Hi everyone! I'm Justin, and this is going to be my blog of adventures in bespoke electronic design not aimed at a market or an audience in particular, and as well documenting my efforts to extend, support, and springboard from old open-source projects. As it will be more technical while focussed on my own folk history of the synths (OK boomer, I hear you sigh), and less focussed on repair work for pawnshop finds, than my existing Electroacoustical Electromusical Excavations blog, I thought it should have its own life-even though the existing one probably has an audience of about two people. Ain't the Theory of Obscurity grand?
This blog stems from my recent revival of interest in what I had been doing before I decided to try making my own designs, namely a keen involvement with Mutable Instruments and its founder/all-round genius Emilie Gillet from 2010 until about 2014. Our story starts in 2010 when I was deep into Synth DIY....
In 2007 when I had revived a teenage dream of building a synth, Eurorack synths were very hard to find in Australia, and a DIY Elby/CGS Synthacon VCF had blown my mind in 2007 while I was supposed to be building an Elby ASM-2 all-in-one-synth (it still hasn't been finished!). Move on a couple of years and I had built a lot of stuff, but as was the wont of the time, everything was adamantly analogue, used old-fashioned through-hole parts, MIDI and computers were dirty words, and design techniques pretty much hadn't changed since the 1970s. The only digital wavetable VCO kit project that was available was the Pucktronix tabulaRasa, which was pretty cruddy (I'm being kind). At the time the MuffWiggler and electro-music forums were the only useful venues for information exchange, and one had to tread on eggshells somewhat around some of the dysfunctional "scene personalities".
One day in late 2010 I stumbled across a mention of a new synth called the Shruthi-1. It was a cute little perspex box with an LCD interface, full patch storage, a digital oscillator section and an analogue VCO and VCA, all for a few hundred bucks for the kit. I managed to order one before the current batch sold out, then waited....and waited...to see the package was returned from Australia to France before it even got near me. When it got back to Emilie, in her words the shipping box "looked like someone had karate-chopped it". She straight away offered to send another one, and as it had been due to forces outside anyone's control I agreed to split the postage costs with her.
In the meantime I had decided to build a Ken Stone Quadslope in Euro. The selection of modules in the format was starting to expand in 2010, especially since Manhattan Analog had started offering neat metalphoto panels to convert projects designed for other formats to Euro. They still required Sisyphean effort to hand-wire circuit boards to panel controls , which was a source of potential failure in the final modules to boot. Suffice it to say the Quadslope, with its single-sided PCB boards and ridiculous panel wiring, took me a month, much of which was trying to get it to finally work (It was amazing once finished tho!).
Two days after I finished the Quadslope, with attendant exhaustion, the Shruthi-1 finally arrived. Intact and undamaged, I might add. It was brilliantly documented, designed for simple, foolproof assembly, and I had it up and working in a day. It's not an exaggeration to say it was the boulder that dislodged an avalanche for me. Unlike the modular synth world, everything was open source as a point of pride and business ethos and fully documented. This was a far cry from the modular world's then-prevalent culture of middle-aged guys having meltdowns when others impinged their "intellectual property" which was often just a functional redesign or straight copy of 40 year old designs. I discovered Mutable had its own forums, full of happy, cheerful and enthusiastic people led by Mutable's acrylic case maker Frank Daniels. This community led me to the MIDIBox and SammichSID communities which had informed Emilie's approach.
Over the next year or so, I became heavily invested in building Mutable products. I bought the 4-pole Mission special edition (with a Matrix-12 pole-mixing filter) and the Yellow Magic edition (with an MS-20 VCF and a lo-fi delay chip) and even came up with the Yellow Magic's name. I built existing special edition Shruthis (the Polivox Red Alert and the Dual SVF edition), and when Emilie offered "pioneer runs" in 2012 to test out new all-in-one DIY synths Anushri (a fully analogue monosynth) and Ambika (a huge Shruthi-derived 6-voice polysynth with mix-and-match voice cards) I jumped at the chance. I was pretty keen to offer feedback, and ended up testing nightly beta firmware builds on Anushri's hardware.
As a result, in late 2012, Emilie, also knowing I was one of the few people in the Mutable forum with a Euro system, asked if I would test a new thing she was developing in secret called Braids... fast forward to 2013, I gave a presentation at a synth forum called Moduluxx about the revolutionary new range of Mutable Euro modules, and the time of Mutable's DIY designs started drawing to a close.
Turns out that during the development of Ambika, Emilie had a crisis of confidence, realising that the compromises to keep designs hobbyist-friendly were locking her into an obsolescent 8-bit AVR platform, and having to have 7 microprocessors to run a 6-voice synth seemed a bit over the top. If she wanted to have an environment with open-source development tools, it meant the ST microelectronics ARM platform, which was strictly machine-assembled surface mount, in line with modern manufacturing. The release of Elektron's Analog Four during Ambika's development also contributed to Emilie's concerns, although in hindsight it probably shouldn't have.
By 2014, Mutable's DIY designs were no longer being developed but they live on in their Github repository. I moved on to my own designs and trying to sell them with limited success, however recently I've decided to finish some items in my DIY backlog from that era and have realised just how fun and useful they were. The beauty of open source is that it lets people modernise designs to keep them viable, and that is what I hope to document in this little blog.
