Today I got to try PetSynth v0.006, by Chiron Bramberger. Chiron owns several Commodore Pet personal computers, and was dissapointed by the quality of the music-making software available for them, so he wrote his own. He has plans to release it to the Commodore community but currently it’s stored on a 5.25″ disk lodged in his dual disk drive.

In addition to producing lovely beeps, Chiron figured out how to drive distortion in the Commodore’s built-in music hardware, to produce vibrato, and to generate something very much like a drum tone. Hooked up to a pair of pot knobs for bending the signal, the system can produce some mean 8 bit grooves.

Chiron also builds guitar effects pedals from the recycled innards of modems, grafted into lovely hand-painted acrylic boxes with the shells of harddrives for backs, but that’s a seperate project.