Learn About Circuits for Homemade Synthesizers

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorin Parker with Expert Village, and we're talking about creating a very simple electronic musical oscillator. And at the heart of this oscillator is going to be this tiny little chip here. It has 14 pins. This is a CMOS chip. This one is a 74HC14. The type of chip that it is, what it does, is it's an inverter. It is a type of amplifier and it takes a signal in, and then switches it. If something comes in high it switches it to low, if something comes in low, it switches it to high, and causes these oscillations to happen. So in order to prep it and turn it into a musical oscillator, we need to tune it with a couple components. We also need to provide power to it. And with any of these 74 series chips, or with the 40 series chips, the chips that start with 74 or 40, usually the power pin is going to be pin 14 right here, and that's what we're going to hook up to the plus side of our battery. And then the ground pin is pin 7 here, and remember you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 from this little dimple over here on the edge which shows you where pin 1 is. And so we're going to hook this one up to ground and this one up to power. That allows this to become the amplifier that feeds back on itself and becomes and oscillator. So with power, and then by creating a circuit in between the other pins on this chip, we can create up to six individual oscillators with just one chip. This has six amplifier circuits in one chip, so we could; theoretically, make a musical instrument or a synthesizer that has six different tones at once being controlled. So this chip will work the other one that's really good is the 4106. So, the 74HC14, good choice, or a CMOS 4106 will do this job just fine, and that's the chip we're going to be using for our synthesizer and oscillator.

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