surely you mean: No, demo's are good!
... why is that? what is it, 8 bit sound or 1 bit or what? Thinking of building it aaahhh!!!!
Why?
- There are a lot of cool schematics and "lofi" synthboxes out there. But most are to expensive or to much
components to wire (I'm a bit lazy). Lazyness, it's much more easier to do a program code than wiring
a lot of ICs and analog parts. And if something has to be changed the circuit has to be rewired, software is
easier and quicker changed. Belive me, it's really much more easier to learn a programming language like "C"
than learning all about electronics. Today every cheap PC has so much performance to do all the stuff we
build in software (VST-plugins, Max/Msp, Reaktor). But is it really fun to play a VST-CrackleBox with the mouse?!
So the intension was an cheap easy to build versatile and bendable hardware platform.
Next thing is that it's a bit boring to implement/rebuild the well known stuff again and again
(the hundreth crackle box, ataripunkconsole ...).
There are a lot of interesting fields we can get our ideas from: chaos theory, cellular automata,
algorithmic omposition, neural networks, fuzzy logic and nature.
- 8bit/1Bit:
Sound is calculated with 8Bit resolution, the PIC-microcontroller works internally with 8bit wide data/registers.
Sound is outputed via pulsewidth modulation (PWM), which is 1Bit output but 8x oversampled.
At the moment, you get 4 different synthesizers/noisemakers in one microcontroller/box.
- Two fractal based "music" generators ("predictive digital music synthesizer", it's not random!)
- Step-sequencer (8 steps) with FM(frequency modulation) tone generation
- Cellular Automata (1 dimensional, see "game of life", "critterandguitari")
But the synths are not limited to 4, it can be more (8,16,32 .. 2^x), A lot of free space is left in the PIC.
ToDo / Ideas:
- adding some switches (Play/ReTrigger, Reverse/Forward, Synth/Preset and Store/Rec)
- adding presets for each synth
- adding a Audio input for use as a FX/Sampler
- adding a 128kByte EEPROM (25LC1024, SPI) for sample storage
- adding MIDI input (control, sync)
- adding more synths (why not some common stuff)
I hope I don't have to write a detailed users manual because my english is not good enough to write
a good detailed and comprehensive manual. Ok, if the thing is working right (one algorithm is still in development)
I post of course a overview of the knobs and algorithms.... but no "high gloss" high resolution color magazine.
I'm shure you can build and bend it