Instruments and Builds

This synthesiser (the Baxter 100) is my most ambitious build so far and, for now at least, it’s an open-ended project. I started with a few core modules just to get it making some noise, but since then I’ve been following whatever ideas pop up from the DIY synth community on YouTube and elsewhere (Look Mum No Computer, Modular in a Week, Tom Whitwell, and others), as well as from the MEMS project (reverse-engineering and documenting Buchla synths) and established manufacturers like Make Noise. I often find myself thinking: how would I make a René-style sequencer, with what I have?

My big mistake – or maybe my USP, depending on how you look at it – and definitely the thing that keeps me hooked, is that I’m not just soldering up PCBs to make a Buchla, Moog, or Make Noise clone (nothing wrong with that, by the way). The core of this synth is built around the idea of using simple CMOS logic chips to make sound – the so-called “Lunetta” approach – which really embodies Nicolas Collins’ notion of hacking (repurposing existing technology). In fact, it was Collins’ book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking that first got me bleeping away with 40106 chips.

Much is made of the Buchla vs. Moog, West Coast vs. East Coast debate, which (somewhat inaccurately) tends to focus on whether there’s an organ-style keyboard involved. But this machine definitely leans toward the Buchla tradition – creating an electronic sound-producing system rather than a “synthesiser keyboard.” It’s synth-building from the ground up, in the spirit of those early electronic music studios.

In the mid-noughties, I immersed myself in circuit bending. I don’t recall exactly how I stumbled across it, but I remember finding Reed Ghazala’s website and his introduction to circuit bending. This was pre-YouTube and other social media, and straightforward tutorials were not as common as they are now.

Having had an interest in circuits and synthesisers from a young age but no real idea where to start, circuit bending offered an immediate, hands-on approach. It chimed with one of my first experiments with electronics hacking a broken Amiga joystick. With limited knowledge but lots of curiosity and a screwdriver to take it apart I discovered the insides were basically strips of metal forming contacts, which could be wired with crocodile clips and connected to other switches. I made a sort of steering wheel out of a round margarine tub, with switches made from drawing pins and kitchen foil.

I was also lucky to already have some experience with soldering, having been bought an iron when my parents got sick of me breaking guitar leads and encouraged me to fix them instead.

After experimenting on a cheap keyboard and getting instant results, I was quickly hooked on buying up toys from charity shops, car boot sales, and pound shops. Sadly, a classic like a Speak & Spell never turned up, but I amassed a collection of strange sound-making devices. I even picked up some classics like the Casio SK-1 but didn’t have the heart to start hacking them until I had a spare.

Much later, discovering Nicolas Collins’ Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking showed me what I’d been doing all along. The most common bend on these toys (the duck and guitar) was to slow the clock down, so bleeping, blooping nursery rhymes became strange textures. The hacked radio with contact points was a direct result of reading that book.

Looking back, my technique was a bit crude. I saw the professional results that artists like Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics were achieving and felt I’d come up a bit short, with pots and buttons forced here and there. See my Casio PT-20 build for an example of me trying to achieve a more polished result.

It was only much later (see other builds) that I began to understand how important it was to get the right components, materials and tools but I suffered from what Adam Savage calls the “Rumpelstiltskin problem”: not knowing the name of what you want, so finding it impossible to search for on the internet. The huge growth of eBay and other online marketplaces, which opened access to a wealth of components (previously the realm of specialist hobby shops or Maplin in the UK), has certainly changed things as well.