Peter kirn, in his blog, has claimed to find two new synthesizers which can piggyback on the Arduino electronics platform. Those synthesizers can actually be used as instruments which can be modified via Arduino code. But, it is being recommended to use a real Arduino and not a cloned one as the latter one are often unreliable. 

 

 

 

The miniATMEGATRON from Soulsby Synthesizers, which is available in the kit form, uses the same lo-fi sound engine of the Atmegatron. Most importantly, the kit can be easily assembled and is accessible to anyone with some soldering experience. The code used here is an open source, where exactly the firmware is open not the hardware. The original Atmegatron is a ready-to-play instrument and comes in a beautiful case. Further, it can also be modified using the friendly Arduino development environment

Soulsby miniATMEGATRON

 

The analog Sawbench which was made before by Tasty Chips are back with an Arduino Piggyback Synthesizer. The concept is same as Soulsby’s, where board is used as an add-on to Arduino and then Arduino coding is used to hack the custom functions. But their route is analog, like the Sawbench and one can get a fully-analog oscillator, an analog VCA, and low-pass resonant filter. Frequency modulation can also be done with sine or saw, which is controlled via mod wheel or MIDI. 

 

Both the boards, further, also rely on USB power along with a proper adapter and hence can be plugged into a wall socket and can stand on their own. This experiment is open for further modifications like building of novel applications into firmware by modifying the code. The shields block the ports on the Arduino and therefore it is tough to take advantage of Arduino’s ability to hook up knobs and switches and drive motors and the like. Both the boards also provide great musical fun and also some easy hackability.