Gallery: Building a Modular Synth With RJD2
01icebird
RJD2 likes to build sounds. The musician has been making tunes for more than a decade: First as a DJ, then as a hip-hop producer, then as a solo artist (the *[Mad Men](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men)* theme song is his "A Beautiful Mine"). Now, as part of the duo Icebird, he's taken his gearhead obsession — building his own [modular synthesizers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer) to make his music — further than ever. What else would you expect from a guy named after a *Star Wars* droid? __LISTEN: 'Charmed Life' by Icebird__\[dewplayer:http://media.audibletreats.com/Icebird-Charmed\_Life.mp3\] "To have a piece of plastic with a bunch of copper traces on it and then drill some holes in a piece of sheet metal and silkscreen it, then you wire this whole thing up and send some voltage through it — I know this might sound silly, but that's the most fascinating and addicting process you can possibly imagine," [RJD2](http://rjd2.net/) told Wired.com by phone, discussing his process. He had to do a lot of building and experimenting for Icebird, the group he formed with singer-songwriter Aaron Livingston (above left, with RJD2). For the duo's new album, *[The Abandoned Lullaby](http://itunes.apple.com/us/preorder/the-abandoned-lullaby/id465264931)*, out Tuesday, the musical modder estimates 90 percent of the sounds come from either vintage synthesizers he restored or instruments played through modular synth gadgets he built from DIY kits. It wasn't an easy process. Once RJD2 was done building his synth, he spent hours playing different instruments through the system and recording the sounds in [Pro Tools](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Tools). It's a constant trial-and-error process; RJD2 estimates he only ends up using 10 to 20 percent of what he records. "That's where the fun comes in, when you get to processing things that are acoustic and electromechanical instruments," RJD2 said. "Running drums, or guitar, or piano through these things. It's also fun when you're using a synthesizer to generate the sound *and* manipulate it." To learn more about how he made those sounds, Wired.com asked RJD2 for a photo tour of his process for building the modular synthesizers he uses in his Philadelphia home studio. You can see those pictures in the gallery above. To hear the final result, check out the song "Charmed Life" in the player above and then [download the track here](http://media.audibletreats.com/Icebird-Charmed_Life.mp3) (free MP3, right-click and “Save As”).
02circuit-board
Order Some Circuit Boards Online and Start Assembling Them ---------------------------------------------------------- RJD2 orders his wares from DIY modular synthesizer circuit board creators he finds on the internet, allowing him to build experimental contraptions that may create unheard-of sounds. "That's a half-built circuit board," he said of the image above. "It's just a circuit board as it comes out of the box. On the right side, those are resistors with the legs popping out of the bottom. In a \[module-building kit\] you'll get a board and bill of materials. And the bill of materials will tell you what value all of the parts need to be and where they go. Let's say one of these resistors is a 470-ohm resistor; it would say that on the bill of materials and then it would tell you where it needed to go. So you'd take that resistor, stick it in there and then the legs pop out the other side. I usually stuff in a bunch of them and then solder them. "On the left those are [trimpots](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimmer_(electronics)) (the "pot" is short for potentiometer). They're like the exact same thing as the volume knob on your stereo. It's a variable resistor. If you have a 10K trimpot, that means if you turn it all the way one way it'll provide 10 K-ohms of resistance; if you turn it all the way the other way, it'll provide zero. For functions where you have to get exactly the right amount of resistance — resistors come in fixed values — that's what you'd use. This board, I believe, went into a [phaser](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaser_(effect) ). You'd know the effect they made if you heard it. In '70s prog-rock music, they used it all the time. You can run anything through it. An original phaser was used with tape machines. It was the phasing of the polarity on two tape machines. If you think of intro to Led Zeppelin's "[Kashmir](http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/kashmir/id267651925?i=267652260)," that's what they use on the drums."
03sheet-metal-panels
Create Panels to Control What the Circuit Boards Do --------------------------------------------------- To control the circuit boards, RJD2 builds his own panels. "I just buy the sheet metal in panels -- blank ones with no holes," he said. "Then I use a drill press. I've been experimenting with different processes of how to label these things. The red one is actually red spray paint and then I did photovoltaic process that functions almost like a silkscreen. The other two are paper just printed out from a printer and then attached by using 3M adhesive spray on the metal. I'll do them in Photoshop. I just bought a proper silkscreening machine that I haven't learned how to use yet. That would be the proper way: silkscreening on the metal."
04add-some-knobs
Add Some Knobs to the New Panel ------------------------------- Once he's drilled the panels and added the labels, RJD2 adds the controls, which give him the ability to adjust things like sound waves. "That's an oscillator," he said. "See the Sine and the Tri(angle) outputs? Those are the [wave shapes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waveforms.svg). So that's the shape of the sound output. That switch in the middle, the VCO stands for 'voltage control oscillator.' When something oscillates it rotates, so it's rotating that waveform and if you rotate it very, very fast it turns into a pitch. Then the LFO stands for 'low frequency oscillator.' Basically anything under 10 hertz, it becomes inaudible, but it's useful as a control signal. Basically, when you flip that switch \[in the middle\], it's changing the range that the oscillator is running at. When it's on VCO, the bottom range of that \[setting\] would be, in theory, 10 hertz; the top range would be somewhere around 20 K-hertz. It's all audible levels. When you flip it down to LFO, it changes the range of that frequency to be somewhere between zero and 10 hertz. For the knobs, two of those knobs control the pitch, one of them would control the pulse wave, and there are two that would control the frequency modulations."
05music-from-outer-space
Name the Panel Something Fun, Like 'Music From Outer Space' ----------------------------------------------------------- Some of RJD2's panels have names and dates, like this MFOS Dual Attack Release EG panel, which is dated 2009. "EG stands for 'envelope generator,'" RJD2 said. "MFOS stands for 'music from outer space.' The circuit board comes from this company called [Music From Outer Space](http://www.musicfromouterspace.com/). They only sell circuit boards. You have to supply the rest of the \[components\]. "This doesn't generate sound. There are things called 'gates' or 'triggers' in synthesizers. If you open a gate, you open a line from zero volts to 5 volts. Imagine you've got a momentary push button and when you push that button down it's going to push that zero-volt line to 5 volts and when you release it it's going to go to back to zero. Now imagine you have a circuit that's designed to provide a delay in that, so when you push that button it doesn't shoot up to 5 volts, it crept up to 5 volts. That creep would be the attack. So if that attack knob is at 10, then that creep is going to take a very long time, two or three seconds. The release time is the opposite. You can use it to modify anything controlled by voltage, like the pitch of an oscillator. That's what this envelope generator does."
06cut-a-hole-in-a-box
Cut a Hole in a Box ------------------- Since, essentially, no two modular synthesizers are the same, RJD2 breaks out his carpentry skills to build boxes for his circuit boards and their control panels. "That was a whole other process," he said of this particular part of the project. "It was kind of a pain in the ass."
07mod-y-building
Do Some Mod-y Building and Get to Work -------------------------------------- Once everything in his modular synthesizer was put together, RJD2 was ready to work. He spends hours running different instruments through different connections and settings on his control panels (the combinations are called "patches") to see what sounds they make. He records them in Pro Tools; when he gets something he likes, he turns it into a sample that one day could find its way into a song. "By and large, it's not the kind of thing that you turn on when you want a particular sound," he said. "It's more the kind of thing you turn on when you say, 'What would happen if I did this to that?' It's a very exploratory discipline. It's not the kind of thing you do if you want to create a repeatable process. It's a totally randomized process. You do it, and if you come up with something you like, just record it in Pro Tools and save it for later. Then you just try to jam it in a song. Just try to make the thing work."
