MIDI Box SID blog

[Afro88]

Hi all,

I've set up a blog so I can document my experience building a midibox sid. It's taken me a while to understand how the Midibox thing works, and how I would put it together, so I hope this blog will help out others who are relatively new to DIY like myself. I'm hoping that once I'm done, it will read like a "how to" on building a SID midibox.

Blog is here: http://diysid.blogspot.com/

Any suggestions, or if you think this is a good/bad idea, let me know

Cheers  :)

[TK.]

Hi,

I like the idea! :)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[DRÄPPEL]

Bookmarked! I will keep an eye on this.

Btw, the SoundLab synth looks intresting, especially the portable one with a built in speaker. What are your opinions on it? Woud you recommend others to build it?

Best Wishes

DRÄPPEL

[Afro88]

Ah, I forgot about this post - thanks for the feedback guys. Good to know the godfather of the MIDIbox SID project endorses it too :) It will be updated everytime I make progress - I'm currently seeing how atomsize's SID chip distribution goes.

About the Soundlab, it's great. You can get some really weird and interesting sounds out of it. It definitely oozes with character, it's quite different to most synths I've heard. IMO it's got a more likeable sound than the Fatman, but that's just my opinion. When the filter's resonance is driven hard it distorts in a very nice early Daft Punk sort of way 8). And of course the modulation effects are amazing too. It's a very experimental sounds synth, not something I'd use for creating the more typical synth sounds. It's quite unstable too (unless you fit the tempco's and all that), which is nice cause it makes me feel like I'm using a cutdown VCS3 ;)

I only use mine in my little home studio, so I haven't put a speaker into it, but it could be a bit of fun to transform it into the portable version. I do highly reccomend this project to anyone with a weekend or so free. It's really simple and easy to build, especially if you're an experienced DIY'er. I'd barely done any soldering before and found it easy enough. It only costs about $70-80 for all the parts and PCB too, so you can't go wrong!

[tatapoum]

Is it necessary to have a keyboard to send notes with CV to play with it or may it be played standalone like a freaky sound generator ?

ludo

[Afro88]

I use mine standalone at the moment. It's got a manual gate trigger button  8)

have a look at http://www.musicfromouterspace.com

[kokoon]

could you post any pics of your soundlab synth? i'm VERY interested.

[Afro88]

Ok, here are a couple of pics.

Note that there's still alot of work to do. For a start, I don't have the knobs yet, a few options still have to be constructed that are drilled on the panel (fine tune, fm, external in etc.) and I accidentally bought blackboard paint instead of normal paint (hey, it was cheap!). I was thinking of marking the interface with chalk when I discovered my odd paint choice, but it rubs off too easily, and even lightly scraping your fingernail marks the surface. The thing used to work, but since it was my first soldering project many wires have come loose or disconnected entirely, so when I repaint the case and get the knobs I'm going to rewire it too. There are some sounds I did when it was working online here:

http://www.electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6075