Learn About Ribbon Controls for Homemade Synthesizers

Video Transcript

This is Lorin Parker with Expert Village and we're building a simple musical oscillator. Also in additional to controlling things with a potentiometer or a knob, you can make your own variable resistor by getting this, which is some anti-static foam. And I ordered this from an electronics supplier, jameco.com, and what it is it's the foam that you receive your integrated circuits on. They stick it in here so that static electricity and things like that are dissipated by the foam. But what's interesting about this foam is that it is a variable resistor. So I cut out a little strip of this, or a ribbon of it, and instead of connecting up a potentiometer or a knob to pin 1 and pin 2, I'm going to just do two wires going nowhere. In this case I don't have a circuit yet, but if I take some alligator clips or if I take longer wires, I'm just extending my reach with these alligator clips, I can connect the circuit up by connecting the alligator clips through this ribbon. And let's go ahead and turn this oscillator on and put it through the speakers. The way to do that is you always need to have your grounds and your output connected up, so the ground is going to come from anywhere on this blue line. So anywhere I have the blue power, that's my ground, so I'll hook that one up. And now I just have a guitar cable going to an amplifier and we're going to connect that up to the sleeve of the cable. This is the tip, that's the sleeve, sleeve is ground. And now we're going to take a red wire and I'm going to put this one coming out of pin 2. So once again we're really just using pin 1 and pin 2, so anywhere parallel with pin 2. So I'll take it right out of there, and I'll connect up my alligator clip, and now I connect it up to my guitar cable, and I connect it up to the tip. That's going to be my signal. But I still haven't completed the circuit because I haven't connected up my resistor. So what I'm going to do, instead of turning a knob, I'm going to just touch it to this foam. And if I have it close together it's very high frequency, and if I bring it farther apart, it should go a little lower frequency, let me align that a little bit better here, there we go. So we're getting really high frequencies there, but I can control it by how hard I press this foam, and how hard I drag it along. So there you can use sort of "home brew" style materials instead of a stock potentiometer or stock controls that you buy at the store.

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