Lately, in addition to my fulltime job and my responsibilities as a husband and a father, I've been spending my "free time" thinking about electronic musical instruments.
Many years ago (maybe when I was 10 or 11 years old) I saw a 16mm film at school about sound and electronic music. That film featured Bob Moog and demo-ed one of his synthesizers. That made a huge impression on me. I spent the next few years reading about electronics (the 70's had great hobby magazines like Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics... heck, even Radio Shack was a geek heaven in those days) and made several crude noise-making contraptions.
I took a few detours from electronic music and played with computers through out my high school years. Then in the mid-80's, I became enamoured of MIDI and the thought of computer-controlled instruments really got my attention. This all culminated when I met some other geeks and joined an all-synth band (in a small town in Tennessee, no less). This didn't lead to a career of wealth or fame as you might imagine. Fun, though... and I still have my Roland JX8P and Ensoniq ESQ-1! My friend Mitch still keeps the flame going at myspace. Thanks dude!
So anyway, many years and careers have passed, but I still really like "stuff that makes sounds" and it's time to do something about it.
I want to design and build a custom VCO-VCF-VCA style synthesizer.
I'll probably use either an Atmel AVR microprocessor or the nifty Parallax Propeller. I have an unopened Xilinx FPGA trainer board from Xess that may come into play here, but the development tools are so Windows oriented (I use Linux and OSX whenever I can) that I'm not too motivated to mess with it right now. On the analog-side, I don't have a clue. I know I love those old Curtis filters in my ESQ-1. Time to break out the old Forrest Mims hobby books.
So here's where it starts. I have a lot of work to do.
Maybe this will get someone else inspired, too.
