A combination of stripboarding, breadboarding (both shown above) with a hearty dash of digital circuit simulation (shown below) has led me to arrive at a nearly complete design. This synthesiser is a direct descenant of my first prototype, with improvements and alterations that reflect my experience playing (and performing) with V1.

The main alterations are as follows:

• added noise generator
• added 3 attenuators
• entirely different oscillator design – this is an experiment, and I am not entirely sold on this being the best option, but these oscillators are now voltage controlled, which is a huge step forward.
• the LFO’s have been replaced with pulse/slope generators, with controls for rise/fall time rather than pitch.
• the VCA’s are replaced with lowpassgates, and these lowpassgates will have output sockets on the front panel rather than being hardpatched to the L/R buses.

Thre reasoning for these changes are as follows:

• There was very little room for subtlety in V1, as there was no way to attenuate signals, as well as the fact that it was mostly dealing with square waves at a low frequency level – on or off, 100% or 0%.
• No filters (in V1) had an interesting effect on the playing habits, but I did have some desire for filtering, to experiment with it from a soldering/electronics angle but also from a performance/playing angle. Hence the lowpass gates