Analog synthy and guitar playing...!

[toneless]

I made a mini analog synthy two weeks ago but i don't know how to mod it to connect my guitar :?
Well,i just wanted to make a synthy but now i am curius on how to use it with my guitar.Here is the page http://atlas.csd.net/~rjwsoft/WP20/WP20_PG1.html
It is a stand alone unit with no input(just a jack for the output).It has a VCO,VCF,VCA,LFO,white noise and an A.D Generator.
Does anybody know how to add an input jack?

By the way it sounds very interesting...

Nick Prionas

[Rodgre]

Just a quick idea. Run your guitar into a preamp, and then tap it to the same point where the Noise Volume pot goes. That should send your guitar through the filtering and whatnot.

As far as TRIGGERING the VCO, that's a whole other ball of wax. I have an old schematic somewhere from Paia on how to trigger the GNOME microsynth with a guitar, but I'm not sure where I hid that.

I never finished the GNOME, so I don't know if it worked.

Roger

[Peter Snowberg]

After a quick peek at the schematics, it looks like you could amplify your guitar signal to the same level as the VCO output and patch that in instead of using the square or triangle wave outputs from S15. You could also mix the output of the VCO with your guitar and feed that to the rest of the circuit.

Looks like a fun gizmo!

-Peter

[Dan N]

I have been looking at that for a while. When push came to shove, I built this instead:
http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/msynth.html

I wonder if the front end of the mini-synth could not be abused in a WP20?

[marc]

Hi. I built the wp20 a few years ago and have always enjoyed it. Mark Hammer's page has a schematic for a guitar signal (monophonic) to cv circuit. I'm unsure if it would work in lieu of the wp20's vco...Let me know if you have any success with it.
marc.

http://hammer.ampage.org/files/GuitarP2V.PDF

[Mark Hammer]

There are two things you need to make use of traditional mono analog synthesis with a guitar: something that tells the synth when a note has started (trigger/gate), and siomething that tells the synth what note it is (pitch CV).  When you provide the first one (note starts here and ends here) without the second, this would generally be referred as guitar *processing* since it is the actual guitar signal you are modifying, but the things modifying that signal treat it as if it were a musical event.  Most decent envelope follower schematics provide an envelope CV output in addition to a trigger and/or gate output.  The trigger/gate outputs indicate the start of a musical event/note and can be used to start envelope generators and other things to shape the amplitude and  tone characteristics of the note.  If you did this, you would bypass the VCO and feed the VCA and VCF of your synth directly.

As Marc points out, there is a decent pitch-to-voltage convertor project for interfacing with mono synths on my site.  If you look in the first issue of DEVICE (also at my site) you will see a project suitable for guitar processing, without the pitch information.

[toneless]

Thanks for the info.I'll give it a try.By the way this project is very easy to be done and it can add a little more color to your music...

Special thanks to Waveform Processing!

Nick Prionas