Doorbell Ringer Birdie Tone

This is an old or “very old” schematic diagram of birdie tone or sound generator. Then, the bird sound circuit used to be a home doorbell device.

P1 is of experimental value. Start with 220 Ohms or so and modify to suit your needs. The transistor is a general purpose kind and is not critical, almost any pnp type will work. L1 is a bell-transformer which is usually already present in the house. If you wish, you could use a battery instead of the bell transformer. Just hookup a 9-volt battery to points “A” and “B” (A=+) the diode (D1) is to protect the circuit from accidental polarity reversal and is optional, but required for use with the bell transformer.

T1 is a General Purpose PNP transistor and probably anything will work. L2 comes out of an old am transistor radio. They look like miniature transformers and are usually colored red or green. You have to fiddle with different transformers as the sound can vary depending on the value. The loudspeaker is a 8 Ohm type and must be larger than 200milli-Watt. I used a 2 Watt type, but anything over 0.2 Watt will do. It really sounds like a bird and when you release the doorbell button the sound slowly fades away. I have used this circuit in my house for over 20 years and even build the “Birdie” for others. Although
an old circuit, the experimentation and the final results still give a punch. Having fun..!