The bane of my existence so far has always been grounding. Why do my oscillators sound all throughout my circuits, even in places they do not belong? The click of LFOs and the drone of audio frequency oscillators permeates every aspect of my work, bleeding into amps, PSUs, noise generators. “Star grounding will fix all of your issues” they say on the forums – how am I supposed to star ground on stripboard? “Isolate your digital and analogue grounds” they say, “buffer your virtual ground”, but nothing seems to work. Frustration is the dominant emotion that I feel at the moment. My best efforts to solve these issues are met with failure, time and time again.

They do say that it takes many failures to achieve success, but my failures are things that others have failed at before, and (obviously, due to the ubiquity of analogue synths with significantly less bleed than my own) overcome – it is just that the secrets of their success elude me.

My noise oscillator works very well, except when plugged into the rest of my synthesiser. Both of them running at the same time, from the same 9v supply, results in total circuit failure of the synth. Writing this out, it now occurs to me that perhaps I am exceeding the current draw of my PSU, and I could test this with another 9v supply. Somehow, my gut tells me that something more complex is occuring, as a result of the exact design of my noise oscillator.

More experiments to be made.