I decided to build a synth, for some reason, back in January or so. I don’t, or at least didn’t, know anything about synths except that Courtney kept showing me videos from Perfect Circuit and they were all really cool.
I also don’t know much about music, and I don’t know how to play any. I’ve picked up guitar a few times but could never really get the hang of it. And piano. I’ve always wanted to be able to play an instrument, though.
I do listen to a lot of music. And I whistle a lot. I would say I’m probably quite a good whistler, and I’ve been whistling along with whatever I’m listening to since my grandad taught me when I was a kid.
And, so, sometimes I think man I wish I could just turn my whistling into music. Cause I know how to whistle in tune and in key and even how to naturally improvise.
This sounds ridiculous. I know.
I’ve also spent a little bit of time in GarageBand trying to reproduce parts of songs I really like, but it’s sort of a mood and I’d rather do it in a comfy chair.
At some point Courtney had taken a class in VCV Rack and was telling me about it, and that got me interested in VCV Rack so I played around with that a little bit. I ended up working through a tutorial to reproduce a Juno in a VCV Rack patch and by the end I was hooked. Why a Juno? My friend restored one once and we talked a lot about it at the time and I started noticing a lot of the same acronyms and stuff in VCV Rack. VCO, DCO, VCF, VCA!
So, one night in January I pulled up Obsidian and opened a new note and wrote:
I want to make (what I have now learned is called) a Groovebox. My initial idea was a desktop thing, but after seeing a few different ones I kinda like the idea of a gameboy sized thing for messing with on the go and while relaxing.
I basically want a mini DAW with 8 or more visible tracks at once, with each being some kind of virtual or synth instrument (vst, basic synth, or sampler?) and a midi track. And I want it to have a huge chunky jog knob for quickly scrolling around the timeline, the notes, settings, etc. I kinda want it to feel like an etch-a-sketch a little.
I want it to be fun to hold for a few hours with a set of headphones on and make a whole song.
So it’s essentially a tracker, although I’m not too sure what the difference between a tracker and a DAW is currently.
I drew a rough idea of what I wanted it to look like:
And then redrew it in Excalidraw:
And well, I started this post and never got around to finishing it… because all I do is work on the fucking synth all day.
Synth synth synth.
But I should still post.
It didn’t turn out to be Gameboy sized. For that you want a Dirtywave M8. Also, I would like one. It did turn out to be a massive fucking education in music production, audio synthesis, DSP, and what feels good to make.
This feels really good to make.
I’m working on Rev 2 of the PCB currently, and it’s hard work, so I am avoiding it by blogging, of all the ridiculous things.
Rev 2 cleans up the layout, makes it smaller in Y, bigger in X, adds 3 more ESP32-S3s (what???), a few more knobs, and hopefully fixes the horrible fucking hissing in the outputs.
I’m gonna post a lot more about this later, because wow it’s been a project, but I gotta get back to it.
