The simplest possible circuit to generate a sound... (beginner)

[Sean Costello]

Scott Gravenhorst wrote:
> 
> I've built (long ago) very simple circuits with things like SCRs and
> UJTs.  One cool thing I did was amplify my electric guitar output
> and injected that into these oscillators and found that when connected
> just right, the oscillator would synch to the guitar signal.  A sort
> of stone age guitar synth <g>.

Speaking of, anyone have any good ideas of how to get a good "hard sync" sound out of a guitar? i.e.
the sound of an oscillator that is swept in frequency, hard synced to a master oscillator that stays
at one pitch. I suppose you could do it with a combination of a resonant filter, envelope following,
and distortion - I've obtained very hard-sync sounds out of a number of synths this way. Any
alternate ideas of how to implement this?

Thanks,

Sean Costello

P.S. I have also found pitch-synchronous granular synthesis, with the window size the same as the
period of the note, and the pitch of the windows being swept downwards from a high multiple of the
input frequency, also produces a "hard sync" type sound. However, I'm looking for something that
could be done with a reasonable amount of analog components, not on a DSP.