The Voice of Saturn Synthesizer mk II was released in Spring of 2016 originally as a kit for a workshop for the Tom Tom Festival in Charlottesville, VA. There have been several revisions with the current one being configurable as a standalone device or a eurorack module. It features 4 oscillators, 2 lfos, a ring modulator, lots of routing possibilities, a built in speaker amp and a very weird resonant low pass filter. Build instructions can be found at the top navigation of this site. Stock is limited but please contact me if you are interested in purchasing a circuit board, kit or built module.

Build instructions here

The Voice of Saturn Modulator was a module designed around an OTA based Voltage Controlled amplifier and a function generator chip that served as an LFO. Also included was a simple attack release envelope rounding out the Modulator as a useful utility module.

The Voice of Saturn VCF is based around the CEM 3372 Signal Processor chip. At one point ca. 2006 I wound up with a decent sized amount of these discontinued chips and I decided to design a filter module around them. I also had a great source for joysticks and loved that sort of user interface control. The result was the VoS VCF. Only ~40 of the full scale units were ever produced or made as a kit due to the limited number of joysticks and CEM chips but the module has also been released in a limited eurorack form. It features cv control over cutoff and resonance of the 24db 4 pole filter as well as cv controls for each of the two input VCAs and the output VCA. I do still have pcbs available for this if anyone one is interested.

The Voice of Saturn Sequencer came soon after the VoS Synthesizer and was an expanded take on the Baby 10 sequencer utilizing a cd4017 decade counter at its core. I wanted something that could sequence my Realistic (Moog) MG1 amongst other things so it was important to add an S-Trig output as well as the more common gate/trigger. With an external clock input you can slave the VoS sequencer to nearly anything and using the reset input you can change sequence lenght to be from 1-10 steps.

Schematic

Manual

The Voice of Saturn Synthesizer was the first device I created that bears the Voice of Saturn name. It came out of my own experimentation with the venerable 555 timer IC and was the result of some circuit bending of some known schematic ideas, the basis of which being the Atari Punk Console.

Schematic

Manual

Build Instructions

BOM

Artwork

Get in touch if you have questions!

Some changes to the build doc:

R11 is b500
R12 is B500
R7 is A100

Instead of the vactrol on the last build i just wired cv1 and cv2 into the cv pins on jp11 and jp14 with a diode for negative voltage protection. kinda does some fun stuff but definitely cv control could be improved on. Also the LFO type/depth connections are kinda hacky and could be worked on.

Using the Doepfer’s modwheel assembly and an Arduino I built this midi controller for a client that needed a standalone box with a center detented, spring loaded pitch bend control and a free moving volume control. There is a switch that puts the device into calibration mode to learn the min and max values of each wheel. The code is pretty simple (though messy and uncommented for the time being) and basically just reads in the analog values of the wheels, scales them to the appropriate midi controller values and has some smoothing applied to take care of jitter. You can download the Arduino source here. It requires the MIDILibrary. Check out the most recent code at my GitHub Project.