How to Mix the Oscillator on a Homemade Synthesizer

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorin Parker with Expert Village and we're going to talk about other options for mixing these oscillators together. Before we just simply had them mixed together, equal volume. But another way that you can mix these oscillators together, we can take out these resistors, and we can replace them with other components. Of course you could use a variable resistor, in which case, like the potentiometer, which would change the volume. Or you could use more photocells which would change the volume of each one. But in order to hear each oscillator, you have to have a resistor or some other component bridging it from the output of the chip to the input to your amplifier or speaker. Now what I'm doing is I'm putting in these little glass diodes and these particular diodes are what are called 1N like Norris, Chuck Norris or something, 1N914 is the style of diode. But they're just little small signal diodes. You can ask your electronics guy about them, but they mix it and they make it sound a little bit different. Instead of, let's see here, I need to turn it up, you get a strange, sort of crackling between them because the diodes let some signal through but don't let other signals through depending upon the frequencies. So we can get kind of percussive effects out of this, depending upon the relationship between our two oscillators. And remember that with diodes there's a little black stripe at the end of this diode, that black stripe needs to go towards the output in order to get this percussive sort of sounds. If you have it the other way, you'll get absolutely nothing. So that's how you mix it with diodes. You can also feel free to use more of these light sensor cells or knobs or anything else that is either a resistor, or, in this case, a diode, to mix our oscillator.

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