'Lil Boxes Part 04

Here's a real treat, a trio of handmade marvels put together for us by our mate (and component/solder and all round audio genius) Andy Lemon. As well as making these little beauties together for us we also persuaded him to scribble down a few words about each , so over to you Andy...

Tupperware Party Synth

"This ones my own oddball combination of a few different experiments generating audio via monostable osc's using feedback, osc drain and stable oscillation to generate more interesting tones out of a very simple circuit. nice thing about this design is you could chain lots of these together to make monstrous drones :) plus it's insanely cheap to build! I've popped the guts of this one into a tupperware box bought in a multipack in poundland - who needs project boxes when you can get 3 for a pound."

Highly Flammable Filter

"This is loosely based on a Forrest M Mimms circuit from his lovely book "Op Amps IC Circuits" - the filter itself is a 'sallen key' lowpass filter. It has a lovely warm analog sound to it, with proper cutoff and resonance control based as it is off the 741 amp. the design allows you to plug in any sound source and give it a little filtering joy - instant grit and fatness. It's built into a ex rental video cassette case I had laying around for one of the old tapes that got eaten by my trusty VCR (great for building these things in). I'm currently working on a filter +overdrive combo unit based on this same design soon with clipping control..."

Punktastic Synth

"the punktastic synth is a bit of a hacky job of Forrest M Mims 'stepped tone generator' circuit ( which got renamed to the Atari Punk Console on the Internet as these things do).

My mods are really simple and involve just messing with the default capacitor types and values to produce a more interesting and warm sound. I used very high value pots to give to give a little more control to the user when making the beep beeps and trying to eliminate the total randomness of the sound generation. I built it into a little mint tin I had laying around - you have o remember to shield the innards of any metal box you use or otherwise you'll have all sorts of wonderful electronic grounding issues..."

Are we chuffed, oh yeah.......;)

Lil' boxes part 03

Carrying on the 'white box' theme, here is a Monotoniclabs N37 seq/synth that combines a simple 4 step sequencer with a voltage controlled oscillator for your noise making pleasure. With the clock rate low you get some fab 4 note sequences, turn it up fast and you get into computer game FX-type territory.

Check the guys website here.

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From crisp while lines to our favourite yellow box of peril - the Bug Brand ICONweevil. A few years old now I'll leave it to the man behind it's truly chaotic audio madness to explain what goes on under its hood (as taken from the Bug Brand website).

"The sonic-heart of the Weevil is a bank of simple squarewave oscillators that are ring-modulated together to give a large range of sounds from drone to crackle. A range of circuit-bend techniques are then added - power starvation to make the oscillator section spin into chaos modes and body contacts which allow the player to touch parts of the circuit and directly alter the electronic flow."

A much more eloquent way of saying lick your fingers, touch the metal front plate and make it go bllleeepzzzywahhhhhwhhoooosshhhhhzzzzttt!

Lil' boxes part 02

This cheeky little devil is a Bleep Labs Thingamagoop. A rather fab sound/FX generator, the Thingamagoop contains an oscillator that is controlled by a light sensing photocell (the little buddys 'nose').

As well as reacting to ambient light the 'goop' has it's own 'LEDicle' sticking out of the top of its bonce. This LED blinks at different speeds to make the little metal dude spew forth all sorts of bleeps, burps and odd noises. Of course there's a little more to how the 'goop works but we're not going to go into too much tech spec here (as long as it works were happy :).

Now discontinued (Bleep labs have moved onto the Mk 2 'Goop) there's plenty of videos knocking around internetwebby land, of these boxes doing their thang - there's a good one here.



Next up is our Chimera BC8 synth, a mini marvel in white plastic that we've already had a quick look at last year (check a video of it in action here).

We love the BC8, it's truly one of those bits of kit that you're never quite sure what it's going to come up with each time it gets switched on. A trait we bloody love in a bit of kit.

Check out Chimeras website here for more great stuff

Lil' Boxes Part 01

One of the projects we had to get done before MR Hoodee headed stateside was the sample set for Future Music issue 226 - out later this month. The theme was sounds from out collection of little boxes that make noises (bleeps, bloops, squeekz, phartz ect and hardly a recognisable note in sight ;) and as we had limited space within the issue to go over what small but perfectly formed delights we used (and abused), we thought this might be a good place to into a bit of detail.

We went for a mix of commercially available boxes (although some are quite limited run units) and some one-off hand made boxes made for us by some of the talented audio-alchemists we've been lucky enough to meet/bother/stalk.

Okay then first up we have........

Gakken SX-150

Little Japanese lo-fi mono synth that comes in a simple kit and screws together (it also ships with a fab looking Japanese synth mag). The SX-150 has a choice of eithe square or sine waveform which is triggered by running the pen along the ribbon strip. Although it's pretty limited, the Gakken can make some great noises and fx and there are plenty of hacks/mods for it online.

Back with a big apple.

Okay so we vanished off the face of the blog-a-sphere again, can't believe our last post was in January! Once again in our defence February and march have been extremely busy at GCHQ with a chunk of projects we had to get finished before MR Hoodee buggered off to New York for a week as a late birthday prezzie.

After much running around like headless chickens we managed to finish everything in time for MR Hoodee to catch his flight and have a great time in NYC - so pics below.

Feeling lucky punk

We like twitter here at GCHQ as we don't get out of the studio much and it's always nice to have a chat (in 140 characters or less) with like minded people about gear, music, tea, that sort of thing. Another great love around the studio (as a quick flick through this blog will confirm) is quirky, modded or handmade gear. So you can imagine we were rather chuffed when we were sent a couple of handmade audio toyz by Andy, one of our ridiculously talented Twitter friends.


This little 2 knob wonder is a basic noise synth built into a mint tin (fab touch) and appropriately named the 'Punkastic'. You want a rude synth noise-maker, this is your baby - it splutters, burps, pharts and bleeps like a good 'en.

Of course we couldn't resist having a quick play and sorting out a few samples for you guys so head on over to our soundcloud page where there's some wavs to mess with (first few are taken raw from the Punktastic, the second half are run through the Moogerfooger MuRF filter array).

Check 'em here and for fellow Twitter heads follow Andy here

New year kicking

Well 2010 and a new decade is upon us, all here at GCHQ hope you had a great Xmas holiday, apologies for the silence but ours started with our broadband connection being cut off (Xmas eve to be precise - great timing guys).

Anyway we're slowly getting things back to normal (still having a few email hiccups) and just in case you missed it here's a late Xmas prezzie - 100 or so kicks for you to download, chop up and make some fab rhythm with.

Check 'em here