Erica Synths DIY Prototyping Breadboard (opens in new tab)

This is a nice idea from that discussion, using machined header pins.

https://makezine.com/article/technology/if-breadboards-break...

I'm totally fine with that kind of question being closed because of that -- that's not what that site is for. It's supposed to be an answer mill... that's _exactly_ what the site is for.

Personally I’d slightly increase the pitch size and have a field of miniaturised Wago push connectors

High current, satisfying insertion, no chance of intermittent contact

That looks more like it's trying to do some sort of fancy software-controlled "breadboard" with internal routing. Neat concept, but it's going to be fairly expensive and fragile. I'm also concerned by the lack of discussion of parasitics.

That looks interesting, but what kind of bandwidth can you get out of this?

Point taken, but you can put together 2 ae vcas, a vco, power supply and headphone amp plus this module for less than 2/3 the cost of this thing. And they're optional. It's still much too expensive imho.

It's more of a West Coast synth so it doesn't sound much like a Moog; I like that it has a "modern" approach (not just a clone of old West Coast synths like Buchla/Serge). I also like that it's really packed with features: two oscillators, two cycling slopes/envelopes, two low pass gates, a bucket brigade delay, a modulation source with noise, three mixers... all in a compact case and for a very reasonable price. It does have some shortcomings though (see below).

The waveshaper sounds good but it's a bit limited (it just continuously shapes from one waveform to another, but it's not a proper wavefolder, i.e. it does not "fold" the wave creating those crazy harmonics). However you can overcome this limitation because you can always use the analog FM for adding more harmonics, this is linear FM, not exponential, so it's easy to keep it in tune and as a result it's very flexible, it sounds great (don't expect the sound of digital FM like a DX7 though, this is the typical 60s/70s analog FM sound).

The envelope is quite bad and it's the main shortcoming of this synth. Of course being a West Coast synth I didn't expect full ADSR, but my issue is that it doesn't have a way to switch from ASR to AD mode, in other words you you can't turn off sustain so the only way to make plucky sounds is to use short gates; this is a big limitation (some hardware doesn't have a way to force the gate length) and I dislike that very much. On the other hand, one thing I like about the envelopes is that they can be switched to cycling so they can be used as LFOs which is in line with the fact that this is a West Coast-inspired synth.

The low pass gates are amazing, definitely my favourite part of the synth, they can be used as VCAs or as proper low pass gates, but also they have resonance unlike the classic ones from Buchla/Serge. I love how flexible they are and how much sonic palette they offer.

TL;DR it's a really good synth except for the envelopes, would be a great pairing together with a good West Coast slope/envelope module like Make Noise Maths or Befaco Rampage.

PS sorry for the wall of text.