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Explore retro sound chip pitch bending with Yamaha’s YM3812 OPL2 sound chip! Learn the programming techniques that bring chip tunes to life.

At the end of 2022, Benjie from Benjiao Modular released an Atari Punk Console synthesizer using a couple of 555 timer chips and a handful of other components. Now, there are lots of 555-based synthesizers out there, but in this case he printed it onto a PCB the size of a business card and added… Read more: YM3812 Part 9 – Synth Card

Today, it’s time to take our module to the next level. Lots of levels in fact! See, right now our module is full volume all the time. And well, music is more than notes and drum sounds—it needs dynamics! Fortissimo! pianissimo and every level in between. Of course, our General MIDI friends thought of this… Read more: YM3812 Part 8 – Velocity Sensitivity

What if you could take all of your beloved retro video games and play them on real OPL 2 hardware… but without using a Sound Blaster or Adlib card? In this article, we are going to do just that by adding percussion support to our YM3812 module. With drums in place, we’ll have enough of… Read more: YM3812 Part 7 – Percussive Maintenance

A couple years ago, I had this crazy idea of controlling multiple Yamaha FM sound chips with a single microcontroller. At the time, I had a YM3812, YM2151, YM2413 and even a non-Yamaha chip, the SN76489 on a breadboard outputting sound together. It turned out that controlling the chips themselves wasn’t really that hard. They… Read more: YM3812 Part 6 – Patches

If you’ve followed the series so far, welcome back! In the last article, we added MIDI control to our YM3812 module. This allows us to play music by sending signals from a computer, keyboard or any other midi source. Still, you can only play one note at a time, and there is a pretty annoying… Read more: YM3812 Part 5 – MIDI Polyphony

If you followed along through last three posts, then hopefully you have a Yamaha YM3812 OPL Sound Chip on a breadboard playing a lovely F Major 7th chord over and over and over 😅. Or maybe, the annoying repetition drove you to experiment and find new patterns. It’s a great proof of concept that ensures… Read more: YM3812 Part 4 – MIDI Journey

The YM3812 Class In the last article, we built a simple circuit to get our YM3812 up and running on a breadboard. To do that, we used code from the GitHub repo and just kind of glossed over how the it works. In this article, let’s delve into the sea of complexity that is c++… Read more: YM3812 Part 3 – Behind the Code

FACE Reveal In the last article we dug into the YM3812 registers and how to manipulate them an electrical level. Today we are going to build up the first part of the schematic—just enough to get sound working through a microcontroller. Whenever building on a new platform, What’s the first thing you implement? Hello World.… Read more: YM3812 Part 2 – FACE Reveal

Introduction In conducting a pretty extensive deep dive into Yamaha’s FM synthesis chips, I’ve come to realize that while these chips produce very unique sounds, they are also largely very similar. In fact, if you compare their register settings (and ignore the level of granular control that you get), you can see just how many… Read more: YM3812 Part 1 – Register Basics

Do you find yourself struggling to tighten the nuts on those 3.5mm Thonk Jacks? Do they break your nails and hurt your fingers, forcing you to resort to pliers that inevitably slip off and scrape your beautiful PCB front panels? Do you have a 3D printer? Take 14 minutes and print this file out. It… Read more: Thonk Jack Nut Tightener

Introduction I’ve been meaning to build a noise generator for a while now—especially to make hi-hats, claps, and other percussive sounds. So when my noise2 chip arrived from electricdruid.com, I was eager to dig in. As I looked through the datasheet schematic, I was really surprised by the simplicity of the module design. The chip… Read more: Noise & VC Tone Filter Module

Building a Waveform Generator When starting out in the DIY synth space, one of the first projects people typically tackle after creating their first oscillator is an analog sequencer—like the “baby-8.” It’s a simple circuit that steps through a sequence of adjustable voltages. And if you use those voltages to control an oscillator you’ll get… Read more: Waveform Generator

An Experiment in Tone One day I was flipping through random electronics parts on AliExpress and came across a chip I hadn’t seen before—the TDA1524. After popping open the datasheet, it appeared to be a tone control chip with voltage-controlled inputs for Bass, Treble, Volume, and Balance. Apparently they use this chip in car stereos,… Read more: TDA1524 VC Tone Filter

Introduction Watching LMNC build the Sega Mega Drive Synthesizer inspired me to build an FM Synth of my own. I loved how all of the controls were broken out and that you could adjust the sound on the fly. I wanted to replicate that in a Eurorack-sized module, and this is how the Smooth Operator… Read more: Smooth Operator