Hackable Synthesizers

because okay we move swiftly on for the final presentation of the mid-afternoon session with Joseph cool well thank you so much for being here I know it's kind of late so quick short introduction about myself um I'm security professional I have been interested in music DIY creative coding for for a really long time now I guess since high school I wrote my first synthesizer in Turbo Pascal which uh which was pretty basic but it kind of started me down on the road about uh synthesizer and music in general uh so the theme of this topic is and the basic inspiration for this is that I lived in the US and there I participated in an iot hacking training and uh it got

me hooked on Hardware hacking for some time and iot hacking then then that kind of died off and I started getting more into hacking synthesizers and how they work what we're gonna cover today is uh just a short synthesizer history just so that we are all on the same page about this uh I will cover some interesting synthesizer hacks and DIY synthesizer scene like how you can start off how you can make your own uh pcbs where to get projects stuff like that so for this presentation the synthesizer will be like audio synthesizers video synthesizers effects sequencers development boards and computers so not just synthesizers uh in general and uh just to get the idea the synthesizer it

basically generates frequencies internally like uh like based on control voltage or just digital information and whatnot so it resonates and you send it to a speaker or to an amplifier or whatever and uh so this is what it looks like so you have a control voltage section uh you get like the control voltage From a Jack or or from keyboard or whatever it doesn't really matter you get some kind of voltage and you use that to control your oscillators so the oscillators resonate or generate sound at the frequency based on the control voltage and after that you have like other kind of signal processing and uh that kind of differs by synthesizer so that I wouldn't go into it right now and

at the end of the chain there is an audio output so the first synthesizers were mechanical in nature so they used the physical forces like water wind uh stuff like that it's uh these weren't really synthesizers in the traditional sense but one easy to grasp is example which could be thought of as the precursor of a synthesizer is uh you know those music boxes which uh there are pins comps and you rotate the the like cylinder and it kind of like hits those uh the Combs and it resonates with a certain frequency and it makes some kind of music so uh that that's one early example of this uh the phone autograph or the phonograph

is uh also kind of like uh important thing for this so that made it possible for audio to get recorded people only found out later that you can also play it back and one of the most interesting synthesizers in my opinion is the tel harmonium which is like a super big electromechanical synthesizer so it weighed seven tons it used gears dynamos and uh the funny thing it broadcasted over telephone so it was like an early synthesizer plus an iot device uh the first almost synthesizers uh I'm I guess everyone is kind of familiar with determi and it's like uh there are two antennas and you control the pitch and the amplitude and uh you know you make

funky outer words sounds with it but uh during the 50s uh after World War II there was a lot of radio and uh just uh military test equipment that was dumped on universities on radios and whatever so people started experimenting with those and uh we are talking about like huge vacuum tube driven racks where you could just dial in certain frequencies and stuff like that and people recorded that onto tape and played it back so they manipulated the tape and uh that's how they created sounds and after that the transistors came so the circuits became much smaller we're talking going from uh vacuum tubes to transistors which were much smaller so the synthesizers became a thing in

the US there was the West Coast synthesis driven by Don bucla this was more of a threat like an experimental version where he thought of the synthesizer as its own instrument category and Bob Moog and the East Coast synthesis they just used like pianos and stuff like that so they used the more traditional classical music type of thing so back here everything was really expensive hand soldered and made to order so this was pretty close to the DIY synthesizer scene just uh just in the early days and after that we are talking in the 70s so we are coming up with small integrated circuits uh and arcade Machines game consoles home computers they needed to make some kind of sound

to get that multimedia experience so this programmable sound generators were cheap and easy way to get acceptable sound quality so you don't you don't really imagine here like uh like something that makes good music it makes like beeps and zaps and noises uh like the common configuration here is just three voices like Square wave triangle wave whatever and the noise channel so you like pew pew and that's it like you make sounds with these and uh just another uh programmable sound generator that most people know who have worked with the Commodore 64 is the Sid chip so the Sid chip was really good it's still really good and it's really hard to find and for a good reason

because it's uh it's like almost like a synthesizer in a small package and after that uh integrated circuits became a thing for music so what this meant is that instead of like having like a circuit board be it full of discrete components you could make the whole thing into just a small chip this was much more Musical and like specified compared to the programmable sound generators uh this also made mass production possible and polyphony so you could before that you would play a note and you could only play a single note at a time it would just drift in pitch or or just cancel the voice and this gave birth to a bunch of legendary

synthesizers that people still love but uh the reality about these is just these are built of small building blocks uh that were created by someone else so there is nothing really mythical or legendary about them and after that uh the digital Renaissance began so what we have here is that digital technology became affordable first we had the first hybrid synthesizer so where some part of the circuit was digital then just a fully digital synthesizers so what happened here is that it was possible to save presets so before that you had to dial in everything with uh knobs and uh if you wanted to switch a sound that wasn't possible at all so what happens here is

that you could just push a button and it would restore the preset that you had saved uh one really good example of this digital FM synthesis used with computers and sound card is the Sound Blaster series so uh like they used FM chips to to make sounds before uh PCM and playing back PCM uh like audio data was a thing uh here the Japanese companies dominate the market and this is when analog scenes were sold off at the rock bottom prices because people thought that okay yeah digital rocks let's ditch these analog things and what also happened is that a lot of us-based companies they failed because they couldn't keep up with the Japanese so this is the this is

the time when everything Japanese was pretty awesome and if you look at 80s action movies they are saying oh the Japanese technology whatever that rocks so the American companies they didn't really have like CFOs who would uh who would look after the business and and they basically almost all of them got bankrupt after that uh DSP chips finally became affordable uh what it meant is that it was possible for uh DSP chips to model analog circuits what ended up happening here is that they managed to recreate some of this but it lacked character so those small inaccuracies that analog circuits has these don't have it which for some people it's bad for some people it's

good uh what's good about this is that polyphony and multi-trainable energy was a thing so if you wanted like a lot of noise like a lot of voices that's possible if you want to play different voices at the same time that's also possible you just need more DSP computation the funny thing about this is that emulating these old old school digital synthesizers it's now possible because we know how to emulate these dsdp chips now like you can run it on your laptop it's uh it's a pretty awesome thing so what also happened is that computers became fast enough to process real-time audio what it meant is that uh it just decreased the barrier of Entry like uh

before that you'd needed expensive circuitry to do this but here uh you could just run a plug-in on your on your machine there are multiple plugins whatever so first here like uh it there was a problem where aliasing was was a problem but uh as the processing capabilities become much better this was eliminated by oversampling my problem with this is that focus is mostly on analog emulation so like recreating these analog synthesizers in the digital domain uh or creating like these big Flagship instruments which is like not recreatable in real life and like instead of creating instruments so we have a couple of great free open source synthesizers like the search XD or the vital so if you want to look at

the source code it's possible it's possible to learn from it so uh they are really good then check them out if you want and after that we have the Euro rack so the Euro Act is a is a really cool format so like back in the day we had these old like really tall synthesizer racks and people like the the fair thought that this is a good thing but let's make it smaller let's make it possible with off the shelf components so they popularized this uh quasi standard it's not really a standard if you ask anyone who is uh who has doubled into eurek it's not a real standard but there are some some like

things that people respect in that Realm so this is a mixture of analog mechanical and digital modules uh this is like how you can imagine this is there like oscillators filters vcas whatever like everything is like a small module that you can chain and wire together to make your own kind of synthesizer and there is like a really big DIY Community with a lot of Open Source modules after that analog Revival so as I told you people sold off their analog equipment because that was like bad and they didn't like it anymore so underground music producers like techno artists house artists uh like Goa artists like they both demo and after that they kind of became popular

and people wanted to get that sound so cheap classic I know Saint prices became like really huge again and people tried to get these again uh but they weren't available just for really expensive prices so what the manufacturers saw that this is like a big gap in the market so what they tried to do is they re-released those old-school synthesizers and uh sold them off for for much more SMD technology meant that they could have sold it for less like the like the component prices were much lower and uh the tuning was much better and uh like they could sell it for like affordable prices instead like back in the day they were really expensive the bad thing for

me here personally is that there were no innovation there is no innovation so the best thing that they do is just like they plug in uh some kind of digital components so that they can interface with midi but uh this is just recycling gold gear answering it again for uh some better price so nowadays what we have is that dsps are becoming uh really really expensive again because nobody uses them anymore because uh processing power became really cheap and is possible to to calculate real-time audio using microcontrollers and chipsets so what happened is that manufacturers switched to arm-based mcus this meant that there is a much better supply chain like everybody uses these chips there's

also a lower barrier of Entry like you can get it for much cheaper you need to you don't need to hire like a specified DSP engineer because uh like the source code is available it's much easier to program it and uh but there is a con to it so these things are cheaper but they have less professional features compared to a DSP based synthesizer also they are running on bare metal or Linux operating systems so I'm gonna talk about some interesting synthesizer hacks why you would hack your synthesizer well in certain cases the original Hardware is not supported by the manufacturer anymore um you may want to add new features change the existing Behavior block Telemetry

that's a thing like if you have a synthesizer there is like a certain synthesizer brand that broadcasts the how you use the synthesizer across the internet which is like really crazy you may want to have total control over your device like you you want to own it you don't own it unless you have control over the software and uh yeah hacking stuff is fun so Hardware hacking so these are made by modifying the circuits you add extra functionality to the to the device like you add midi in or midi output to interface with your gear uh you might want to get different responses from analog circuits so you put on resistors capacitors whatever there are people who are putting things

into different chassis so you have like a small flimsy plastic sync you might want to put it into a big metal box so that it's reliable and you can like smash people's head with it but uh so this kind of leads to avoiding guarantees so it's not for the faint-hearted there are also custom server for devices so we have so these are page Replacements what I'm introducing here they have Rewritten the operating system from scratch to extend the capabilities so here we have this deck lenser on the top which kind of makes you able to sequence gear like uh you can control gear in a certain way some other gear which was not possible with the original

device it costs like 50 bucks or 50 Euros so it's not not really that expensive uh we have the gjos which kind of replaces the firmware for for assembler and it's like it's it makes your device much more powerful like uh everybody who uses that device is running on that operating system so we have more exciting stuff here the core electrobe the electribe sampler as well so this is the same Hardware different enclosure they are exactly the same just they change some labels uh one is black the other one is gray nothing is different from these but they didn't let people switch the firmware's because they are greedy as but the only protection was just a

header check so what people found out is that you rewrite the header it makes it possible to switch the firmware between the two there were some problems with this but the community now maintains a firmware that combines features of the both uh rating system and uh funny thing about that is that Quark basically discontinued uh firmware support for this so it's now only maintained by the community which is like really bad because they still sell it here we have the zoom FX pedals so here we have another example of corporate greed are locked to certain device types which in some cases it makes sense so there are different kind of models where you have multiple screens and there is like

uh different effects that don't really use those scenes like uh screens but you still want to use them on your device so internally all of the devices use the same OS and architecture uh not the processors because like the ones with the multiple screen are more powerful but you can still upload some effects to cheaper devices uh here's a python utility that allows you to upload these unsupported effects we also have an example for uh like building up on the original firmware so here we have the volca sample and Volk FM so one of them is a center sample player and the other is a an FM synthesizer so ajin or pajan or I'm not

sure how you pronounce it they added lots of additional features to these uh to these synthesizers which meant that your device isn't much power much more powerful than it was earlier uh this was only available for V1 devices so core really is the version two but uh they didn't say like okay we're gonna help this guy out or girl out uh they just released a new firmware and uh they didn't really Port those features so if you buy the V2 it might not have all the features that your hacked firmware one has so yeah corporate greed here we have uh hakai or MPC live Explorer so what we have here is that there are several MPC

devices but they are what happens here is that these are running Linux and these were locked down but people managed to root these devices so now you can ssh in VNC it's like control over VNC uh what's happened here is that uh people represent engineer the firmware and they found unreleased Hardware revisions and so people got a heads up that their device is going to be like pretty much absolute in a absolute in a few months so another exciting hack about this is that they had a different device which wasn't really compatible with this one but they managed to execute uh the software from that device which is really cool like you buy one and you can

run the operating system from the other one and uh this was just released two days ago this is a synthesizer that has a new modular design and it uses the Intel nuke computer element a compute element what it means that you can replace the CPU and like the the motherboard of your synthesizer so what they're hoping for here is that it's more sustainable and has a longer product life cycle and it also runs Linux the thing here is that they are using an older generation so support is going to end for that compute element next year so uh yeah don't buy this one yet okay the DIY scene skin so as I said the early synthesizers were

almost DIY in nature like people soldered it together in their garages or in their like apartments and stuff like that but uh DIY couldn't keep up in the 80s 90s there it like the chips were expensive or they couldn't even get chips so that kind of died off like there were some old Engineers who were making synthesizers but this wasn't really a thing with with younger Generations so when Arduino became a thing and Web 2.0 became a thing the DIY Electronics scene got kind of revived uh like people found out that okay you can share tutorials you can get more information and uh like people wanted to get back the sound of the old uh video consoles

that they used so they started taking out the psgs and the FM chips from old consoles like uh here's one example the electron seed station so what they do did here is that they got the Sid chips from Commodore 64s and they put it into a shiny box and they installed it now this is really expensive because you can't really get uh chips anymore but there are alternatives based on fpgas and just software emulations in general so the other thing that happened here is microcontrollers became good enough for synthesis uh so you could get an Arduino and make some really really low-fi sounds with it and uh thanks to Chinese fpf like PCB Fabricators you can also

create your pcbs like without like suffering with a strip board or just uh like using acid to etch your pcbs and uh like the digital scenes kind of look like iot devices from a certain perspective like uh you have sensors you get analog control signals or digital control signals from those you do some kind of uh processing you interface with the storage the hardware or the network and uh you forward Digital Data to MIDI or you forward uh Digital Data to the digital analog converter and from that you get the audio and the synthesizer plays some wonderful Tunes uh so these can this can be done with off-the-shelf components like you can order your stuff there are kits here

like uh you can do whatever you want and uh what you need to like really take care here but what you need to do here is just interface with the external signals and send some signals externally again so everything else is code so I love code you should do you can basically do whatever you want with these whereas with analog synthesizers you have to just make a circuit and if you want to modify that that's more pain in the ass so some like really good companies that kind of made this whole thing possible mutable instruments so they are the original Hardware open Hardware synth Company by Emily Gillette so all of her designs were eventually

open sourced so you can find whatever she made you can find it online she's also well she has me really active on forums before that but she she shut down her company because uh just manufacturers were cloning her modules and synthesizers left and right without like paying back which is okay because the license allowed that but it she sort of got rid of the whole thing because she didn't like giving support for free so she shared a lot of knowledge about circuitry and DSP design her code is still used by large manufacturers like Behringer or arturia and they often lie about their contributions to the DSP community so but it's still something to check out

if you're interested so the other one is the monouns these are made by a small us-based artist Collective who are creating unique synthesizers and controllers they have a lot of Open Source design and open Hardware projects not everything is open source not everything is open Hardware but some are this is Community Driven there's an orange Shield right here this runs on the Raspberry Pi it's Open Source Hardware so you can make your own and you can use super collider and Lua to create your own synths or effects or whatever you want the other one is Critter and guitari they have the organelle and the IC uh this is also a us-based boutique sync manufacturer they also use the Raspberry

Pi computer module they are running they are running Linux python or whatever like the users publish and modify changes hacks it they really expanded on the whole ecosystem so you can basically uh create your own synthesizers using pure data which is a also an open source but graphic programming language for interacting with audio and if if you want to learn more about synthesizers and DIY hacking you you can check out electromusic.com or modvicular but be careful these are OG forums there is like data going back from for a really long time all topics might be outdated and they are not really Keen to newbies so they expect you to read a lot so rtfm but the Lions Community I personally

find it much better it's not that about Hardware it's more about DSP projects and audio in general if you look for open source synth projects you can find a lot on GitHub so they publish pcbs they publish wiretaps they publish bombs so not bombs boms build of materials so you can get them there and you can order it from your local Friendly Hardware electronic supplier also if you're located in Budapest the ass or S they offer local workshops a couple of times a year like every couple months and they do it for really cheap so it's really affordable you should participate if you want these are really small but really enthusiastic people so shout out to them

and if you're more of a visual type here are a couple of YouTube channels so hugivo makes a really affordable modular synthesizers uh like modular synthesizer modules if you look at that so they rely very much on Arduino so you know it's like a couple of bucks like the most expensive module that I have seen is like 20 bucks so it's really good really cheap Moritz Klein Cynthia guy and Luke mom no computer they also make so these have like different learning curves but all of them are really good and that's all I wanted to say uh I'm available on Discord if you want to ask questions as well ladies and gentlemen just before we we say thanks

to Joseph we are ahead of uh time so are there any uh questions

is one are you going to ask it or sing it you could sing it so how many L's are in the L lines um at the end it was hard to count sorry how many L's are in the last lll.com eight I guess thank you eight or seven you're welcome but you can check it out on on the slides thank you any anything from anybody else okay in which case Joseph thank you very much