Wendy-1, my first synth project.

Project updates and ressources.

View project on GitHub

First post : Hello World!

Introducion

Hi! My name is Mehdi, I’m a 21-year-old currently studying Aerospace Engineering. My favorite musical genre is electronic music and so, I have been always amazed at sythesizers. Having had courses on basic signal analysis and electronics and pretty much no musical background I find that they are much simpler to understand than more classical instruments (at last, an instrument that works on the principle that music is “just” a bunch of waves at different frequencies!).

I am therefore starting this personal project to build a simple synth with only the necessary tools (a few VCOs/Waveform generators, VCAs, LFOs, VCFs, ADSR controller, fader, noise generator, mixer and delay - though if I only implement only half of that, I’d be already pretty happy!- perhaps MIDI controller too). The idea had been running in my mind for a few years now, and I think I now have enough understanding of electronics to undertake this project. This will be a long endeavour with lots of things that I’ll be able to learn I am sure.

Planning

I plan to make this a multi-faceted project, mostly focused on the electronics but also having parts of CAD and content creation around the developement.

First part will be searching on what I need/what would make for a good architecture. Once that’s done, schematics, PCBs and BOMs can be made and explained. In parallel an enclosure can be designed.

I expect this project to take about a year to complete, considering I will only be working on it from time to time and on my own funds.

Documentation

For initil documentation I am basing myself on the works of Moritz Klein and Dean Friedman. The former makes video tutorials on synth circuits and more details can be found on their Patreon page. The latter published the book Synthesizer Basics in 1985. The book is freely available on the Internet Archive.

Tools

” A good craftsman never blames his tools” but he may praise them :).

  • To get a good understanding of the architecture that I will be building, I will use VCV Rack. It allows to completely simulate a modular synthesizer (some people even use it to make music!). It is free and open-source software (which is always a plus to me). A paid version is available to get integration with DAW software and some more modules but this is way beyond the scope of this project.

  • For the electronics, KiCad is my weapon of choice. For free and open-source (again, cool!) industrial software it is incredibly powerful and completely suited for this project. I have already made some PCBs with it and I can’t recommend this tool enough for anyone wanting to get started in electronics.

  • The physical enclosure will surely be made using CATIAv5 or 3DX (Dassault Systèmes intensifies). I might tryout FreeCAD though.

Conclusion

That’s all for today! If you want to participate, feel free to fork the repo and/or raise an issue! You may also want to send me an email @mehdi-wendy1@proton.me.