The title of this blog is perhaps a bit sarcastic but early on in my lunetta building journey I was stung by a comment on an internet forum which went along the lines of “every couple of months there’s another goddam drone box based on the 40106 inverter chip” – ouch. Yep, every couple of months someone gets the Nicolas Collins book, reads the hackaday series or electro-music forums and discovers this remarkably easy way to get bleeping, pretty soon they’re posting their creation on youtube and instagram. Perhaps they package it up, give it a name and try and sell a few too, dreaming of being the next Make Noise.  

So there is already a wealth of information on the internet (I’ll cite as I go along and check out the sidebar links too) about lunetta style synths and getting noise out of CMOS chips. Why start another blog? Why is my journey different? What do I possibly have to add on the subject?

I’ve pondered these questions. I’m certainly more knowledgeable about electronics now than when I started but I’m not sure this blog should necessarily be a source of definitive schematics (although one thing I can vouch for is that I’ve built them and they work – for me at least). There’s many better sources if you want to know how a transistor works but I guess I’ll touch on the theory that I’ve picked up. In building my lunetta what I did want to go beyond is just having something housed in a plastic lunchbox with a marker pen legend and bare pot stems. I wanted something that looked like a modular synth. I’ll write much more later about panel designs, materials and so on. 

I think what I’ll mostly be sharing here is the mistakes I made along the way and the things I wish I had found on the internet: for example there’s a ton of schematics for a 4051 based sequencer for example – but little on the practicalities of wiring its 32+ connections from panel to board. Of course proper manufacturers solved such problems years ago but this blog is strictly DIY – I’ve never designed a PCB (although as I got deeper in I concede this would have been very useful) and I’ve hand drilled all my panels (for better or worse). The instructions and reflections on this blog will come from that perspective –I want to make this thing for myself using cheap and accessible materials and tools, I want to make some noise but I’m not trying to sell it to the public, it doesn’t have to be ‘production quality’ but I don’t want it to look or sound like crap either.