DB50XG Yamaha daughter board bought years ago was finally used to make a stand-alone midi synthesizer – as it was envisioned. Arduino platform had to come my way – to be able to do all the little programming to be able to set the the instruments manually with rotary encoder. It is now used extensivelly.

The board can play back very high quality samples from the extended midi (XG) set of instrument sounds. While for artistic approach I prefer the co-called “de-naturized” sounds, using the “natural” sounds in this way is very perverse – especially with interfaces that do not in any way resemble classical instruments.

The electronic schematics

top left is the generator of negative voltage needed by the DB50XG daughter board – so that we can power it with single supply (9-12 volts)
top right is LCD screen – connected to micro-controller via i2c bus
bottom middle it the atmega324 microcontroller that holds the program to communicate directly to LCD