Railroad Gin Episode One: Railroad Bill

Tube Boost Looper

This is for a project that I am currently working on right now. Its a dual tube boost with a FX loop.  Its based on the Bass Paralooper  and the Valve Caster . I have two identical boosts, modified with larger input capacitors; Currently I am just using the trim pot to set the gain. More to come later!

Update:

So I drilled out the case yesterday but screwed up on the placement of the jacks for the loop send and return, they are in the way for the tube sockets.  I think I'll take a brass strip and use that to cover up the existing hole and mount the jacks to that.  Other than that screw up this is one of my most accurate drillings for an fx box.  

 

Got a Few Old Unused Records Lying Around?

Matt Glassmeyer of Nashville, Tenn., built this roof out of 350 records. The roof is on the north side of the house and gets no direct sunlight, and shows no sign of warping.

[via MAKE via Core77 via Treehugger ]

Mammoth 2

This is yet another attempt at the Mammoth Fuzz I could not get the other to sound like I wanted it to so this one will work hopefully.  Same layout as before from Tag Board Effects Used a Dermal tool to grind the Copper away leaving nice pads to solder onto. Build time was about an hour and half.

Please leave a comment telling me what you think.

Spoon Organ

This is from:  C i b o M a h t o . c o m


"Spoon Organ is an instrument that I created to show at the Make Tokyo Meeting 06 this past weekend. The user can play musical tunes simply by touching a row of spoons sitting on a table, with a fork added in for good measure. A microcontroller is used to detect changes in capacitance caused by a finger pressing against the metal, which are then sent to a computer using the MIDI protocol."

Mini Lunetta Patched Close up

CMOS-based instrument designs have earned a strong following among the synth-diy crowd - and for good reason. The circuits can be relatively simple and the resulting sounds quite interesting. The Lunetta is built primarily from 4000 series CMOS integrated circuits with inputs and outputs taken to front panel jacks to be patched to other sections.  Lunettas uses counters, shift registers, XOR gates and 40106 schmidt trigger clocks and oscillators.


Check out the Electro-music forums for more project info and users' builds.


This one is built bysndbyte's

Electronic Music Studios

This excellent doco covering the origins and life of Electronic Music Studios. A company formed by avant-garde musicians & engineers who all shared a passion for electronic sound. Their collaborative efforts brought about the first digital electronic music sequencer, utilizing a relatively massive amount of computing power for the 1950s.

 

More info 

TorrentMeter - A Steampunk Bandwidth Meter

This is from Skytee

Its and analog gauge that displays the bandwidth of torrents being downloaded.

I got inspired by reading Tom Igoe's article in Make Magazine issue 11, about an antique gauge displaying air quality data from the web. It hit a nerve: friends and I had once built asteam powered teletype. Since we've got fiber optical intertubes at home, I wanted a big brass gauge telling me how big my pipe was. And that's the idea of my TorrentMeter.



Video of it in action.

Full Article 

010

This is a Fender 75 that my friend Rusty asked me to take a look at; the lead channel of it was not working on it. While working on it I took the opportunity to take some pictures of it, and since photo-shoped. Good news its working now but the bad news is that I don't know what I did in order to get it working again so if it fails again I am back at square one. 010 refers to the binary positions of the switches, great part is I did not plan that when I took the picture.

DIY RAM Memory- Register Style

This is from Instructables.com. Its an amazing hand built three bit memory. 

DIY RAM Memory- Register Style

**UPDATE** I also made a CMOS version here: http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-CMOS-RAM-Memory/
If you have ever looked at a microcontroller's datasheet, you have probably seen something about registers.  Registers are little one or two byte memory storage units in microcontrollers.  The register in this instructable can hold 3 bits of data (b/c I ran out of room on my breadboards) using transistors.  I did this to prove that I can, however, its not practical as an 8 bit register requires 64 transistors, about 64 resistors and lots of space.

The register is a neat device. It can recieve data when the enable input is, in my circuit, low and it can then latch and save the data even it the data line is changing. My circuit is not the conventional D-type latch because it used more transistors than I had.

Full Instructable 

Swishercutter left a great comment:

Good job.

Whenever I see people build large scale versions of commonly available circuits I always think of my electronics instructor...he wanted to build a "Macroprocessor" which would be built from tubes and relays (he is an ex radar tech) as he put it "...it would be as big as a building, would put off a ton of heat as well as making the most wonderful clicking sound as it ran...".

Lets keep going on these types of Instructables...if we forget how these circuits are designed internally we become not only dependent on the circuit always being there but we also risk losing the spark of ingenuity which led to the design in the first place...you can only go further if you know how we got here.

Maybe we can start a "macroelectronics" tag just for things like this.

Meet Meeblip

Via Make



Meet Meeblip, The Open Source, Hackable Digital Hardware Synth... Peter writes -

Making music, making blips and bleeps, turning knobs, plugging in keyboards, and having the freedom to modify your gear – these are good things. And that’s why I’m so excited that today is the day the MeeBlip launches.


It’s been several years in development, but now it’s finally here. It’s a hardware box that makes noises – virtual analog synth noises, chip-sounding noises, good noises, bad noises, noises you can make into music. It’s got physical knobs and switches on it, plus a MIDI DIN in port so you can connect that keytar you bought on eBay. It’s also a digital synth you can build, modify, and hack, down to the way every knob is mapped and every sound is blipped.


The MeeBlip is the creation of James Grahame, of Retro Thing and Reflex Audio fame. But we’re serious about the Create Digital Music name going on there, too. We’ll be documenting and helping develop this instrument for some time to come, and we’ve begun building a site and community for the instrument so you have a place to meet other people using it.


The MeeBlip, from code to schematics, is open source hardware. You can hack it, read through the code, make your own and sell it. At the same time, just because it’s “open source” and “hackable” doesn’t mean the MeeBlip is just for hackers. On the contrary – we wanted a synth anyone could play. With the Quick Build Kit, you can assemble the MeeBlip without a soldering iron or, really, much skill, in a matter of minutes. Plug it in, turn some knobs, and you can make some sounds. And if later you decide you want to go deeper or even change the way the instrument works, you can do that, too.

Check out their web site here

1,003

Just broke 1000 page views thanks to every one that has been stoping by!

Benjolin Light Synth

This was made by Casper Electronics

"The sound in this video is all made using one my custom built synth that 
you can read about it here.


The synth is made up of two complex analog oscillator/modulator/filter circuits, 
a light control circuit and a modified BOSS RSD 10 sample/echo module.
I've started playing with a cool feature of the RSD 10 which is that it can
use external oscillators to control the playback rate of the echo and an
external clock to trigger the echo repeats. I'm using a sequenced oscillator
to melodically modulate the pitch of the echo of the other oscillators and
I'm using the sequence clock to trigger the echo. its a cool sounding
effect that gives a relatively normal sequence a bunch of cool quirks to
play with."





I want to make cool rhythmic like this, some day soon it will happen!

Apex Electronics

I got the chance to Apex Electronics today, I was stupid and forgot my camera at home. So, here is two images taken by Mighty Ohm. Going to build some cool tube boost with NOS tube sockets I got.


Flickr

Turbo Encabulator

six hydrocoptic marzel vains dude I need one of these

Make a Point Contact Transistor at home

Really great video from Jeri Ellsworth

Live Rig / Looping

He's doing some really cool stuff live with vey few sources really is quite amazing.

Circuit Skills: Perfboard Prototyping, sponsored by Jameco Electronics

This is from Collin Cunningham he has some really cool stuff on his page at Make. 

When you think "DIY electronics," one of the first images that likely comes to mind is of parts and wire soldered to a standard piece of perforated circuit board -- and that makes sense. Perfboard is widely used because it's so versatile. Essentially, it's just a grid of potential solder-point connections. You can trim it down to just the size you need, or leave extra space for future enhancements, or revisions, if need be.

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