Let's Build A Synthesizer! + FREE Kontakt Library

hi I'm Dave Hill awaits so today I was thinking it might be fun to try to build a synthesizer not like a contact instrument a physical synthesizer basically I want to have some kind of a sound source that I can record and sample and bring into context but I want the sound source to be analog there's all this you know talk on forums all the time about how analog is you know much fatter and much better sounding I don't know if I've ever really completely bought into that but anyway I thought it would be a fun project when I was 13 I had this really intense electronics phase that involved me like looking at schematics and building tons and tons of circuits but I never actually understood how the circuits work and to this day I still don't for some reason digital stuff and programming always clicked a lot more than Hardware stuff so yeah let's get started okay so the schematic I picked is this one and the reason I picked this isn't because I know anything about this circuit or because I understand the circuit I really don't understand electronic circuits the reason I picked it is because it has a diagram of what the breadboard is supposed to look like so typically when you get an electronic circuit you're given just this a schematic and I know how to read the schematic but translating that into an actual working circuit is actually not so easy things are not laid out on a breadboard the same way that they're laid out on this schematic and doing that mapping is something that's never come easily so I am that lazy I'm actually picking this based on the presence of that breadboard diagram okay let's build this thing so basically all I'm doing here is I'm putting the components in place at the center of the circuit is a 555 timer this is a small very cheap integrated circuit that's at the heart of a huge number of beginner electronics projects it basically allows you to generate a pulse which makes it perfect for building an oscillator like this one other than that the circuit has a resistor two capacitors and a variable resistor to control the pitch [Music] next I'm just gonna make my way around the breadboard connecting everything with these pretty colored wires if it looks like I'm doing this quickly it's because I've messed with the speed of the footage to make this video less boring this part of the video is only a minute long but it actually took me 14 minutes to build this circuit [Music] okay I think we're done let's hear what this sounds like i plug my 9-volt battery in and [Music] okay so I've got my sound samples that I've recorded from my oscillator I've got six regions basically all I did is I twiddle the knob waiting for it to get a little bit stable and then recorded and I did that six times so let's take a listen I'm going to open them up in our x6 and we can take a look at the spectrums okay this one okay I can already see that this one's gonna be pretty much useless okay that's yeah I definitely think I screwed up something with this circuit cuz I think it's supposed to be either a square wave or a saw wave and that is neither okay that's getting closer let's let's look at the waveform zoom in a ton okay we can see here this is not either you know a saw wave or a square wave it's something else it is periodic it's usable as a synth but yeah okay so that's one region six okay that's also all of the really high pitch ones for some reason aren't really stable and all the low pitch ones are really really unstable so probably we're gonna use this one we're gonna use the previous one okay it's still kind of usable it's gonna be awful okay so that was for some reason these have loaded out of order one five and six are the ones we want to use and that's really all I wanted to do I just wanted to kind of figure out which of these six samples I actually want to use as part of this contact instrument okay let's load up contact and make three groups open up the mapping editor and what do we say 1 5 & 6 label this region of one region 5 region 6 I'm doing this only for my own benefit because I probably won't be able to keep track of this okay and I pull in that first region spread it across everything ok I'm already doing this to the wrong group try that again pull in region 1 pill in region 5 to the region 5 group switch to the region 6 group pull in region 6 now if I play note it's gonna sound awful cuz I haven't tuned anything not even awful it seems to have set the root note on all of them to see -2 so what we're gonna do we can actually set it to see 3 for all of them next what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go back into our x6 and I'm going to look at these and try to kind of select that first frequency the lowest frequency the fundamental okay and down here while I'm doing that you can see we've got but it's about 850 actually gives me the low in the high of my selection it's about 850 Hertz so I actually have a lookup table that I use for all of my instruments 850 Hertz or whatever is closest and I usually choose the note below so I'm gonna go with G sharp 4 which is note number 80 and take that in and then I'm gonna do the same thing with region 5 I'm going to pull up region 5 and I look here and that's about 1100 Hertz we're gonna go here that's no 85 I'm going to do the same thing with region six which is about 1900 Hertz very high up go back to my lookup table 1900 Hertz yeah ninety-four it's gonna be a little more than 94 so there we go that's actually sharp [Music] okay so we've got three waveforms layered on top of each other one thing I haven't done yet is I haven't actually set there loop regions so open up the wave editor and go down here and turn on that first loop and zoom in a ton and we can do this by hand almost it's pretty close and I'm gonna do some cross fading just for fun move to the next one do the same thing you can see it's not a completely even loop you've got these big modulations happening towards the end and they're much tighter up here it's interesting okay we're going to do this by hand and definitely we want some crossfade on this okay and then finally and I'm gonna back out a little bit and I'm gonna make sure that the the loop region is somewhere in the middle and I'm gonna do fine loop end long and now we're just gonna inspect and that looks pretty good turn out to crossfade a little bit let's hear that okay so that has a lot of high-end I think what I want to do is put a low pass filter on all three groups and I'm just gonna choose the first one the first for polo low pass filter let's [Music] it's actually kind of cool sort of like a vintage string machine kind of sound to give it more of that stereo effect I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these regions and maybe pan them a little bit so first I want to make sure I'm not editing all groups I'm going to grab the first one maybe pan it a little bit to the left and the middle one I'll keep in the center the right one I will pan I get an equal amount to the right [Music] okay since it's kind of a pad I think that it should have longer release time so I'm going to turn that up to like maybe 1200 or something it's cool sounding but I turn to cut off too much it sounds kind of nasal it sounds kind of whiny let's try adding some chorus sometimes that's all you need that's pretty cool pretty cool so even though I screwed up making the actual oscillator circuit we still managed to use the results of the oscillator to make a very cool sampled instrument with contact I'm going to put a link to the instrument in the description to see youtube video justice I always do if you've been enjoying these videos remember to hit like or subscribe or both some combination yeah this has been kind of fun adventure take care [Music]

Channel: David Hilowitz Music

Views: 47,493

Rating: 4.8540144 out of 5

Keywords: synth, circuit, kontakt, kontakt library, 555 timer

Id: Ry5MYvOiwQk

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ElGuaco]

Cool idea. The video of how to make a Kontakt instrument is a cool bonus. Be sure to leave a comment and stick around to answer questions.

[u/adredd]

Very cool! Thank you for sharing!