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.