After going down a few YouTube rabbit holes, I learned about a popular starter project for those interested in DIY synthesizers: The Atari Punk Console. Also known as the “Stepped Tone Generator”, the circuit is driven by two 555 ICs (or one 556 IC). It uses a handful of other components (potentiometers, capacitors, etc), and is super cheap to build.

There’s a ton of online tutorials for building an Atari Punk Console (APC), each with their own slight variations. I followed this post from Instructables, and it worked great!

As described at the bottom of the post, you can swap out the 8ohm speaker with an audio jack. I deviated from the schematic a bit here, and added a 500k potentiometer to act as a volume control.

Here’s a snippet of changes I made:

apc_jack

I also added an on/off switch and an LED to indicate power.

After testing things out on the breadboard, I found an glass jar with a plastic top to use as an enclosure. Instead of a PCB (which would have made things a lot easier), I used a prototype board and soldered everything together.

Here’s how it turned out:

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