DIY Laser Guitar Synth

Instructables has published a tutorial on building the Prism – a DIY laser guitar synth:

I suppose I should clarify what the Prism is: It’s a bit like a guitar with some synthesizer mashed in. It has aspects of a theremin and a laser harp thrown in to boot. In short, it’s not like anything else, and you can use it to make some really neat sounds. Anything from cold Sine and harsh square waves to heavily distorted noise.

At its heart the Prism features a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator), based around the very shiny XR2206 monolithic function generator. The octave range is selected by blocking one of four laser “strings,” and the pitch is controlled by the position of the musician’s hand on the fretboard. The musician has the option of selecting a sine, triangle or square wave. The sine and triangle waves can be skewed using a separate Skew control.

It also has two other controllable oscillators, one acting as an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) and the other acting as a Sync generator.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *