Discription
This is really DBopII. I built the first one after I destroyed my Korg
Minipop in 1985. At the time it was the only way I had to get a beat on
my 4 track. When it died I was frantic to get a beat somehow and I remembered
a series of articles in my collection of 1979 Radio Electronics by James J.
Barbarello on the PerSyn percussion synthesizer.
Initial experiments were promising but I hated the sound of his tone
generators. A friend had a Radio Shack beat-box that I thought sounded great
so after a little reverse engineering I built generators that worked well enough
to start construction. The first version had only kick and snare but four
programs instead of two. It was a real mistake not to include a hi-hat and
now that analog beat boxes are in again I thought it would be cool to do a
updated version.
The generators can be compared in sound to the 808. I have always loved
the sounds but they fell out of favor when sample based machines became cheap
enough to own. Now I use my sampler to cop riffs from this thing. Funny
isn't it.
The concept here was a programmable beat-box to create analog riffs with.
I wanted it small, battery operated, cheap and easily programmed. There are
a lot of drawbacks to the way this was designed formost is probibly eight
beat resolution. Sixteen and thirtytwo beat resolutions can be simulated by
turning the rate up. If you want to modify this I have included a schematic
of a true sixteen beat sequencer but it can be carried even futher to the
extremes see the section on modifications.
Programming
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