Designing Your Own Synthesizer Circuits

let's say you want to start designing your own synthesizer circuits so you bought a breadboard and some components but now you're having trouble figuring out how to use them properly then this video is for you in it i will walk you through the absolute basics from identifying and handling components understanding the breadboard's internals to reading schematics and then setting up your first simple circuits keep in mind that we won't dive into the theory behind those circuits this video is strictly about the practical aspects of using a breadboard though if you're interested i'm regularly doing circuit analysis videos on my channel before we begin let's make sure we have all the necessary parts and tools you can find a list of common status items in the description so obviously the star of the show is going to be your breadboard and these come in different shapes and sizes but i'm using a standard full size variant with 830 tie points and this will give us plenty of room to play around with next we need some sort of power source if you're just starting out i strongly recommend you use 9v batteries here two of them to be precise this is because batteries will only get a little warm if you accidentally create a short circuit whereas with a wall plug power supply you might actually see things go up in smoke to connect the batteries with our breadboard we'll also need two of these simple clips here speaking of connecting things a box of different size jumpers can make your life a lot easier these are basically just pre-cut solid core wires so all they do is connect components on the breadboard but often that can really help clean up and organize your layouts you could of course also just buy a big roll of wire and cut jumpers from it yourself but for me this is way more convenient since we're dealing with audio signals here we'll also need a few jack sockets to get those signals into and out of our circuits you can use 3.5 millimeter once if you prefer but i'm going with big 6.35 millimeter sockets now in order to connect these with your breadboard you've essentially got two options if you're comfortable with a soldering iron you could simply solder wires to the socket connectors but in case you're not you can always fall back on alligator clips like these just attach them to the connectors and to a small jumper and you're good to go this next tool is not exactly necessary but it will save you a lot of headaches especially while troubleshooting a simple digital multimeter with it you can measure all kinds of things the voltage between two points or the amount of current flowing or the resistance value or even an oscillations frequency super useful but okay time to talk meat and potatoes here are some of the main components you'll be dealing with when building synthesizer circuits first off let's check our resistors these come in different physical sizes which will roughly indicate their power rating a bigger resistor can handle more electricity flowing through it because it dissipates heat better with our use case we'll rarely be pushing large currents through our resistors though which is why i'm using these small and handy ones that can handle just up to 0.4 watts now you'll probably notice these collet rings across the resistor's surface and those tell you the resistance value if you can decipher them but honestly i think that's too much of a hassle which is why i normally just use my multimeter to determine resistances for that you simply have to set it to the resistance detection mode and hold each probe to one end of the resistor you want to test as you can see i've got a few 100k 10k and 1k resistors here now these values are not going to be super critical so if you've got some that are in the same ballpark we should be good next we'll look at capacitors these can be a tad confusing because there's a bunch of types that look wildly different this here for example is an electrolytic capacitor you can identify them by their cylinder shape and silver top foil caps on the other hand often come in this kind of boxy format and ceramic ones have this round knob-ish appearance now with capacitors you thankfully don't need to learn any color codes their value is usually printed right on the outside somewhere so here we have a one microfarad foil capacitor that can handle up to 63 volts and this here is a 100 microfarad electrolytic cap that's rated for 50 volts that voltage rating is important your capacitors can actually explode if you exceed it but since we are only toying around with 9 volt batteries here we are perfectly safe in that regard and like with the resistors the capacitor values are not that crucial as long as you've got a few different ones to play around with next up leds these are probably self-explanatory you can get them in different sizes and colors and some of them can handle bigger currents than others but apart from that there's not much to look out for be sure to buy more than one though you'll probably fry a few along the way still happens to me sometimes finally we've got an integrated circuit here or ic for short ics are basically like plugins they serve a specific specialized purpose and encapsulate that in a handy little form factor this one right here is a tl074 which has four independent op-amps on a single chip you can use other op-amp ics this is just the one i have laying around in spades okay so to get started let's check out a very simple schematic all this circuit supposed to do is make an led light up there's three components involved a power source a resistor and of course an led it works like this electricity flows from the battery's positive terminal through a current limiting 1k resistor and the led and then back to the battery's negative terminal making that led light up in the process now in most schematics you won't find the circuit laid out in a circular form like this i just drew it this way because it's easier to read at first in the wild you'd probably see something looking more like the schematic over here semantically these two are completely identical we just separated the positive and negative terminal of our battery this way we can lay out our circuit in a more compact fashion and once you look at more complex designs you'll see how much that simplifies things with this we have all the information needed to build the circuit the battery connects to the resistor which connects to the led which leads back to the battery but now the question is how do we get it onto the breadboard for this we'll first need to understand how all these tie points are connected internally so here's what we'd see if the breadboard was transparent you'll notice that there's a clear and simple pattern on the sides we have what's called the power rails these run all the way along the breadboard's length connecting all these tie points together and are normally used to distribute power to wherever we need it that's why they have these plus and minus labels suggesting that we match them with our batteries terminals be careful though some breadboards split these rails into two isolated sections per side and this is usually indicated by a gap in the red and blue lines like this and can give you some mysterious power issues if you miss it next let's look at our breadboard's middle section this is split in half by this big rift giving us two separate areas to work with you'll see how that's useful later now unlike with the power rails the tie points in these sections are connected across the breadboard in chains of five so they run perpendicular to those power rails okay so now that we know all this setting up our circuit should be doable first of all i'll connect a battery to the power rails on this side using one of our clips now all the tie points on this rail carry nine volts while this rail sits at zero volts or ground looking at the schematic we can see that the only thing directly connected to the positive rail is the resistor so i'll grab a 1k and stick it into one of the positive rails tie points it doesn't matter which one i pick since they all connect to our battery's 9v terminal then i plug the other end into one of the middle sections tie points and again i'm free to choose whichever i like best this one seems appealing so now this entire five point row connects to the positive rail through the resistor next up we'll need to plug in our led there's a small caveat here while for the resistor the orientation does not matter setting up an led requires a little more care that's because leds only let current pass through them in this direction how do we tell these two connectors apart then easy you just have to check their length one leg is always longer than the other and that's the one that connects to our resistor so i'll just plug it into the same row finally the short leg needs to loop back to the ground rail to complete our circuit and while you could just squish it past the resistor like this i prefer to use a jumper to create a cleaner looking layout to do that i'll first connect the led's short leg to a new row then from here i can comfortably use a small jumper to link that row to the ground rail and as if it's telling us we did everything right the led lights up great next we'll tackle a slightly more complex circuit idea this is a crude op-amp based voltage inverter the basic idea is this if we apply a negative voltage here the output led will light up and if we apply a positive voltage it will turn off now in order to be able to translate this into a breadboard layout we need a bit more information information which is only implied in this schematic looking at the op-amp symbol it's actually unclear how it's powered we only see two inputs and one output this is because the supply pins are only implied here the schematic assumes that you know you have to power your op amp sometimes people will draw it with the supply pins but that's the exception okay but how do you power an op-amp ic or any ic for that matter simple you just google your chip's name in this case tl074 followed by the word pin out this will most likely prompt you with what we call a pin out diagram which shows you what each pin is for and also indicates the supply connectors if you're now wondering how to match your real chips pins with the diagram that's what this little notch is for which you'll find in the diagram as well as on the actual component okay so now we know that this pin should get the positive while this one's for the negative supply voltage only one slight problem there right now we only have a positive and a neutral or ground rail on our breadboard luckily for us adding a negative rail is really easy when you're using batteries all we have to do is get our second battery attach the clip then plug the positive red cable into our ground rail while connecting the black one to a power rail on the opposite side that's it now we have an additional negative rail right there so next we'll set up our op-amp ic and this is where this middle rift gets its time to shine because by plugging the chip in like this we ensure that all of its pins are isolated from each other if the rift wasn't there all of these pin pairs would be connected together which is not what we want okay time to supply the ic with power from the pinout diagram we know that this pin should connect to the positive rail so i'll use a small jumper to link this row to that positive rail same thing on the opposite side small jumper connects this row to the negative rail and with that our ic is powered and ready to use next we'll have to pick one of the four op-amps on the chip to build our circuit with it doesn't matter which one we choose so i'll go with this one here looking at the schematic we can start by tying the non-inverting input that's the one level plus to ground so i'll use another jumper and connect this row to the ground rail then i'll set up our output led so we'll first need to plug a 1k resistor into this row connecting it to the op-amp's output from here i'll route the signal to an unused row where we'll have space for the led next plug the led's long leg into that row and the short leg into the ground rail almost done now we just need a way to send a voltage into the op-amp's inverting input that's the one labeled minus to keep it nice and simple i'll just use a long jumper here plug it into this row and we're good to go first let's send in a positive voltage as expected the led goes dark but if i use the negative rail the led lights up great but to be honest a simple inverter is not all that exciting so let's pick things up a notch this here is a simple fixed frequency square wave oscillator that will make our leds switch on and off automatically in regular intervals as you can see there's a bunch more components at play so let's divide things into smaller easier to handle chunks since the output led and current limiting resistor are set up the exact same way as with our previous circuit we can simply carry them over no change is required next we'll deal with the op-amp's non-inverting input here we have to make two changes we need to replace the direct connection to ground with a 100k resistor and then we need to connect that non-inverting input to the op-amp's output through another 100k resistor so in practice i'll first remove the jumper that's connecting this row and the ground rail next i'll plug in a 100k resistor in its place finally connect these two rows with another 100k resistor now all that's left to deal with is the op-amp's inverting input the setup here is very similar to the one down here but it exchanges the resistor to ground with a one microfarad capacitor we have to be a bit cautious here this symbol tells us that we need to use a non-polarized capacitor because both of these lines are straight if one of them were curved we'd know to use a polarized one so which type is polarized and which one is not easy both the foil and ceramic caps are non-polarized while the electrolytic one is polarized for audio applications it's generally a good idea to favor foil capacitors so let's go with this one setting it up is a bit tricky because its legs are so close together this means that we can't simply connect one of them to the inverting inputs row while plugging the other into the ground rail we'll have to find another way to give us a bit more space to operate i'll first use a medium sized jumper to connect this row to another row further to the left now if i connect this row to ground with another jumper we can comfortably plug in the capacitor right here so that this side is connected to the inverting input while this one links straight to ground finally we'll have to connect inverting input and output through yet another 100k resistor plug it in right here and as expected the light is flashing cool but while looking at a flashing light is nice it would be even better if we could listen to our oscillator signal for that we'll have to make two adjustments first we replace the resistor here with a 1k this will increase the oscillations frequency and make it audible and then we'll swap our output led for an output audio socket to get the signal down to line level in order to not damage our headphones or speakers we use a 10k 1k voltage divider between our socket and the op amps output let's start out by swapping the 100k between inverting input and output for a 1k resistor next i'll remove the led the 1k resistor here then gets replaced with a 10k and we can use that 1k to connect this row to ground finally we'll set up the audio socket again looking at the schematic we can see that one of its connectors should be tied straight to the ground rail while the other needs to link up to the voltage divider now the question is how do we identify them on the real-life socket this is where our multimeter comes in handy again if we take a look at a standard mono audio jack we can see that it's split into two sections the tip and the sleeve now conventionally the sleeve should be connected to ground while the tip carries the actual signal so if we insert the jack into our socket we can use the multimeter to check for continuity which is just a fancy word for saying that two points are electrically connected for that i set the mode dial to this setting which in this case is a two in one diode testing and continuity testing to switch it into the latter mode i press the function button now if i bring the two probes together we can hear a loud beeping noise telling us that there is continuity so if i hold one probe to the tip of the jack here i can use the other to check the sockets connectors okay so this one should get the audio signal i'll attach a red alligator clip cable to mark it next hold the probe to the jack sleeve and test the remaining two connectors seems like this one should link to the ground rail so i'll attach a black alligator clip cable now what about the third connector well we can safely ignore it this is a special kind of switched socket but we're not using that feature here all that's left to do is attach the red and black cables to small jumpers which we can then plug into their respective destinations the black one connects to the ground rail while the red one goes where the led's long leg used to be and now we can listen to the signal either through headphones or anything with an aux input audio interfaces work too and there you have it a nicely annoying fixed frequency square wave oscillation if you've made it this far you should now be able to translate most basic synth schematics into a breadboard layout now if you're curious about the theory behind those schematics i'd recommend you take a look at my diy vco series where i explain and analyze a fully featured vco also if you've enjoyed this content and would like to see more of it in the future consider supporting me on patreon you can get access to a bunch of benefits there one of which being a private discord community where patrons can ask for help and share ideas anyways thanks for watching and until next time

let&#39;s say you want to start designing your own synthesizer circuits so you bought a breadboard and some components but now you&#39;re having trouble figuring out how to use them properly then this video is for you in it i will walk you through the absolute basics from identifying and handling components understanding the breadboard&#39;s internals to reading schematics and then setting up your first simple circuits keep in mind that we won&#39;t dive into the theory behind those circuits this video is strictly about the practical aspects of using a breadboard though if you&#39;re interested i&#39;m regularly doing circuit analysis videos on my channel before we begin let&#39;s make sure we have all the necessary parts and tools you can find a list of common status items in the description so obviously the star of the show is going to be your breadboard and these come in different shapes and sizes but i&#39;m using a standard full size variant with 830 tie points and this will give us plenty of room to play around with next we need some sort of power source if you&#39;re just starting out i strongly recommend you use 9v batteries here two of them to be precise this is because batteries will only get a little warm if you accidentally create a short circuit whereas with a wall plug power supply you might actually see things go up in smoke to connect the batteries with our breadboard we&#39;ll also need two of these simple clips here speaking of connecting things a box of different size jumpers can make your life a lot easier these are basically just pre-cut solid core wires so all they do is connect components on the breadboard but often that can really help clean up and organize your layouts you could of course also just buy a big roll of wire and cut jumpers from it yourself but for me this is way more convenient since we&#39;re dealing with audio signals here we&#39;ll also need a few jack sockets to get those signals into and out of our circuits you can use 3.5 millimeter once if you prefer but i&#39;m going with big 6.35 millimeter sockets now in order to connect these with your breadboard you&#39;ve essentially got two options if you&#39;re comfortable with a soldering iron you could simply solder wires to the socket connectors but in case you&#39;re not you can always fall back on alligator clips like these just attach them to the connectors and to a small jumper and you&#39;re good to go this next tool is not exactly necessary but it will save you a lot of headaches especially while troubleshooting a simple digital multimeter with it you can measure all kinds of things the voltage between two points or the amount of current flowing or the resistance value or even an oscillations frequency super useful but okay time to talk meat and potatoes here are some of the main components you&#39;ll be dealing with when building synthesizer circuits first off let&#39;s check our resistors these come in different physical sizes which will roughly indicate their power rating a bigger resistor can handle more electricity flowing through it because it dissipates heat better with our use case we&#39;ll rarely be pushing large currents through our resistors though which is why i&#39;m using these small and handy ones that can handle just up to 0.4 watts now you&#39;ll probably notice these collet rings across the resistor&#39;s surface and those tell you the resistance value if you can decipher them but honestly i think that&#39;s too much of a hassle which is why i normally just use my multimeter to determine resistances for that you simply have to set it to the resistance detection mode and hold each probe to one end of the resistor you want to test as you can see i&#39;ve got a few 100k 10k and 1k resistors here now these values are not going to be super critical so if you&#39;ve got some that are in the same ballpark we should be good next we&#39;ll look at capacitors these can be a tad confusing because there&#39;s a bunch of types that look wildly different this here for example is an electrolytic capacitor you can identify them by their cylinder shape and silver top foil caps on the other hand often come in this kind of boxy format and ceramic ones have this round knob-ish appearance now with capacitors you thankfully don&#39;t need to learn any color codes their value is usually printed right on the outside somewhere so here we have a one microfarad foil capacitor that can handle up to 63 volts and this here is a 100 microfarad electrolytic cap that&#39;s rated for 50 volts that voltage rating is important your capacitors can actually explode if you exceed it but since we are only toying around with 9 volt batteries here we are perfectly safe in that regard and like with the resistors the capacitor values are not that crucial as long as you&#39;ve got a few different ones to play around with next up leds these are probably self-explanatory you can get them in different sizes and colors and some of them can handle bigger currents than others but apart from that there&#39;s not much to look out for be sure to buy more than one though you&#39;ll probably fry a few along the way still happens to me sometimes finally we&#39;ve got an integrated circuit here or ic for short ics are basically like plugins they serve a specific specialized purpose and encapsulate that in a handy little form factor this one right here is a tl074 which has four independent op-amps on a single chip you can use other op-amp ics this is just the one i have laying around in spades okay so to get started let&#39;s check out a very simple schematic all this circuit supposed to do is make an led light up there&#39;s three components involved a power source a resistor and of course an led it works like this electricity flows from the battery&#39;s positive terminal through a current limiting 1k resistor and the led and then back to the battery&#39;s negative terminal making that led light up in the process now in most schematics you won&#39;t find the circuit laid out in a circular form like this i just drew it this way because it&#39;s easier to read at first in the wild you&#39;d probably see something looking more like the schematic over here semantically these two are completely identical we just separated the positive and negative terminal of our battery this way we can lay out our circuit in a more compact fashion and once you look at more complex designs you&#39;ll see how much that simplifies things with this we have all the information needed to build the circuit the battery connects to the resistor which connects to the led which leads back to the battery but now the question is how do we get it onto the breadboard for this we&#39;ll first need to understand how all these tie points are connected internally so here&#39;s what we&#39;d see if the breadboard was transparent you&#39;ll notice that there&#39;s a clear and simple pattern on the sides we have what&#39;s called the power rails these run all the way along the breadboard&#39;s length connecting all these tie points together and are normally used to distribute power to wherever we need it that&#39;s why they have these plus and minus labels suggesting that we match them with our batteries terminals be careful though some breadboards split these rails into two isolated sections per side and this is usually indicated by a gap in the red and blue lines like this and can give you some mysterious power issues if you miss it next let&#39;s look at our breadboard&#39;s middle section this is split in half by this big rift giving us two separate areas to work with you&#39;ll see how that&#39;s useful later now unlike with the power rails the tie points in these sections are connected across the breadboard in chains of five so they run perpendicular to those power rails okay so now that we know all this setting up our circuit should be doable first of all i&#39;ll connect a battery to the power rails on this side using one of our clips now all the tie points on this rail carry nine volts while this rail sits at zero volts or ground looking at the schematic we can see that the only thing directly connected to the positive rail is the resistor so i&#39;ll grab a 1k and stick it into one of the positive rails tie points it doesn&#39;t matter which one i pick since they all connect to our battery&#39;s 9v terminal then i plug the other end into one of the middle sections tie points and again i&#39;m free to choose whichever i like best this one seems appealing so now this entire five point row connects to the positive rail through the resistor next up we&#39;ll need to plug in our led there&#39;s a small caveat here while for the resistor the orientation does not matter setting up an led requires a little more care that&#39;s because leds only let current pass through them in this direction how do we tell these two connectors apart then easy you just have to check their length one leg is always longer than the other and that&#39;s the one that connects to our resistor so i&#39;ll just plug it into the same row finally the short leg needs to loop back to the ground rail to complete our circuit and while you could just squish it past the resistor like this i prefer to use a jumper to create a cleaner looking layout to do that i&#39;ll first connect the led&#39;s short leg to a new row then from here i can comfortably use a small jumper to link that row to the ground rail and as if it&#39;s telling us we did everything right the led lights up great next we&#39;ll tackle a slightly more complex circuit idea this is a crude op-amp based voltage inverter the basic idea is this if we apply a negative voltage here the output led will light up and if we apply a positive voltage it will turn off now in order to be able to translate this into a breadboard layout we need a bit more information information which is only implied in this schematic looking at the op-amp symbol it&#39;s actually unclear how it&#39;s powered we only see two inputs and one output this is because the supply pins are only implied here the schematic assumes that you know you have to power your op amp sometimes people will draw it with the supply pins but that&#39;s the exception okay but how do you power an op-amp ic or any ic for that matter simple you just google your chip&#39;s name in this case tl074 followed by the word pin out this will most likely prompt you with what we call a pin out diagram which shows you what each pin is for and also indicates the supply connectors if you&#39;re now wondering how to match your real chips pins with the diagram that&#39;s what this little notch is for which you&#39;ll find in the diagram as well as on the actual component okay so now we know that this pin should get the positive while this one&#39;s for the negative supply voltage only one slight problem there right now we only have a positive and a neutral or ground rail on our breadboard luckily for us adding a negative rail is really easy when you&#39;re using batteries all we have to do is get our second battery attach the clip then plug the positive red cable into our ground rail while connecting the black one to a power rail on the opposite side that&#39;s it now we have an additional negative rail right there so next we&#39;ll set up our op-amp ic and this is where this middle rift gets its time to shine because by plugging the chip in like this we ensure that all of its pins are isolated from each other if the rift wasn&#39;t there all of these pin pairs would be connected together which is not what we want okay time to supply the ic with power from the pinout diagram we know that this pin should connect to the positive rail so i&#39;ll use a small jumper to link this row to that positive rail same thing on the opposite side small jumper connects this row to the negative rail and with that our ic is powered and ready to use next we&#39;ll have to pick one of the four op-amps on the chip to build our circuit with it doesn&#39;t matter which one we choose so i&#39;ll go with this one here looking at the schematic we can start by tying the non-inverting input that&#39;s the one level plus to ground so i&#39;ll use another jumper and connect this row to the ground rail then i&#39;ll set up our output led so we&#39;ll first need to plug a 1k resistor into this row connecting it to the op-amp&#39;s output from here i&#39;ll route the signal to an unused row where we&#39;ll have space for the led next plug the led&#39;s long leg into that row and the short leg into the ground rail almost done now we just need a way to send a voltage into the op-amp&#39;s inverting input that&#39;s the one labeled minus to keep it nice and simple i&#39;ll just use a long jumper here plug it into this row and we&#39;re good to go first let&#39;s send in a positive voltage as expected the led goes dark but if i use the negative rail the led lights up great but to be honest a simple inverter is not all that exciting so let&#39;s pick things up a notch this here is a simple fixed frequency square wave oscillator that will make our leds switch on and off automatically in regular intervals as you can see there&#39;s a bunch more components at play so let&#39;s divide things into smaller easier to handle chunks since the output led and current limiting resistor are set up the exact same way as with our previous circuit we can simply carry them over no change is required next we&#39;ll deal with the op-amp&#39;s non-inverting input here we have to make two changes we need to replace the direct connection to ground with a 100k resistor and then we need to connect that non-inverting input to the op-amp&#39;s output through another 100k resistor so in practice i&#39;ll first remove the jumper that&#39;s connecting this row and the ground rail next i&#39;ll plug in a 100k resistor in its place finally connect these two rows with another 100k resistor now all that&#39;s left to deal with is the op-amp&#39;s inverting input the setup here is very similar to the one down here but it exchanges the resistor to ground with a one microfarad capacitor we have to be a bit cautious here this symbol tells us that we need to use a non-polarized capacitor because both of these lines are straight if one of them were curved we&#39;d know to use a polarized one so which type is polarized and which one is not easy both the foil and ceramic caps are non-polarized while the electrolytic one is polarized for audio applications it&#39;s generally a good idea to favor foil capacitors so let&#39;s go with this one setting it up is a bit tricky because its legs are so close together this means that we can&#39;t simply connect one of them to the inverting inputs row while plugging the other into the ground rail we&#39;ll have to find another way to give us a bit more space to operate i&#39;ll first use a medium sized jumper to connect this row to another row further to the left now if i connect this row to ground with another jumper we can comfortably plug in the capacitor right here so that this side is connected to the inverting input while this one links straight to ground finally we&#39;ll have to connect inverting input and output through yet another 100k resistor plug it in right here and as expected the light is flashing cool but while looking at a flashing light is nice it would be even better if we could listen to our oscillator signal for that we&#39;ll have to make two adjustments first we replace the resistor here with a 1k this will increase the oscillations frequency and make it audible and then we&#39;ll swap our output led for an output audio socket to get the signal down to line level in order to not damage our headphones or speakers we use a 10k 1k voltage divider between our socket and the op amps output let&#39;s start out by swapping the 100k between inverting input and output for a 1k resistor next i&#39;ll remove the led the 1k resistor here then gets replaced with a 10k and we can use that 1k to connect this row to ground finally we&#39;ll set up the audio socket again looking at the schematic we can see that one of its connectors should be tied straight to the ground rail while the other needs to link up to the voltage divider now the question is how do we identify them on the real-life socket this is where our multimeter comes in handy again if we take a look at a standard mono audio jack we can see that it&#39;s split into two sections the tip and the sleeve now conventionally the sleeve should be connected to ground while the tip carries the actual signal so if we insert the jack into our socket we can use the multimeter to check for continuity which is just a fancy word for saying that two points are electrically connected for that i set the mode dial to this setting which in this case is a two in one diode testing and continuity testing to switch it into the latter mode i press the function button now if i bring the two probes together we can hear a loud beeping noise telling us that there is continuity so if i hold one probe to the tip of the jack here i can use the other to check the sockets connectors okay so this one should get the audio signal i&#39;ll attach a red alligator clip cable to mark it next hold the probe to the jack sleeve and test the remaining two connectors seems like this one should link to the ground rail so i&#39;ll attach a black alligator clip cable now what about the third connector well we can safely ignore it this is a special kind of switched socket but we&#39;re not using that feature here all that&#39;s left to do is attach the red and black cables to small jumpers which we can then plug into their respective destinations the black one connects to the ground rail while the red one goes where the led&#39;s long leg used to be and now we can listen to the signal either through headphones or anything with an aux input audio interfaces work too and there you have it a nicely annoying fixed frequency square wave oscillation if you&#39;ve made it this far you should now be able to translate most basic synth schematics into a breadboard layout now if you&#39;re curious about the theory behind those schematics i&#39;d recommend you take a look at my diy vco series where i explain and analyze a fully featured vco also if you&#39;ve enjoyed this content and would like to see more of it in the future consider supporting me on patreon you can get access to a bunch of benefits there one of which being a private discord community where patrons can ask for help and share ideas anyways thanks for watching and until next time

Transcript for:Designing Your Own Synthesizer Circuits

Transcript for:
Designing Your Own Synthesizer Circuits