Building a dual Sympleseq
I’ve been building a couple of Sympleseq analogue sequencers from hexinverter and they’re coming on, most of the soldering is done.
Essentially, they’re basic analogue 8 step sequencers based on a 4017 decade counter, offering note on/off/reset per step. There’s an internal clock provided by a 40106 with quite a wider range, and there’s an option for externally clocking, although you’ll have to get quite close to the input voltage to clock it. I’ve not had any success yet in my brief attempt at trying to directly clock it from an MFB Dual LFO.
Here’s the rather lovely Eurorack-sized panel – hats off to Ben at resynthesis.co.uk, he’s done a great job, I’m really happy with this:
This is the logic board, attached by a header on the right hand side to the switch board, it’s a bit wobbly:
Here’s a (mildly chopped up) really quite horrible drum loop I sequenced from the Simpleseq, sound source being a homemade Polivoks filter and a Doepfer noise source mixed together, with a bit of spring reverb and occasional delay from an RE-201.
I was trying to be a bit Human League circa Reproduction, as ever.
Hats off to Mr Gaudreau for getting this out, they are good for the money. Having said that, I’m not keen on the switches, which are very easy to burn up when you’re soldering, although the build manual does give fair warning about this. Not that I read manuals *cough*. To Stacey’s credit he does recognise this and include a couple of extra switches in case you do fuck up. Which I did. But only twice.
Also I think as a function of trying to fit two sequencers into a small space, the switches are pretty small and… not really the best. They seem to be a bad combination of stiff and fragile – I managed to snap one in my fingers when trying to switch it down… it’s also hard to tell when they’re on, off or set to reset.
On the positive side, it’s really good that the sequencers work off a single sided power supply, so you can attach a 9v battery and start bleeping. It’s also not very deep, so it could be fitted in a slim desktop case, which is my current plan.
Because they’re based on 4017 decade counters, there are no extra features like reverse play, or pendulum or CV control over which step is played next. All the attempts I’ve seen so far at linking two 8 step Sympleseqs together to make a 16 step sequencer have been a bit tricky, the most reliable seeming to be switching on each trigger between the two sequencers, rather than switching at the end of 8 steps.
Thinking about it a bit more, it would be fairly easy to replace the two logic boards with an Arduino Nano, and use a pair of shift registers to drive the sixteen steps, with the remaining digital and analogue ins used for selecting playback modes. I say easy, it just takes time.
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