Thorsten Klose's SID

There are times which you do a thing with no precise reason, but just to "do something"... this is what happened when i decided to build a synth based on the Commodore 64 sound chip, the SID!

Even in this case, like what happened with the MIDIBOX, i have to thank the genius of Thorsten Klose at www.ucapps.de...
Assembling this unit was easy thanks to some premade PCB boards i get form Claudio (pcb_cc@email.it), and in a short time i was able to listen to the sounds which make C64 a classic!! But Thorsten's SID is more than this! thanks to some additional functionality, you can use the three oscillators at once, in order to obtain really "fat" sounds!! then, add some Pulsar effects, filter... and you will obtain a synth which has a strong "personality". This unit's specs ends whit an arpeggiator, a sort of step sequencer and the possibilty to create similar to a wavetalbe, thanks to an internal micro-tracker.

In November 2004 the unit was boosted heavily. After founding another couple of SID 6581 and testing them by turning on an old C64 (what a nostalgic moment!) i build a second SID unit, and placed both my synth in an C64 (new model) case. The new born synth can work in stereo mode, in split, in layer... the two units can be controlled seprately and they can produce very interesting sounds. A necessary addition was the LCD display and the rotary encoder, to realise the simple control surface that permits the access to all the parameters.

This synth is a awesome, and it can compare to some thousand euro synth... just listen to the demo at www.ucapps.de !!!

Here you can listen to some examples recorded with this magic box. Other examples can be foudn on Torsten's site

Sid-Demo1 ("dry" sequence, only the SID is playing)
Sid-Demo2 (previous sequence processed with Pulsar effects)
Sid-Demo3 (lead solo fx)

Here there are two moments of SID testing... the power up of the C64 and the program which is necessary to generate a simple sound from the SID

For an in-depth study of this synth i decided to make a remake of a C=64 classic: the intro of Zak mc Kracken! you can download the song in my Music Page, while here you can download the patches (33Kb) created for this project, for the JSynth Free Editor

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