Hardware synthesizers

Synthesizers and music tech gear, I love it! To build, to play or to just dream about. This is a collection of the music tech DIY projects that I've been working with the past few years. My lovely girlfriend Josefina Kennebjörk have been my woodworking partner for many of these projects.

It's made out of wood, it's red and it's beautiful. It contains a +- 12V PSU that i soldered to a perf board and a keyboard controller circuit by Ray Wilson musicfromouterspace.com. I bought the PCB from their website and some rare parts. It has outputs for CV, CV with portamento controlled by a knob, gate and trigger.

Picture of the electronics.

Detail of all keys.

Numbering every key to make it easier to assemble them in correct order.

Skarp Plingeling was a competence development project I did together with a collegue, Linus Fredriksson, at Skarp (Note, when this project was made the company Skarp was named Drakryggen. The name change was done in march 2021). We made a VCA module, a VCO and started to design a state veriable filter. Unforunately (very very sad) Linus passed away durign the project due to sudden health issues, and it was never finished. Both the VCA and VCO was based of the LM13700 IC (a dual transconductance amplifier). The VCA and VCO was was assemblied but no enclosure was built. Simulation was done in LTspice, schematics and PCB design in Eagle and KiCad

Picture of the VCA circuit.

I assemblied and painted this guitar from a harley benton kit. I don't know what makes a good guitar, but it works and it's fun to play and inspires me. The project was fun and i would reccomend the kit, it will not make you a vintage guitar but it's the best electric guitar i own! (I only have one more and it's really bad.)

The first synth DIY project i made, a 10 step CV Gate sequencer based on the Baby 10 schematic from Captain’s Analog. It's based on a 4017 CMOS IC and i built it with one row of pots and one row of on-off-on switches to get one CV output and two different gate outputs that can never gate at the same step. One trick i use often is to use gate 2 output to trigger a reset, this way I can control the sequence length from 1 to 10 steps. The IC have a pin for cartry output, this pin is high on step 1 through 5 and low on step 6 through 10, i have made this pin available as an output as well for some extra gate action, I use it about once every 4 years, so you can probably live without it if you want to build something similar.