Who doesn’t love a good resonant low pass VCF? It’s arguably the beating heart of any subtractive synth – adding character, dynamics, and a good deal of retro-futuristic oddness to your patches. That’s why a diode ladder VCF that sticks to super basic and widely available components was created. On top of that, the architecture is as approachable as possible by avoiding the tricky diff-pair setup classic ladder filters rely on. Erica Synths and Moritz Klein have developed a series of educational DIY kits under the brand name mki x es.EDU with one specific goal in mind: to teach people with little-to-no prior experience how to design analog synthesizer circuits from scratch. What you’ll find in the box is not simply meant to be soldered together and then disappear in your rack. Instead, we want to take you through the circuit design process step by step, explaining every choice we’ve made and how it impacts the finished module. In total, they have developed 9 kits to build a fully-featured modular monosynth: a sequencer, a VCO, a wavefolder, a noise/S&H module, a mixer, a VCF, an Envelope generator, a dual VCA, and an output stereo mixer with a headphone amplifier. Additionally, an affordable eurorack case with a DIY PSU will also be available. While these kits are easy to build, we did not compromise on design and functionality. We will launch one kit every 4-6 weeks. For each kit, there is an extensive user manual (40+ pages; can be downloaded separately) that will dive deep into not only the electronics behind each circuit but also the fundamental principles of sound synthesis. We hope that the mki x es.EDU project will inspire future engineers and will contribute to the ever-growing diversity of electronic music technology. NB! All kits in these series are simple and come with extensive user manuals which can be downloaded separately, therefore we will not provide customer support in case your DIY build fails to function or similar.
