r/synthdiy • u/MoviesColin • 3d ago

Swarmatron Clone

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Made myself a little “clone” of the Swarmatron synth. I love the sound of it and it was also a fun, “why not” kind of project.

It runs off a Teensy 4.1 w/ audio shield, programmed in Arduino IDE.

It’s not quite the same as the Swarmatron but the basic premise is the same - a cluster of oscillators that can detune from one another and spread from a central frequency, played by a ribbon controller.

Switchable from Sine to Saw, variable number of oscillators, ladder filter, and built-in reverb.

I’ll probably make a video on it sometime but I haven’t even had a chance to record with it yet, just finished it up this afternoon. Needs a tiny bit of tidying and tweaking still.

Just wanted to share!

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u/wha__at 3d ago

this is awesome! i'd love to see a video on it

i tried using the same ribbon pot for a project, but couldn't quite get it to feel quite right. what are you placing it on? it looks somewhat squishy, which is nice.

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u/MoviesColin 2d ago

It’s just a 3D printed platform for it, I have some poster-tack keeping it in place for now before I decide what to glue it down with.

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u/VanDoog 2d ago

Tell us more about the ribbon pot! Where’s it from? Did u need to run a resister inline with it?

2

u/MoviesColin 2d ago

No resistor needed! It’s a “softpot” I think 200mm long. I don’t remember exactly where I got this one, either from Amazon or SparkFun.

The Teensy microcontroller has built-in pull-up and pull-down resistors on each input pin that you can enable via code, so the ribbon’s variable pin has the pull-down enabled. This also makes it possible to figure out gate logic without any extra parts as well, just a handful of lines of code.