Clacktronics

  • Octave Kitten Repair

    A cut down Cat, but no less brilliant sounding synthesizer built by the NY company Octave in the late seventies. Features very nice sounding feature rich VCO and the legendary SSM2044 filter. Very similar style of layout to the Arp Odyssey, so much that they were sued for it.

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  • Video Synthesis Part 1 : Getting into Video Circuits

    Frame from video by Gijs Gieskes Just recently I have been researching how to work with analogue video, specifically Composite (the yellow phono connector you get on a lot of consumer video equipment.) Here is some information I have found out.

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  • Yamaha CS-10 Sub Octave Mod

    The Yamaha CS series has some unique features inside and out. Most of the circuitry uses quite unusual IC’s (custom perhaps?) . The VCO for a start uses an interesting method of resetting the core, I can’t really go into detail because I can’t exactly understand what is going on but it creates a very stable oscillator that was used in the polyphonic part of the CS series. It has quite a pleasant band-pass filter and very fast attack settings, it can sound a bit sterile but its unique-ness pays off for that.

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  • EDP Wasp Deluxe Repair

    The Wasp Deluxe was an enhancement on the original Wasp, they removed the touch keyboard, put it in a big wooden case with a real keyboard and added an oscillator mixer and an external audio input and that was about it. The component designators (IC1… IC2…C1…R100 etc) are all the same as the original wasp.

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  • (Late) Spring Cleanout - AVRsyn

    Getting rid of items I have been sitting on too long, here is an AVRsyn by Elby Designs. It is an AVR based Analogue Modelling synth. It is quite cool and is up for auction here.

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  • MFOS Soundlab Synthesizer with MIDI

    This was a one off project to see if I could fit MIDI into the simple MFOS soundlab (Designed by Ray Wilson see musicfromouterspace.com ) it was built from parts I had laying around including a MIDImplant (midimplant.com), basically I was attempting to try and make it perform like a monosynth. Below is a list of the modifications done.

    • MIDI control of pitch and trigger
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