One of the most common beginner SDIY questions is which parts are frequently used and worth buying in large quantities to use on multiple projects. The people who ask this question think they're going to save serious amounts of money by buying…
[Read more]
As the title says, North Coast's RSS feed works again. The URL is in the footer of every page:https://files.northcoastsynthesis.com/rss/That's a change from the old URL, but the old URL still works if you're already subscribed to it. Sinc…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
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…
[Read more]
CAD