

The cheapest synthesizer you can ever build - jipumarino
http://www.teledemic.com/hardware/tinyosc/

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apitaru
Check out Tristan Perishe's beautiful 1-bit symphony. He also builds minimal
circuits by hand, and I'm always surprised at how rich and complex the music
is.

<http://www.1bitsymphony.com/>

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hackermom
You can actually do better than this - it's possible to build a switchable
pulse, sawtooth and sine'ish wave oscillator from a single op-amp. During my
childhood my father was heavily into electronics and electronic music, and one
of his interests was designing and buildning his own analog synthesizers. One
of his more compact feats for one of his many synthesizers was four three-wave
oscillators built on a single TL074 (quad op-amp).

~~~
meatmanek
This is what I came to point out. The 555 is a horrible waste of electronics
for something as simple as an oscillator. (Also, iirc, 555 timers do nasty
things to your rails.)

You can get a better (50% duty cycle) out of a comparator/op-amp, a capacitor,
and a few resistors.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Op_Amp.E2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Op_Amp.E2.80.93based_electronic_relaxation_oscillator)

555 timers are much more useful as one-shots, since that functionality is much
more difficult to implement with a comparator.

~~~
chipsy
The 555 is probably used because of the influence of the Atari Punk
Console(which is typically based on a dual 555 design).

