A very basic drone synthesizer that I built at home out of cardboard and spare parts.
Based on this circuit on Look Mum No Computer's website. This took me like 6 tries to get right, but eventually I got it.
These basic oscillators can be made for mere cents worth of components, the most expensive part would be the potentiometers. You can salvage those, or use those tiny cheap plastic blue ones maybe.
I used a 2n3904 transistor for these ones, but you can choose from a handful of others. kerrywong.com has a great article about how these oscillators work and what transistors you can use.
A capacitor controls the discharge time of the circuit, which changes the pitch. I used two 4.7uF caps for the left oscillators, and a 10uF cap for the right one.
There's plenty of room inside for a proper RAT distortion circuit, which i will definitely add in the future.
The base is made from a cardboard composite (too thick for the front panel), which was inspired by NightHawkInLight's video about building with cardboard.
Here's a weird sort of song that I made with this new synthesizer and a handful of plugins in Reaper. You can download it and use it freely for whatever you want.
Click the cover art to download!
Title: LRB Loop 2
Album: Large Rat Loops
Year: 2025
