“Build a retro sounding 8-Bit Sound Generator and control it through MIDI.This design is partly inspired by Chiptune enthusiasts building Arduino circuits to play Chiptune files and some of my own ideas to integrate the sound of early video game consoles into my synth-jam setup.The design is centered around the 1978 AY-3-8910 programmable sound generator. This chip contains three independent square-wave oscillators (great for generating chords), a noise generator, an envelope generator and a mixer. All these functions are fully controllable, but it does comes with a few limitations; the design I am presenting here is meant as an extension to, for example, drum machines/samplers capable of sending MIDI (trigger) notes. This design, called TB-AY-3 (or Techno Box AY-3-8910) sounds best with the release-only type of envelope (i.e. to generate percussion type of sounds), but it does allow you to select other types.I pre-programmed 8 patches:The first 5 you can freely edit (Bass drum, Snare drum, Closed hi-hat, Open hi-hat and a bleep sound) The remaining 3 patches are hard coded (a random bleep sound, an arcade kind of video game sound and a Kraftwerk “pocket calculator” kind of random melody) You can’t save the changes you make to the 5 selectable patches; the intention here is to tweak the sounds on the fly (as they are MIDI-triggered) - often resulting in cool techno patterns.Important to understand here is that the design is monophonic (only one patch at a time). Of course, I am including the Arduino code, so feel free to customize the default patches.
Enough intro - let’s get started!”