Learn About Frequencies for Homemade Synthesizers

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorin Parker with Expert Village, and we're talking about building an electronic oscillator. And we're doing this as an audio oscillator, so one of the keys becomes determining what type of capacitor and what type of resistor we want, because the relationship between these values of capacitor and resistor determine the frequency. If we choose the wrong capacitor and resistor combination, the oscillator could be so high that we can't hear it, or so low that we can't hear it. Now I'm going to tell you right away that probably the best combination you can do is what I have right here, which is a 2 meg pot, it says it right on the back. Pot is short for potentiometer, and right here it says 2 Megs, and this works really, really well with the capacitor that I have. So if you're building one of these start with a 2 meg potentiometer. And then right here I have a .1 micro farad and the way you'll see this written on the Internet is .1 and then you see a little "u" like this, and an "F", so that's .1 micro farad capacitor. If you want to get into the nitty gritty, you can determine the frequency of this oscillator at any point by doing an equation which is one over two pi, times the square root of the resistor value and the capacitor value. But better than doing all the math is just starting with this value, .1 micro farad and 2 mega ohms. Ohms are often written out like this, so we have 2, capital "M" for mega ohms, or millions of ohms, and a .1 micro farad capacitor, and then you can get some slightly different values like a .2 micro farad capacitor, or a 1 micro farad capacitor, and just try experimenting with changing up the values on your bread board and in your oscillator circuit.

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