It is often said that the secret of Taco Bell's success is that they only use six ingredients: refried beans, seasoned ground beef mixture, cheddar cheese, sour cream, lettuce, and corn tortillas. Everything on their menu is just some com…
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UPDATE: This item has been sold and is no longer available. I'm leaving the Web log posting online for historical interest. Hey, kids, I have an assembled Leapfrog Filter here that failed the initial quality control (because of what tu…
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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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