This weekend, I started working with Nicolas Collins‘ excellent book Handmade Electronic Music (Routledge ISBN: 978-0-415-99873-4). One of the more intriguing projects in the book is an amazingly simple, inexpensive square wave oscillator based on a $0.75 74C14 CMOS Hex Inverter chip. In it’s most basic form, the circuit consists only of the 74C14, a capacitor, a resistor, a 9V battery clip and an output jack. Total cost: a few dollars and a few minutes of your time.
After experimenting for an hour or two, I modified the basic circuit with a potentiometer to control the oscillator frequency, a few extra resistors to limit the frequency range, and a momentary switch to control rhythm. Here is a video of me playing the resulting instrument. It’s rough, but fun…
Click here to watch this video on YouTube.
