Learn About Bread Boards for Homemade Synthesizers

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Part of the video series: How to Build a Synthesizer

Summary: Learn about bread boards for a homemade synthesizer in this free instrument-building video series that will show you how to create the perfect synthesizer.

Views: 881 | Tags: diy, instrument, keyboard, wave, build, synthesizer, electronic, square, musician, oscillators, with, klaus, schulze


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Contact: electricwestern.com

Lorin Parker Lorin Parker works as an artist, audio engineer and instructor in sound and audio. He is currently a faculty member at the Art Institute of California, Los An... read more

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Video Transcript

Learn About Bread Boards for Homemade Synthesizers

Hi, I'm Lorin Parker for Expert Village, and we're building an oscillator on a bread board. So let's take a look at our bread board. Basically the bread board allows us to connect up rows. So if I stick a wire in here, these are my, where I have a red and blue lines, these are my power busses, and so this point is going to be connected all the way down this row, and this point is going to be connected with the way down this row. But these two are not connected together. So I connect up my plus to the red side and I connect up my minus to the blue side. Then, in the middle of our bread board here, we have a channel. And that allows me to actually take my chip and put it in the bread board, I can just kind of, sort of have to kind of squeeze it, sometimes just rock it back and forth. Be gentle just kind of rocking it so that you don't bend any of the leads. And so now, each one of these leads is in a row here, and these rows connect up with 1, 2, 3, 4 connections right there. So if I stick in a wire right here, it's going to be connected with the pin that is down its' row, right there. But it's not going to be connected with anything else. It's also going to be connected with all other points on that row. So really this is all about rows. And the reason we have the dimple in the middle is these rows don't cross over to the other side. That's good because we need to provide power here, ground here, and different signals on different sides of the chip. So let's do the basic hookup with this chip. What we're going to do first is we're going to go from the power, positive power, into pin 14 of our chip, which is right here. And I could connect it to any point on the row, because that row all connects to that pin. And now I'm going to do the ground. With any electrical circuit you have to have power and ground, you can't just have power. The ground is this pin right here, pin 7. So I'm going to connect up pin 7, once again, any row in parallel with pin 7, and I'm going to connect that up to the blue. The blue is going to be our ground so I stick that in there, and we have power for our chip! Then to provide the power from the batteries, I can connect up my red lead from my batteries to red on the bread board, and then I connect up the black lead from the batteries to blue on (squeeze it in there, there we go) blue on the bread board. So now the battery's sending positive down red, negative down blue, and then furthermore, since I'm connecting up both sides, I'm just going to take a length of wire and I'm going to connect from blue to blue, to make sure that I can use both sides of my bread board. And when you're using a bread board, it's best to use this solid wire like this, I recommend using twenty gauge wires, sometimes you can get away with using twenty-two gauge wire. But you just take it off the spool, make a cut, and use wire strippers like this. You clamp them down until they just barely grab at the insulation, and then you pull off like that, and that exposes the bare wire. That's how we start hooking up our chip on the bread board for our oscillator.

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