Well, like I said, you’re way ahead of me with this, I must have been getting confused with watts
It’s a shame you’re not documenting the creation of this synth you’re making, or maybe you are?
Do you have a blog or something like that, something you update as you build it?
Hands-on sampling is surely pretty high on just about every electronic musicians list, or at least it definitely is on mine, you only have to look at the popularity of the Volca Sample (and that thing can’t even sample).
Would love to see this thing progress, or if you can’t be bothered with that, maybe do a tutorial when you finish it
Voltage multiplied by current = watt,
most electronic circuits are driven by direct current, DC, while audio is always an alternate current, AC, because that’s what makes it audible. As long as the current is alternating in any frequency between 20Hz to 20kHz it shold be audible at least in theory. 1 Hertz is exactly 1 cycle per second, 2Hz is 2 cycles and so on. The voltage tells us how ‘loud’ this signal is, but is impossible to measure with a voltmeter because it’s constantly alternating between negative volts and positive volts more than 20 times per second while the voltmeter tries to read it as DC voltage.
In circuits there is always a common ground, which is supposed to be 0V at any time, you can look at it as a huge water tank, though in circuits we usuallly read it from positive to ground, or negative to ground in other circuits (both in opamp circuits used in many amplifiers), but in fact it actually is the other way around because electrons are negatively charged and therefore is drawn towards the positive leads. A negative voltage however is basically just to swap the wires from the power source.
At this moment i’m in the experimentation phase and i’m basically just waiting for all the parts i need to start this. I’m building most of it out of small ready made modules this time, instead of building them from small components, so this simplifies things a lot compared to soldering everything by hand like i have done for the most. I’ve ordered most from Aliexpress and they’re mostly pretty cheap compared to what they’re capable of. The most expensive parts was of course the Raspberry pi + extras, but apart from that i have ordered things like a tube preamp for about $10 and i’m most certainly shure it would cost me a lot more to build myself. Surround sound modules (i think i can easily turn it into an echo/delay module too), tone board, preamps, voltage regulator modules with voltage output display, recording modules, ring modulator kit, robot voice kit, relay module, radio modules, radio transmitter modules, i’ve lost count of all i have ordered, but the price range is somewhere around $3-$5 per module. I’ve also ordered metal switches with built in light when it’s on and lots of potentiometers, wire connectors and such. There will be lots of wiring, but i think the project will be pretty easy to explain how it all works, so i will try and document it as well as i can and post a thread about it once i’ve figured how and what i can get crammed into this thing.
My current plan/configuraton is something like this:
Raspeberry pi as an audio generator, hopefully Renoise feeding audio through a soundcard > signal goes to a preamp and mixer which splits the audio signal > each signal is fed through a recording module and dry signal to final mixer > 8 step sequencers triggers the recording modules to play > various effects like reverbs and more crazy stuff like pitch/robot /vibrato voice changer which is easy to circuit bend into sounding completely bonkers
Only a crude simplified explanation, but it gives you an idea of what i’m trying to make. All recorder modules can record what comes from the soundcard by holding a button and you can also change sample rate by turning a knob (or one for coarse tuning and one for fine tuning) after i’ve modified it a bit. The sequencer, i hope will work with an optocoupler connected to the play button which can be set to the mode where it plays the whole recording or just while it’s switched on. It also has a loop mode so you could basically record a beat, and make it loop forever and also turn the knob where you can make the bpm match the rest if you wish.
I doubt i will use the radio modules for this project, but anything can happen. My initial plan with the radio and radio transmitter modules was to make a theremin out of them, but i’m not shure it will work.
The cream on top would of course be to have Renoise on the touch screen and at the same time have it synced to everything else.