“I’ve hit a pretty significant milestone with this Instructable - my 200th! It’s been a busy 9 years, building and learning a lot of new skills whist producing these 200 ‘ibles - and it’s been a blast.
Thanks to everyone who has ever voted for me in a competition or given me some positive vibes - you guys make it all the more fun for me.
For the 200th ‘ible I present to you my latest synth - the 555 Fizzle Loop Synth. Some of you might recall that I have built and published a few other iterations of this synth but this one really takes it to another level! You can check out the other versions in the below links.
The synth is based around a couple 555 timers along with a 40106 Hex Schmitt trigger and a 4040 Binary Counter. I was over a friends house recently and we were listening to some acid house music and thought it sounded a little like my other fizzle loop synths. I decided to revisit the build and add a few other controls to be able to make beats.
The new version allows touch control modulation and has a built in tone and beat generator via the 4040 and 40106 IC’s. The 555 timers create the tones and these can be controlled 3 ways, through a pot, slider and LDR.
It’s a really run little synth which has a heap of different beats that can be generated and controlled. I also made a custom PCB to make life a little easier.”