Old VCO

This is the Front Panel of the old VCO or Voltage Controlled Oscillator. This module basically converts a voltage into a signal of varying frequency. The relationship between the voltage and the frequency is 1V for every octave over about a 8 octave range. This VCO has a very expensive IC in it which is now kaput so it will not be used again as better designs can be realized more cheaply. I suppose I will recycle the knobs...

This is what is hiding behind the front panel. It is all mounted on a small piece of vero board.

ORT circa Mar 05

Well this is waht it looks like today; it is now the colour that it is supposed to be. It was based quite heavily on an ARP2600. There was a version of the 2600 called the blue meanine which is this quite nice blue. The main difference from the last version is the addition of the MIDI to CV interface (the white section in the secon from left panel). I was told that it wasn't "old school" enough but then anything with MIDI really isn't "old school" anyway...

ORT Circa June 2004

Here is a picture of the ORT end of June last year. The Picture is taken by me collegue Matt. As you can see from the '86 picture the only addition is the sticker from which it draws it's name. You can see the reverberation spring on the top of the unit.

ORT Circa 1985

Here is a picture of the ORT at my Grandparents house around about 1985. I had just bought the Minimoog (at the bottom). It is scanned in from a fairly dogey photo so the colour is fairly iffy. It is amazing how little it has canged to date really! The Minimoog is more different in reality!

The ORT

This is a new blog about the ORT sythesizer that i have been building for about 25 years. Why is it called ORT you may ask? Well about 9 years ago it was sitting on the cupboard at a place i was working at and a collegue placed a label that was the last three letters of "Hyundai Sport" on one of the panels. It from that day on became known as the ORT. I started building it around 1979 or so during my last two years at High School. It has gone in fits and bursts since then. There was a bit if a hyatis between 84 and 2004 while little happened to it. My American Aunt bought me 4 Curtis Electromusic integrated circuits that actually kicked the entire project off. She bought me a set of dual VCA/VCO/VCF/VcADSR. The VCO was the first module built closely followed by VCF and then a selection of modules from the electronics magazine Elektor. Since the ORT has staged a renaisance in the last year or so two new modules have made an apperance. A MIDI to CV module that I have designed myself and a Spring Reverberation module that is based upon a design from the ETI synthesizer from the mid 70's. It is planned to go through each module one at a time and explain the issues with it and how well it worked etc. I then plan to kick off and ORT2 project that will introduce a new set of modules that are so audacious in conception they will take the Analog Sythesis comunity by storm... well probably not as we will be doing well to get that far... but maybe we will.