend. I did this due to space restraints and because I think it looks cool, so don't be hating' me too much.

Some of my cuts came out a little rough and thanks to a mid point change of mind, I have two nice air vents in the back top corners. One I filled with the AC line, the other I will get some mesh and use for an air vent.

I pit the voice board under the keyboard, which meant I had to lift the keys up a little. I did this because I want to keep every this housed in the main body rather than build a external power enclosure. (Having tight to the power supply ended up not adding any extra noise to the signal)

To my wife's dismay, I painted the side panels and the back to hide the cut and chopped text from the Juno.

Overall it was a fun project and I am very happy with the results. I did loose the lower octaves(MIDI 100% though), but there is a mod to transpose that I will do in the future.

This is my beloved SQI Six Track. Six voice polyphony, 3 oscillators per voice, Curtis filter, 49 key little synthesizer. My only beef with the thing is that its in mono. I wanted to get a stereo width out of it, the same width as my Juno 106 if possible. So I decided to add a Boss CE-5: Chorus Ensemble and mod the synthesizer. I did not alter any of the electronics, just merely re-housed the pedal into the synth. During my first attempt, I was poking around with my multi-meter looking for power to leach, I blew out a few components. Luckily I was able to repair the damages for a few 35 cent parts. As you can see below the jumper cable takes the synths signal to the pedal, if removed you still have a fully functional CE-5 for whatever.

This is my Commodore 64 mod that I've been working on for the last few months. I built this machine to be used as a synthesizer which to run 8bit adventures MSSIAH from Sweden. I installed a sid2sid board with 2 new old stock sid 6581 chips that I got from Australia.

I repainted the machine black with the key bed white. I wanted to also repaint the keys, but I could not find a way other that stickers to get the letters back on, so I kept the keys original. I added the 4 pot mod as well as switches to deactivate the pots making ports 1 and 2 still usable for game pads. Basically the four pot mod is taking the y axis and x axis from the game ports and installing it into the machine. I also added indicator lights to the switches to let me know when they are activated. The other two pots on the left hand side is the feedback distortion loop mod, with switches and indicator lights as well.

Added 1/4 inch outputs and inputs, both with volume control. I added a custom 3.5 inch lcd screen with second input available via rca on the back. The screen is a back up monitor for a vehicle, I was able to get this lcd for only $30 including shipping from China. The screen though takes 12 volts of power, so I added a second input for a 12 volt 1 amp power supply on the back. This way the mods get there power with out tapping the c64s power. I also added a dimmer switch to the led's so that I can control the voltage they receive thus dimming the lights.

As you can see from my blog, this is not my first attempt at bending my Vl-tone. The first time through was OK, but glitchy. For my top panel I used a piece of stainless steel that unfortunately conducted the current from my potentiometers dropping the pitch. Also at the time, the only wire I had was too thick and stiff to work with. So I decided to rip it all apart and start over. This is what I did.

So here are the mods. I used a little help from Casper electronics, he has a mod sheet that gives you a few patch points and three pots. I ended up only using four of the patch points and all three of his pot mods. I also added three extra pots by externally replacing the VLs internal pots. Then I tested and tested and found twelve other patch points that I liked. So that is from the left all the pots and the black RCA jacks.

As for the white RCA jacks, they function as a switch bay triggered by the switches to the right. The smart observer will notice there are nine switches in the array. One turns the bay into a multiple, the top row (on-off-on) engages the bay or sends it to the switches below. Those switches a attached to capacitors and diodes to further change the sound. The pots about the switch array are part of a home made low pass filter with frequency and resonance. Then there is a volume and reset button.

Casio Drum Machine
This is the Casio RZ-1 Plus version. The kits are acoustic, electric and Latin. The number one best feature about this Casio version is that its has four banks of sample memory giving you the ability of sampling 16 sounds.

I painted this one white, redid the text, added wood panels, and upgraded the materials used. This mod took two months and about $100 more than my previous version.

Has a 30 point RCA patch bay that short circuits three of the eprom chips for a total of around 480 possible patches (if I did my math right). You can patch with in the chips and chip to chip. To add some more fun I've tried patching my two rz-1's together to get all sorts of crazy sounds! In addition to the patch bay there are five input / output on/off switch section with toggle switches and momentary buttons. Each toggle switch also has an LED indicator.

I also added a switch to bypass the RZ-1s main timing crystals with two getlofi LTC1799 precision oscillators to allow for some great pitch control. These also have LED indicators.

I've added 10k pots on the top to easier access the samples tone control. Also, I replaced the internal permanent soldered battery with a replaceable one.

Casio Drum Machine
Has a 24 point RCA patch bay that short circuits three of the four eprom chips. The different chips are for certain samples, so some patches effect only certain sounds. You can patch with in the chips and chip to chip. In addition to the patch bay there are four input / output on/off switch section with toggle switches and momentary buttons.
There is now a switch to bypass the RZ-1s main timing crystals with two getlofi 1799 precision oscillators to allow for some great pitch control. I still have a little bit of tweaking to do with some different pots and resistors.
I've added 10k pots on the top to easier access the samples tone control. Also, I replaced the internal permanent soldered battery with a replaceable one.

This is a home made diy synthesizer built from two getlofi.com 555 timer kits. This two oscillator synth has a square wave output and a very weak triangle wave output, both waves are switch able. Osc 2 can be synced with osc 1 or ran independently. Both oscillators have a pitch control and a volume control. There is a setting which allows you to control the pitch through two photo resistors, with one of them being tilted to allow for variation.

There are four outputs on this machine, two RCA and two 1/4", one of each is for osc 1 and 2. There is a 9 volt battery inside the enclosure, but is switch able to a 9 volt power adapter.

On the side is a semi lfo mode. I basically added an extra 500k resistance to lower the pitch. But at these low frequency the triangle wave can can be heard and the square wave will function as a controlled voltage on / off. Added sync, triangle square switch, volume, photo resister, RCA and 1/4"outputs, and some what of a lfo mode.

This is a simple little device I made to patch MIDI information. Even though the MIDI signal is routed through a 5 pin DIN connector, it transmits only through 3 of the pins. So by converting those 3 pins over to a TRS connector you can run your MIDI information into a TRS patch bay and re patch your MIDI, which is what I did. So I have all my synth's MIDI in / out cables going into the patch bay as well as to my controllers and to my computer. So at any patch I can quickly reroute where my MIDI goes. For this I made special cables, but I also made this little box to accept regular MIDI cables and TRS cable to interface into my patch bay.