The manner in which I am building circuits is slightly sideways: I don’t have a comprehensive electrical engineering background, and instead have been slowly filling that knowledge in through youtube, dusty archaeic 2000s forums (some more up-to-date forums too) and books (although not too many of those really. Haven’t got round to it much, although the ones I have read have bore a lot of fruit). This results, 99% of the time, in circuits that are poorly designed and lacking isolation from eachother. I.e, they operate in myserious ways. This results in two things, detailed over the next two paragraphs.
The first is that electronics and the process of making things work is mystical and magical to me. I find explanations of things online, circuit diagrams here and there, little tidbits of knowledge, but it never seems like a solid grasp of the concepts is really attainable because as soon as it feels like things are starting to be in any way predictable, I’ll wire something up and it will do something wildly left-field that I simply cannot account for. This initially seems like it would be a real turn-off for the budding synth builder, but instead it ignites this feeling inside of me that I’m tampering with some otherworldly forces, that I’m trying to turn lead into gold, that there are wizards out there who just ‘get’ these circuits and could point out the flaws in my designs in a heartbeat. Electronics seems only half grounded in logic and reason, and partly grounded in some alchemy-style half-science of bubbling potions and smoking, crackling resistors. Of course this is some playful pretend mindset that I sometimes adopt, and most of the time when something unexpected happens (especially when I am expecting something to happen and then nothing happens) it is unfathomably frustrating. But when things suddenly go my way after hours of trial and error and writing everything down, and the electrons all wiggle just correctly it feels as though some god has reached down and touched my forehead, that I have been chosen for just a couple of minutes to have this bundle of wires and components infront of me finally work in some capacity.
The second occurance, one more practically grounded and with far less conceptual, lofty daydreamings is that connecting circuits in such an amateurish manner results in strange cross-modulation. The lack of buffering, of proper power supply regulation and probably numerous other conventions of audio electronics to which I am blissfully ignorant results in certain parts of the circuit affecting others in unexpected manners. Think of the lowpass gate, which aims (in some use-cases) to mimic the natural decay of acoustically generated audio which decays in both volume and frequency response at the same time. Some of my circuits seem to do similar things; my VCA seems to not just alter the amplitude of the signal but also slightly nudges the waveform somewhat, and also the fequency (but only when a certain capacitor is connected, from BJT base to VCC-). This has its uses, in my opinion, becuase it pulls some of the decisions out of the hands of the user and forces some ‘life’ into the circuits. They seem to behave with a mind of their own, pulsating and organically altering other ‘modules’ within the synth as parameters are altered.