FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Envelope generator offers full ADSR with minimalist design TORONTO, Ontario - July 11, 2018 - North Coast Synthesis Ltd., Toronto-based manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, has extended its line of discrete-tran…
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Most transistor circuits are quite straightforward. If you look at the schematic of something like the North Coast Transistor Mixer, you can easily recognize common patterns - an emitter follower here, a common-emitter amplifier there - which a…
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Visit the North Coast Synthesis SDIY page!It's a fairly common question "What tools do I need to get started with synthesizer do-it-yourself building?" and most people who ask or answer this question seem to think it starts and ends with a soldering…
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Here is the skeleton of a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract, with the vertices labelled by musical note names. No label is used more than three times, and out of the 24 two-dimensional faces of the tesseract, on 18 of them the note name…
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In the last couple weeks, since the storefront move, I've been busy with a lot of store and non-store issues and haven't had much time to update here. Sorry about that; here are some notes on what's going on. Storefront This Web site is s…
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This is Part 14 of a series that started with Part 1. The basic operation of patching a modular synthesizer consists of connecting an output to an input. Perhaps you have a MIDI interface with a V/oct pitch control voltage output, and you…
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So, here we are. As you've probably noticed, this storefront has changed significantly. The thing is that Shopify, which I used to run my corporate Web presence since starting the business, changed its admin interface in such a way that it would…
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This is Part 13 of a series that started with Part 1. When we think about what makes one instrument sound different from another, we often think about the spectrum of the sound - harmonic like a violin, inharmonic like a bell, bright with many har…
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A few days ago I suddenly found myself unable to log in to the admin section of this Web site. That's understandably a problem when I'm running a business through the site. Upon investigation, it turns out that my e-commerce provider had made some…
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This is Part 12 of a series that started with Part 1. Many beginners say they're interested in making "drones" with their modular synths - musical textures that eschew conventional musical notions like rhythm and melody. I think part of the appea…
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Much of musical harmony comes down to combining notes that share harmonics. Sounds produced by (some...) physical objects typically have consistent waveforms, where each wave is the same shape as the last. That is also typical of modular-synth osci…
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This is Part 11 of a series that started with Part 1. Trying to divide modules into "analog" and "digital" may be a losing game, and it's certainly a recipe for flame wars on Web forums, because strictly speaking, "analog" and "digital" are proper…
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