Tim Escobedo's synth stick

[sean k]

The original schematics and what to do page is here http://www.geocities.com/tpe123/folkurban/synthstick/synthstick.html

Heres what I ended up with. I breadboarded the basic oscillator Saturday, built it yesterday with mods Sunday then took it out for a experimental electronics workshop that night.

Got some of the  knobs off an old radio. Bakelite is the best!

So I turned up at the workshop with the setup below, two oscillators in parallel feeding another oscillator in series in a room full of people with more, much more, experience with their noise makers, having never played with even a single oscillator. Well, thats not true. When I bread boarded the SS single oscillator I played with it enough to realise it was worth making an enclosure, adding all the extras and adding another oscillator. When it was all made I played for about 5 minutes, scratched my head for a bit, then filled up the car and went to the performance with the stuff in the pic... and did it in a light dimmed room!

I reckon anybody who likes twiddling knobs should have a go at this thing. It's absolutely a total time wasting black hole in the best sense of stuff to increase your sense of expotential possibilities. I suppose then it's actually a White Hole!

I had to go through a few videotapes before I found one that had 1Meg of resistance over about a metre length. That went onto double sided cellotape and onto a length of plywood (reverse that order- wood then VCR tape), then another double side sticky tape with a foamy centre about 2mm thick went next to that and then I wrapped a strip of the corrugated plastic, that signs are made of, with aluminium adhesive backed tape and stuck that onto the foamy tape. Add contacts and we have a 1mtr long 1Megaohm resistor.

My version has mistakes but it still goes. Number one was that I needed another stage in oscillator one, after the .005 and the LFO I went straight out and used a 1MA pot accross the stick that was reverse wired so osc 1 was weak and the stick didn't really work. Well it did but not with the oscillator weak and paralled with another combined with the wrong pot accross it. Osc 2 went big even though it was  only one stage and then straight out. God knows why 'cause I don't.
I definitely made it hard on myself when I then went straight into the TMK

Which is another oscillator!
So go for it Boys and Girls!
Doesn't take very long, is incredibly gratifying and when you make mistakes it still works and you learn alot trying to figure out why.
(which I haven't yet but I intend to do, hopefully before I start in on finishing up my Fatman synth kit from Paia and making up a box and antennas for an etherwave populated circuit board by Moog! )

Actually the oscillators are really cheap to build but having 9 pots throws the price up somewhat. I'll go and take a photo of the interior...

[sean k]

Ad heres the inside.

I'll be thinking long and hard before I do another board without the mistakes I made. Actually it'd be easier to just get another 74HC14 and make another little board and then jumper it into this one. Yureka! Lazy solves the problem again!

[flo]

It's wonderfull... 
How does the synthstick play for you? Can you "wield" it in pitch?

[DougH]

Very cool! And you can use it to drain pasta to boot!

Thanks for sharing!

[sean k]

Thanks guys, the stick worked as it should when I bread boarded it but didn't work later. Well it did work but until I fix the problems I won't be able to hear it. But with the stick I made the amount of overhang I had was not enough and it was had work to press it down so I'll make another one (lucky video tape comes on rolls!) and give myself more overhang so the contact is easier to make. The other thing is that body voltage makes it do some wierd things, usable of course but you don't want it all the time so the way you play the thing needs to have you isolate from the contact points... unless you choose to make it. Try it...