Learn to build your own hardware sequencer using 4000-series logic chips on a breadboard. With a brief introduction to logic gates & RC timing networks, we’ll build up digital clocks, memory cells, and counters. We’ll explore a range of sequencing techniques: Step-based, Counter-based, and Generative feedback. Combining these tools together, each participant will build their own sequencer on breadboard, culminating in a group-improvisation controlling a eurorack synthesizer.
Prerequisites:
Familiarity with signal flow, and a basic understanding of how to use sequencers with a synthesizer.
Basic knowledge of electronics components like resistors and capacitors, and reading a schematic.
Very excited to guide this workshop, and just a quick shout out to @MengQiMusic who coined the delightful name. We spoke at length about how analogue logic (or perhaps more correctly, discrete-gate logic) is ripe for a rebirth while microcontrollers have descended into unobtainium.
These logic chips have been an obsession of mine for a couple years now, and I’m excited to explore them in the workshop. There’s so many delightful little circuits to be strung together with just a couple chips. It’s very freeing to create a tiny single-purpose “computer” where the “program” is encoded in your circuit board rather than a symbolic scroll of code.
Hoping some folks can make it there & share in this joy!
luck dragon has a strong focus on the non-virtual but we’ve already discussed developing some materials and resources that can be shared online after the class happens.
What I would personally be intensely grateful for, are teaching materials or even just tips, for creating a similar experience in other parts of the world.
Zero expectation! Just suggesting a possible way to spread the knowledge without removing the emphasis on local community, perhaps?
Regardless, thrilled to see this happening, it’s a great idea.
i’m waaaay in over my head as far as knowledge about circuit design but the description seems to match something i’ve read recently about Gijs Gieskes 4swing sequencer
Apparently it’s built around the 4017 logic chip…I’m now thinking back on whether NLC sequencers are built with similar principles in mind
This looks like a good start! 8 step sequencer with some chips pots n wires. There is a wealth of simple designs out there. Search for “lunetta synth circuits”
But gosh there’s a big difference between “here is a circuit” and “here’s how I teach building this type of circuit to a group of people with mixed ranges of skill and experience”.
But if I come up with an answer to the latter question, I’ll try to come back and share.
Don’t mean to derail the thread too much. The workshop sounds like a grand time. But here is a series of vids you may find helpful to learn how to teach this sort of thing. After watching these videos, I went from knowing nothing, to building all manner of synthy lunettas bits. Helped me to not be afraid to learn to read schematics. And I send anybody who wants to learn this stuff to these. In my opinion these are the basics that you need to understand and then you will dive deep into the rabbit hole.
Then go check out the LogicNoise series at hackaday. Also an informative way to approach and present this kind of material.
And Nicolas Collins has a free PDF called Hardware Hacking which would make some good teaching material as well.
Attending, and beyond thrilled! I wasn’t able to make the first workshop but was able to attend the evening performances.
I have a ton a nice jumper wires and other components (and breadboards) from AdaFruit as I’ve been signed up to their AdaBox subscription box from the start and have accumulated a bunch. Happy to bring along a bunch!
I’m just starting to dip my toes into circuit design and this sounds so cool! Really wish I could attend. Had half a mind to ride my bike across the border and camp my way down there but I can’t take that much time off school…and my bike is broken atm
in case anyone is on the last-minute fence and deterred by the listed prerequisites— if you know synths/sequencers pretty well, and at least know what a capacitor and resistor are, you can likely follow through what’ll happen in the workshop (just think of it as micro-patching). it’ll provide a great footing for further learning.
we simply wanted to point out that we weren’t planning on doing a the-very-basics-electronics workshop— not planning to explain Ohm’s Law (though the point is, it’s not super necessary here anyway!)
can’t wait to see some of the sequencer projects that emerge !!
