A Simple Square(?) Wave Electronic Music PCB

Bert Jerred built a voltage-controlled oscillator circuit designed to Eurorack specs.

Jeremy Cook
4 years agoMusic

Hacking and electronic music seem to go hand in hand. As his “first foray into ordering components and placing them on a PCB without manually verifying my choices and measurements,” Bert Jerred decided to make a simple VCO, or voltage-controlled oscillator. The device consists of an input and output jack, along with an SN74HC14N Hex Schmitt Trigger, a capacitor, and a potentiometer for user interface.

The PCB is based around Eurorack specs, so it could be integrated with a much larger system as needed. Jerred doesn’t actually have a rack at this point, but wanted to get a feel for aligning his booard with a known specification. The build was created as part of his “ongoing self-directed learning,” and as such seems to have been a definite success.

Someone did, however, point out that what he’s generating here isn’t actually a square wave, due to a minor error. It’s still definitely functional for music creation, and a few mistakes along the way is part of learning process — self-directed or not!

It's quite the simple setup, and you can hear it used quite creatively in the clips below. Such a build is a great way to take the next step in PCB/electronic music device design, and hopefully we’ll see Jerred's synth project develop further in the future!

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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