How to Harmonize a Homemade Synthesizer

Learning to play and use a homemade synthesizer is a great addition to playing the keyboard and can be used in a variety of music genres. Knowing how to harmonize your homemade synthesizer is vital to using it and keeping it functioning.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Capacitors
• Alligator clips

1. Build your synthesizer using the instructions available in the eHow article, "How to Build a Synthesizer." Once you have completed this, it will be time to harmonize it. This process is similar to bringing songs together, much like with other instruments and even singing.

2. Hook capacitors onto Pins 1 and 3. Make sure to ground each one of them. Clip an alligator clip onto the right side of each capacitor and to the output areas on the speaker or synthesizer output you are using.

3. Place your fingertips over the top of the light sensors you installed while building the synthesizer to hear the different pitches. With the two of them connected, there is now more of a harmony coming together. The pitch can also vary depending on the amount of light coming into the light sensor.

4. Continue adding capacitors to different pins and creating circuits to form different pitches. The more circuits you create and the ways you loop them together, the bigger the difference on the pitches and sounds that come from the synthesizer.

Tips & Warnings

• Always ground the circuit you are using to avoid a short circuit in that specific and other circuits, which could cause the entire synthesizer to be incapacitated.