Chaos NAND

While waiting for my power supply to be fixed, I was looking for some more cheap kits to hone my soldering skills. I discovered the Synthrotek Chaos NAND synth and thought it looked interesting, so I built one.

It’s basically 3 square wave oscillators, derived from a quad NAND gate IC, which modulate each other to make crazy chiptune-esque noises.

I now had half of my first row finished, but still no power to test anything out.

The Chaos NAND actually turned out to be my first major troubleshooting experience. It didn’t work properly and after weeks of debugging, I eventually narrowed the problem down to a faulty vactrol, which, when replaced, sorted it all out.

Edit: I have since found that the owner of Synthrotek is not someone I wish to have any further dealings with (I won’t go into why here, you can Google it!). I considered removing the Chaos NAND, but instead decided to “rebrand” it.