I remember when i first saw and heard a Formant at a concert of a local rockband in the late 70ies. Nobody owned a synth back then.... It just blew me away. Now i am 63 and i still remember that moment. What an impression this thing left on me....
i remember a friend of mine owning one back then, and he got a call from phil collins, because he owned the other one and he needed a second one for hos europe tour 😅
Besides the other trolls nonsense, I have built mine around 1983. German Elektor Abonnement. That's what we do, or?:) Oh "trolls"? These clowns do not know that Phil Collins is a drummer. And in now way some kind of roady, that organizes equipment for his keyboarder.
Yeah that drives me crazy. I own the only other hand-wired analog telephone left in the UK and a malfunctioning Phil Collins calls me on it sometimes. Usually I can't tell what he's saying because of all the gated reverb, but you can tell it's him. I have to WhatsApp Mike Rutherford and tell him the Phil Collins is broken again, and I guess they switch over the spare. Sadly it looks like they're down to the last working Phil Collins now. When you look at how poorly built they are, we're lucky there's any left around at all. I'm glad that someone's been maintaining the last working Phil Collins and using it make music. It would be said if Phil Collins was just left to rust in the corner of some museum and no one ever took it out and played with it.
@@johnbehan1526 that sounds so typical. we never preserve our real history. we just let our phil collins' rot. really explains the youth of today. thank you for sharing!
I don’t think you know just how clever you actually are, Sir. Which is often the case. As an ‘old dog’ technical engineer myself, you give me hope for the future of ‘us’ and young people.👍🙂
I say the same too. 61yr engineer now retired, grew up with Elektor and all those old school electronics mags. Could listen to this all day taking me back to the 70's & 80's. Ty for rescuing all those bits and making them live again; the world before computers made things boring LOL. Well done :o)
Hello, Thank you for your video which encourages me to restore my “Formant” after almost 50 years ! It's a shame that I don't understand much English and you speak very quickly ! I'm French and I translated this answer using Google.... Hello, from France!
Well done Sam, another incredible piece of work. You're a hero. Thank you for sharing it with us. Your fight with the keyboard contacts reminded me, some 50 years ago I glued 49 of them onto part of a salvaged wooden piano keyboard for my first diy synth. Memories of tweaking the gold plated wires to get the action right.....
Sam, Just wanted to thank you. You bring joy to the Internet. I know I am not alone in feeling this way. Thank you for your indomitable spirit and exuberance in creating electronic splendor!
Worth headphones 🎧or nice speakers to hear the full chonk. The separate filters for each voice makes it sound so much bigger, like fancy complex chorus. The LFOs movement helps keep the chonk light on its chonky feet too
Jeesh thats a beast of a machine. I was just starting to nod off (sorry), then you started using it! Wowza, amazing! Brings me right back to the seventies/eighties when I used to get Elektor and send off to Maplin for a list of parts (took ten days usually), then copper etched boards and soldered away to my hearts content! Your enthusiasm, relentless optomism and skill is an example to us all! Thank you thank you thank you!
Love the sound of this synth. It's bugging the hell out of me what synth it sounds like though - it reminds me of the score on the film "Dark Star" but I can't for the life of me remember which synth was used.
quick look and listen to the theme tune. my bet is a moog modular or an arp 2600 as a broad guess from what was popular with american composers of the time. but who knows! i wasn't aware of the film, but it came out 4 years before the release of the formant so just a guess!
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER I have an ARP 2600 and I don't think it's that (though it might be as it is close) but then they probably set it up better than I ever could. I think it may just be my memory dicking around with me as you're likely right, as it is most likely a Moog or an ARP, though I wonder if it's the big old Moog modular I'm thinking of?
I have to comment here that this is (for someone who has been into sysnths since the late eighties) absolutely mindblowing. To think this stuff came from a magazine, and my god, the depth to the sounds once you hardwired the modules in. Amazing! Thankyou!
Actually, now that I've thought about it: It would have been cool to add another keyboard and treat each voice like a division of an organ. The left side with three oscillators could have been like the Great, or main division and the right side with only one oscillator could've been like the Swell. That way, you could play two different musical lines coming through with different timbres from each "division". But it sounds awesome the way it is now, kind of like a CS80! I use Surge XT, a plugin that works exactly this way with Scene A and B.
you can have polyphonic synths but sometimes monophonic is superior. This is a mono synth. It was designed as one and it has certain advantages. No point making a Frankenstein. That's what you build new synths for
I applaud the incredible amount of effort you put into this project. Truly a labour of love. Well done 👍 Sounds amazing too! God bless Elektor Magazine. 💜 Oh, how I miss doing hobby electronics in the 70's & 80s, when the logic signal switching speeds were slow, the components were still big enough to see with the naked eye, and before all circuits included a computer. 😆
Awesome. Built a PAIA system in the late 60's, landfill now😢 Moved on to an Apple II system, still somewhere, must dig it out. Feel your pain on the wonky kybd switches, same issue on my Taurus peddles, swapped those for relays,all good now. Enjoy your content.
For DIY junk it's damn good....when you turned the bass up I immediately went ...Ooooh.....when you went stereo I almost melted....now currently studying the files, doubt I'll be able to build it but I can dream
I'm glad you got around to building this as it was intended - and that it turns out to sound pretty good indeed. Tripling the voices will be delightfully monstrous, if all goes well.
I built and played both the Maplin 3800 and Transcendent 2000 synths way back in the 70s. The 3800 was a beast of a multiple circuit board design, while the 2000 was a single motherboard job. Both were amazing, although they had a tendency to drift out of tune. Had the same problem as you - had to leave the keyboard unscrewed, because a bit of over enthusiastic playing could leave one of the contacts 'stuck' and I had to get back inside to free it up. My university room was a chaotic jumble of parts, boards, integrated circuits and bits and pieces. My playing? I was useless. But the sounds were great!
Excellent work Sam. That synth sounds great. I was a subscriber to Elektor when this was featured, and I thought about building it, but then realised that I would never have had the skill to play it.
Freakin' brilliant Sam! One of the more rewarding videos involving modular that I have ever seen! I can't even imagine how long this took - you make it look so easy..
I've been watching your videos for ages and I always found the patching stuff like advanced algebra, but as the recent reowner of a minibrute 2s it's really not that much of a pain and kinda fun. And it overcomes the midi limitations of my model d nicely too. Really it's just methodically patching things from one thing into another until you like the sound.. Even if you're a complete idiot like me you kinda learn what might make for promising sounds.. It's all the extra cables that activate my OCD that are the major problem. Beautiful sounding machine
8:25 - "they have power on different pins"... me: what? :D ))) it's ingenious! :)) If something will fail, the company's manager will tell you: please, check that wiring on every module is proper. Sam, maybe it could be better to connect the other parts of the connectors (female?) first and drilling them to the rails after that? This is a way to minimize the tension. Also you could use some rubber spacers behind bolts when connecting them to the rails. Thus it can eliminate the problem with different lengths. Other than that you're doing a great work!
Thanks very much for posting, Sam. Tonnes of information I could use on my own DIY modular! Sam, could you, at some point, do a deep dive into the Yamaha A3000 sampler? If you’ve come across one at any time in the past, that is! A million thanks again!
You really give me a lot of inspiration to try new things. I think you're quite clever, but when you're fiddling about, I can see, "oh, there's a logic and a (semi-)consistency to these things. I could do that if I took a little bit of time to figure it out." Your DIY ethic has already translated into some successful minor projects around the house, as I think about it.
All those telephone/uniselector projects have clearly been great back-wiring practice :) nice lace-up job too. That's a pretty nice bi-timbral three-oscillator setup. I like the resonators especially, they're a lot like the ones in the recent Korg reissue. But presumably you could buy an RFM module separately to connect to any other synth setup as well!
Fantastic sounding synth ,well done for getting it to work,pity no one does a kit of this ,i had a Kimber Allen keyboard which was just as bad as those springy things are awful ,
![DDG & G Herbo - Nosey [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/I9Ra0Zc2NlQ/mqdefault.jpg)
NAME A DIY SYNTH
Elfor 🤓
Magnuminous
The Thrillmarillion.
Crowminius.
Got the bare board working, still working on a case.
The voltage voyager.
I remember when i first saw and heard a Formant at a concert of a local rockband in the late 70ies. Nobody owned a synth back then.... It just blew me away. Now i am 63 and i still remember that moment. What an impression this thing left on me....
i remember a friend of mine owning one back then, and he got a call from phil collins, because he owned the other one and he needed a second one for hos europe tour 😅
i had a buddy growing up. he owned the only other phil collins at the time. he was always getting calls when the original was acting up. wild, man.
Besides the other trolls nonsense, I have built mine around 1983. German Elektor Abonnement. That's what we do, or?:)
Oh "trolls"? These clowns do not know that Phil Collins is a drummer. And in now way some kind of roady, that organizes equipment for his keyboarder.
Yeah that drives me crazy. I own the only other hand-wired analog telephone left in the UK and a malfunctioning Phil Collins calls me on it sometimes. Usually I can't tell what he's saying because of all the gated reverb, but you can tell it's him.
I have to WhatsApp Mike Rutherford and tell him the Phil Collins is broken again, and I guess they switch over the spare.
Sadly it looks like they're down to the last working Phil Collins now. When you look at how poorly built they are, we're lucky there's any left around at all. I'm glad that someone's been maintaining the last working Phil Collins and using it make music. It would be said if Phil Collins was just left to rust in the corner of some museum and no one ever took it out and played with it.
@@johnbehan1526 that sounds so typical. we never preserve our real history. we just let our phil collins' rot. really explains the youth of today. thank you for sharing!
I don’t think you know just how clever you actually are, Sir. Which is often the case. As an ‘old dog’ technical engineer myself, you give me hope for the future of ‘us’ and young people.👍🙂
I'm too dumb to know when not to try something that's all I know :Dhaha
I say the same too. 61yr engineer now retired, grew up with Elektor and all those old school electronics mags. Could listen to this all day taking me back to the 70's & 80's. Ty for rescuing all those bits and making them live again; the world before computers made things boring LOL. Well done :o)
OMG. My dad built that one, and I still have it. Not sure it runs still, but it was great learning about formant synthesis.
Fix it!
love that you never shy away from a huge challenge, i havent had that drive since when i was a teen!
Love to see someone giving the Formant some appreciation. Surprisingly little Formant on the web.
Now I really need to go ahead and restore my own.
Hello,
Thank you for your video which encourages me to restore my “Formant” after almost 50 years ! It's a shame that I don't understand much English and you speak very quickly ! I'm French and I translated this answer using Google....
Hello, from France!
Or sell it me.
"the wobbles, the wiggles, the wooblies"
LMNC - 2024
haha!
_All perfectly technical terms_
Well done Sam, another incredible piece of work. You're a hero. Thank you for sharing it with us. Your fight with the keyboard contacts reminded me, some 50 years ago I glued 49 of them onto part of a salvaged wooden piano keyboard for my first diy synth. Memories of tweaking the gold plated wires to get the action right.....
Sam,
Just wanted to thank you. You bring joy to the Internet. I know I am not alone in feeling this way. Thank you for your indomitable spirit and exuberance in creating electronic splendor!
Worth headphones 🎧or nice speakers to hear the full chonk.
The separate filters for each voice makes it sound so much bigger, like fancy complex chorus.
The LFOs movement helps keep the chonk light on its chonky feet too
Oh man that looks and sounds SO frickin FUN!!!
It was really satisfying watching that pile of parts turn into a nice synth, and it sounds great too!
That sounds freaking incredible
Jeesh thats a beast of a machine. I was just starting to nod off (sorry), then you started using it! Wowza, amazing! Brings me right back to the seventies/eighties when I used to get Elektor and send off to Maplin for a list of parts (took ten days usually), then copper etched boards and soldered away to my hearts content! Your enthusiasm, relentless optomism and skill is an example to us all! Thank you thank you thank you!
that LFO wobble is just sublime
That moment at 27:18 when you can see the song idea forming in your head is awesome :D It sounds so good!
What a beautifully awesome analogue tone this has! Especially the dual/stereo version. This channel is the pinnacle of punk nerdery :)
you brought me into getting a synth and im super love it, your vids are amazing, ty so much for all you do!
Love the sound of this synth. It's bugging the hell out of me what synth it sounds like though - it reminds me of the score on the film "Dark Star" but I can't for the life of me remember which synth was used.
quick look and listen to the theme tune. my bet is a moog modular or an arp 2600 as a broad guess from what was popular with american composers of the time. but who knows! i wasn't aware of the film, but it came out 4 years before the release of the formant so just a guess!
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER I have an ARP 2600 and I don't think it's that (though it might be as it is close) but then they probably set it up better than I ever could.
I think it may just be my memory dicking around with me as you're likely right, as it is most likely a Moog or an ARP, though I wonder if it's the big old Moog modular I'm thinking of?
EMS VCS3? I remember reading years ago that it was used by Carpenter for parts of that... he might've got a sequencer from arp or sequential?
It sounds AWESOME through headphones.
What an odyssey - and what a joyous result! Kudos and congrats!
I have to comment here that this is (for someone who has been into sysnths since the late eighties) absolutely mindblowing. To think this stuff came from a magazine, and my god, the depth to the sounds once you hardwired the modules in. Amazing! Thankyou!
That's one of the best sounding synths I've ever heard (in my humble opinion).
Christ I want one
Bloody amazing. You're a legend.
Cant beat your workflow man. Epitome of synthesizer scrapheap challenge. Shouldnt work? Will make it work. Pure wizard
Well some of electronic musics best bands built their own diy synths.
Thing sounds good. Good job
The colour of t he case blends well with the Joan's organ (brown wood☺)
Interesting video 2x👍👍
You are always so inspirational
That thing really does have some great sounds, such a cool video!
Try building a wedge base for the module so that it faces upwards towards the player while playing it standing up. Sounds great!
cheers! i like them being straight, think synths look nicer parallel but purely to aesthetic preference
Nicely done sir, Good on Ya ! 😁
Goddamn that's nice. The EUROSTILE extended typeface really seals the deal. Excellent werk.
Actually, now that I've thought about it: It would have been cool to add another keyboard and treat each voice like a division of an organ. The left side with three oscillators could have been like the Great, or main division and the right side with only one oscillator could've been like the Swell. That way, you could play two different musical lines coming through with different timbres from each "division". But it sounds awesome the way it is now, kind of like a CS80! I use Surge XT, a plugin that works exactly this way with Scene A and B.
you can have polyphonic synths but sometimes monophonic is superior. This is a mono synth. It was designed as one and it has certain advantages. No point making a Frankenstein. That's what you build new synths for
There is a switch at the back however so using 2 keyboards they control each side seperately I guess that's what you wanted
Curlywurly brown wood stain. Niiiiiiccccceeeeee.
Wood, saws and glue. The most mental synth video ❤
Very nice Sam, I could have easily watched for another half hour.
I applaud the incredible amount of effort you put into this project. Truly a labour of love. Well done 👍
Sounds amazing too! God bless Elektor Magazine. 💜
Oh, how I miss doing hobby electronics in the 70's & 80s, when the logic signal switching speeds were slow, the components were still big enough to see with the naked eye, and before all circuits included a computer. 😆
So incredible watching this come together! And what an amazing, phat sound!! i love a semi-modular; best of both worlds!!!
This video is sooo coool! got super interested in this kind of stuff but man, your work is awesome!! keep it up mate!!
great fat sounds. That thing sounds huge! Great vid!
This makes for a good ad for Eurorack!
Reminds me of when Markus Fuller set out to fix a Maplin synthesizer, built from a kit I guess.
sounded good on my big mono speaker in my shed
Great work Sam, that is already sounding awesome even with a few non working bits! Thanks for sharing 🙂😎🤓❤
I'm always amazed how much work goes into every video. Very cool synth!
This thing is crazy! Love it, can't wait to see some more vids. I wanna see Alex Ball do a vid on this company/synth now and mess w/it!
Awesome. Built a PAIA system in the late 60's, landfill now😢
Moved on to an Apple II system, still somewhere, must dig it out. Feel your pain on the wonky kybd switches, same issue on my Taurus peddles, swapped those for relays,all good now.
Enjoy your content.
Somewhere i have a box of electronic bits for this and a few others,must find them someone would like them i am sure,nice vid thank you
Man, quite the undertaking!! Looks like a major pain in the ass!! Sure came out looking nice anyway 👌
Oh yeah, and this video reminds me- I let my daughter borrow my wax thread for bracelets and it vanished.
That is a beautiful sounding synth! Might be my favourite that you've shown
I love the awesome job you did on the knobs.
Superb job. Looks and sounds beautiful. Really great video. Wax lacing reminds me of when I used to wire up telephone exchanges 😅
Talented master artisan tinkerer you are.. Awesome.. 🤙
Outstanding, you fine bloke. Super well done.
Ooh, I like the sounds of this synth very much indeed!
For DIY junk it's damn good....when you turned the bass up I immediately went ...Ooooh.....when you went stereo I almost melted....now currently studying the files, doubt I'll be able to build it but I can dream
16:53 Am i the only one that heard that and in my head went straight into Get Ready For This by 2 Unlimited?
Or maybe the original Playstation boot sequence?
I'm glad you got around to building this as it was intended - and that it turns out to sound pretty good indeed. Tripling the voices will be delightfully monstrous, if all goes well.
I built and played both the Maplin 3800 and Transcendent 2000 synths way back in the 70s. The 3800 was a beast of a multiple circuit board design, while the 2000 was a single motherboard job. Both were amazing, although they had a tendency to drift out of tune. Had the same problem as you - had to leave the keyboard unscrewed, because a bit of over enthusiastic playing could leave one of the contacts 'stuck' and I had to get back inside to free it up. My university room was a chaotic jumble of parts, boards, integrated circuits and bits and pieces. My playing? I was useless. But the sounds were great!
- 5 volts! My father has built one 40 years ago. It even had 16 step sequencer. Good times!
Love the sound... made me search my old records.
Sounds so good!
Love the off-white/pale-grey knobs, my Super 6 has those too 👍
Around 5:40 using the saw handle as a square - not seen that before, very good.
Sounds absolutely amazing!
This was my first synthesizer! I built it myself and still have it today.
Excellent work Sam. That synth sounds great. I was a subscriber to Elektor when this was featured, and I thought about building it, but then realised that I would never have had the skill to play it.
Wow @ 26:34!!! That piece made me feel things... 🫨
Freakin' brilliant Sam!
One of the more rewarding videos involving modular that I have ever seen!
I can't even imagine how long this took - you make it look so easy..
One very boring week! Bloody felt like it never ended 😂haha
Have all your albums in my Apple playlist... AWESOME!!!!
Put oscilloscope in xy mode to visualise effects :)
You are a SYNTH GENIUS!
wow.... I want to make one now.... that is an awesome sound!!!!
Love it over to Patreon
Elektor is gonna have some new sales!! Hope he can keep up!!!
Nice one with the wax lacing my dude, a brilliant look for this machine. I love that you take the time for that kind of stuff.
I've been watching your videos for ages and I always found the patching stuff like advanced algebra, but as the recent reowner of a minibrute 2s it's really not that much of a pain and kinda fun. And it overcomes the midi limitations of my model d nicely too. Really it's just methodically patching things from one thing into another until you like the sound.. Even if you're a complete idiot like me you kinda learn what might make for promising sounds.. It's all the extra cables that activate my OCD that are the major problem. Beautiful sounding machine
Ear candy. Pure and simple. Extraordinary.
Fair Play✌️❤️
this synth absolutely bangs!
8:25 - "they have power on different pins"... me: what? :D ))) it's ingenious! :)) If something will fail, the company's manager will tell you: please, check that wiring on every module is proper.
Sam, maybe it could be better to connect the other parts of the connectors (female?) first and drilling them to the rails after that? This is a way to minimize the tension. Also you could use some rubber spacers behind bolts when connecting them to the rails. Thus it can eliminate the problem with different lengths.
Other than that you're doing a great work!
That sound is beautiful. Where's Vince?
Thanks very much for posting, Sam. Tonnes of information I could use on my own DIY modular! Sam, could you, at some point, do a deep dive into the Yamaha A3000 sampler? If you’ve come across one at any time in the past, that is!
A million thanks again!
That is a brilliant sounding synth.
You really give me a lot of inspiration to try new things. I think you're quite clever, but when you're fiddling about, I can see, "oh, there's a logic and a (semi-)consistency to these things. I could do that if I took a little bit of time to figure it out." Your DIY ethic has already translated into some successful minor projects around the house, as I think about it.
Genius 🥳👍🦋
I love your joy in synths . Cool going with build man! I sub'd
You Are Awesome.
Man, 26:00 on made me envious of what you have there. Sounds amazing!!
Sounds PHAT as... to me, great job Sam! I think you were channeling Keith Emerson at some points. 🎶💯😜
Sounds like a right joy!
All those telephone/uniselector projects have clearly been great back-wiring practice :) nice lace-up job too.
That's a pretty nice bi-timbral three-oscillator setup. I like the resonators especially, they're a lot like the ones in the recent Korg reissue. But presumably you could buy an RFM module separately to connect to any other synth setup as well!
That's nice! (well, except for the keyboard springs)... and 6 LFOs is nearly enough LFOs. ;)
Genius 🎉
A damn awesome rig! I love your work.
fantastic
Don’t forget to return the knob spray paint to Mr. Doepfer.
Those wet slappy reverbed synths reminds me of the audio hallucinations I had on SAN pedro. Good times. Good job Sam!
Fantastic sounding synth ,well done for getting it to work,pity no one does a kit of this ,i had a Kimber Allen keyboard which was just as bad as those springy things are awful ,