LFO

555 Based Drone Synthesizer With LFOs

Sam

Today I have an update to the 555 Based Drone Synthesizer which I posted last week. I was having a lot of fun with my Drone synth but wanted to expand on it to get a bit more variation from the sound. To do this I added a set of LFOs to modulate the frequency of the drone oscillators.

To accomplish this I built a second set of three 555 based oscillators. These new oscillators are identical to the ones in the drone synthesizer except for a change to the capacitor between pin 2 and ground. By increasing this capacitor from 0.01uf to 1uf I was able to lower the frequency of the square wave they produce. This makes them perfect for use as LFOs.

I then connected the output (pin 3) of each of these new oscillators to the control voltage input (pin 5) of the corresponding oscillator in the drone synthesizer through a 1K resistor. An additional modification that can be made to this circuit to provide further control would be to replace this 1K resistor with a 10K or 50K ohm potentiometer which would allow you to modify the amount which the LFO modulates the oscillator in the drone synth.

In this experiment I have used LFOs but you could easily control the drone synth in other ways as well by providing a control voltage to pin 5. I am interested to see how this set-up would react to a control from a sequencer or keyboard and may try this in the future.

Atari Punk Console – Adding LFOs

Sam

Today I wanted to show you guys something new I’ve been playing with on the breadboard. Essentially what I have here is a twist on a classic project. I’ve taken an Atari Punk Console (Stepped Tone Generator) and added two 555 timer based oscillators as LFOs to add more depth and interest to the sounds produced.

This modification is built on one simple characteristic of the 555 timer (and by extension the 556 which consists of two 555 timers). This is the control voltage pin which allows you to use an external voltage source to modify the chips performance. On a traditional 555 timer the control voltage input is located on pin 5 while on the 556 you would use pins 3 and 11 as I have here. By connecting the outputs of two 555 oscillators to these pins on the 556 we are able to use them to modify the frequency of the stepped tone generator.

You may notice in the video I play mostly with the left LFO knob. This is because in my experimentation I was able to illicit much more noticeable effects from the first oscillator connected to pin 3 of the Atari Punk Console. The second oscillator (connected to pin 11) only seemed to have a pronounced effect at fairly high frequencies. For this reason you may want to try switching the 500K pot on the second oscillator for something smaller like a 100K or 50K. Another option to increase the frequency range is to change out the 3.3uf capacitor for a 0.1uf cap.

Another thing you can do with this circuit to gain further control is to add a potentiometer to control the modulation of the LFOs on the Atari Punk Console. To accomplish this you can add a potentiometer in place of the 10K resistor at the output of the LFO oscillators. A 50K pot would likely work best for this.

Finally if you enjoyed this project I did build an Atari Punk Console back in the early days of this site with jacks for control voltage inputs. Feel free to have a look if you are interested.

 

555 Oscillators in Series

Sam

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately playing around with 555 timer chips and wanted to quickly share my latest creation. This project uses four 555 timers each set up as a standard astable oscillator. I’ve then connected the output from pin 3 of each oscillator to the control voltage at pin 5 of the next subsequent chip. Essentially this means each 555 timer is working as an LFO for the next oscillator to it’s right. I also increased the size of the capacitor between pin 6 and ground of the two left-most oscillators in order to  lower their frequency.

I was quite pleased with the range and depth of sounds it produced however, it should be said that I built this as a proof of concept and it is not fully flushed out. I would be very interested to try a similar setup with a different waveform. I feel like this idea would really come into it’s own if used with a triangle or sine wave oscillator which produced a wider range of tones. I have also been experimenting, with some success, with adding capacitors between the output and control voltage inputs to smooth the square wave slightly and create a saw tooth pattern. Without an oscilloscope on hand however this is proving difficult to optimize.

This is also a circuit which can be easily expanded by adding additional oscillators and admittedly there is a little voice screaming in my head to take it to it’s logical conclusion. I expect in my near future I’ll spend a rainy afternoon stringing together as many 555 circuits as I can fit on my breadboards and see what I end up with. I’ll be sure to share the results.