NICK'S WORLD OF SYNTHESIZERS
THE BEAST
BEAST1.WAV
FILTERMORF.WAV
HARMONY.WAV
UNDERTONES.WAV
This synthesiser took me about a year to make, half of that time was spent on making it look good. It is a similar design to The Machine. the main improvement I made to this one over the last one is that this one is a lot more reliable, I had so many problems with the other one breaking down at gigs, this one hardly ever goes wrong. another feature of this one is all the coloured lights, these let me know what switches I have switched on, this is very useful on stage when you need to change from one sound to another very quickly.
A Lovely diagram of what the knobs do
Never again!
This one has 2 ribbons so you can play 2 different notes at once but this is a skill I have not mastered. the ribbon controllers are wire wound variable resistors the wire is 1 tenth of a mm, very fine, it is wound onto perspex rods the resistance it about 10k.
Playing with a ribbon gives you a similar sound to a theremin, only it is a lot easier to play because you can see the notes. It is a lot better than playing a keyboard with portamento. The problem with portamento is that you can't time when you glide into the notes only when you glide out of them.
I play the beast with 2 sharpened toothbrushes. I have only recently mastered the 2 toothbrush technique. I find that our newer songs require it, this is because there are more fast jumps in the melodys. I also prefer the sound with 2 toothbrushes because you can use a combination of slides and keyboard style jumps.
This synth is fully modular. There is a switch to change it to internally patched. I used relays to do this. The internal patch is what I use on stage.
RINGMOD.WAV
RINGMOD2.WAV
I have made an old fashioned diode ring modulator. This is a simple circuit using germanium diodes and LT44 output transformers. I much prefer the sound of this type of ring modulator over modern designs using multiplier chips. It is normally described as a passive circuit, but I have used buffer amps on the inputs. I found you get a better sound if you get the signal levels just right on the inputs.
DISTORTION1.WAV
DISTORTION2.WAV
Here is a picture of the valve distortion circuit. As I have very little space I decided to use a miniature nuvistor valve. It is a class A triode circuit which means very soft distortion and lots of 2nd harmonics because of the way it squashes the wave more on one side than the other. It also has a germanium diode rectifier. I used germanium diodes because they round off the corners of the waves slightly, preventing the circuit from adding too many higher harmonics.
Please Leave a comment about this machine I will try to answer any questions. You don't have to leave your email address if you don't want to.
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