A Simple Square(?) Wave Electronic Music PCB
Bert Jerred built a voltage-controlled oscillator circuit designed to Eurorack specs.
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!