/diy/ - Do It Yourself

You have an audio-grade signal gen inside your pc and phone so you just need an app.

>>2687166
But what about le twisting knobs and le analog sound?

>>2687161
I'm no expert but hung around with people who were for a bit, and basically it depends on what kind of sounds you want and how you plan to perform/ record them....just like photoshop is a collection of darkroom emulations, a dedicated synth is a collection of the individual circuits/devices used to generate and modify waveforms in the audible range. Once you know what does what, it's just a matter of finding oscillators, filters, gates, etc. with the parameters you need, and trial and error.

Helps a lot if you're open to using what you find by accident and experimentation as opposed to trying to force the gear to bend to your will and make X noise at Y time.

The people I knew used quality oscilloscopes for the final amplifier stage into a recorder or PA, and a lot of Navy surplus communication system components for filtering an other tweaks since they were already optimized for audio frequencies.

They also used the non-music stuff to generate control voltages to trigger analog synth sounds in interesting ways that avoided the strict quantization of dedicated musical sequencers...something that generates less musical waveforms can still be useful as a trigger or gate to control other sounds in time and the timing variations can do some cool stuff you can build from.

Its a shit ton of work but very organic and not at all mechanical sounding when done well and allowed to do its thing...this is some of what they did with no keyboards, midi or sequencers, some of the grooves are cool as hell-

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iqmMZxT8n9w&pp=ygUtdm9sdGFnZSBjb250cm9sbGVkIEluc3RpdHV0ZSBvZiBOb3J0aCBhbWVyaWNh

>>2687161
Have you tried experimenting with a Deece machine?

>>2687167
The thing about these old boomer electronic hobbies is that a lot of them were made in a time when electronics were being produced using primitive yet versatile components that could easily be repurposed. But nowadays most of that cool old stuff is long gone in favor of computer chips that mostly just do digital logic. So trying to cobble together an analog synth from random scrap is not really practical these days.

>>2687210
Not OP but damn you know a lot about this! Will check out that video

>>2687239
True in the sense of the supply of dirt cheap industrial and military surplus gear having dried up compared to 30-50 years ago, but the knowledge base for diying is a lot more accessible now than it ever was, and there's tons of modular analog synth and filter/ fx modules available either complete or as kits...
The idea that you'd go into some electronics liquidator and build a musical production workstation with 100% surplus non-musical gear isn't really realistic, using that stuff was always more about pragmatism more than getting sounds that couldn't be made with anything else and most people used a mix of dedicated audio processors and oddball non-musical gear, along with good old fashioned tape editing and manipulation that predated synths.

Ultimately it's about the final product, and avoiding the rigid parameters of keyboards, scales, sequencing/quantization, etc. is still very possible using digital equipment and editing, most people are just too lazy to do it and/or afraid to sign off on things that aren't made to some idealized standard of what makes for "good" music.

>>2687161

>>2687161
Sine waves go BWOOOP