Ray Wilson - Make: Analog Synthesizers

When my father, who was a remarkable mechanical engineer, used his influence to get me a job at the U.S. Steel Wheel & Axle Works in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, as a laborer in the labor gang, I couldnt have guessed what was in store. To this day it surprises me that the mill would eventually be my ticket to receiving electronics training and in time (OK a lot of time) lead to me starting my own small electronics business, Music From Outer Space LLC , which I run to this day.

After a year or so of shoveling, sweeping, and jackhammeringand way more than likely at the behest of my fatherI got into an electronic repairman apprenticeship program. This meant that I was freed from the labor gang! Not that jackhammering scale (the drossy crust that falls from steel billets as they are being heat-treated) out of furnaces that had been heat-treating train wheels the day before wasnt fun, but the apprenticeship was a godsend (well actually a dadsend ). The apprenticeship meant that I got to go to the Homestead Works in Homestead, Pennsylvania (where they used to produce those giant buckets full of molten steel) and get paid more than I did as a laborer to learn electronics!

I had found my passion. I supplemented my classroom training with breadboard experimentation, a Heathkit microprocessor trainer kit, and reading, reading, and then more reading. I did the practice math problems and experiments in the books, and Id encourage you to do the same if youre just getting started. Through it all I learned enough to spend the next 15 years in the medical electronics industry, finally landing in the biomedical engineering department of Siemens Pacesetter. Interestingly, I was able to do this without an engineering degree, but I think those days are over, so get in college and stay there until youre armed and dangerous with a degree in something useful.

Equipped with enough electronics training to be dangerous, a friend and I started a small electronics kit sideline called Waveform Processing . We were located in Crafton, Pennsylvania, and were in business from the late 1970s into the early 1980s. I designed some simple sound-making boxes (

Figure 2. The Waveform Processing Mini-Synth

To this day, I still cringe when I think of what we used to pay for a 15-word classified ad buried among hundreds of others in the back of that magazine: $500. Needless to say, the brand Waveform Processing is not rolling off of anybodys tongue today.

My interest in electronics didnt wane by any means; I kept on researching and breadboarding and developed some very cool mono- and polyphonic synths. I remember the excitement of discovering the Curtis Electromusic Specialties chips designed by Doug R. Curtis. They were simply the coolest chips ever. You could easily build voltage-controlled filters and voltage-controlled oscillators that tracked one volt per octave perfectly and were completely temperature compensated. I was in heaven. Eventually, however, family and job responsibilities caused me to pay less and less attention to synth-DIY.

I was getting my electronics design fix at Intec Systems in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, and eventually Siemens Pacesetter in Sylmar, California, so my focus shifted to designing electronic test equipment and writing software. In 1994, an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 chased us out of California and on to Aurora, Colorado. I can still remember throwing my first attempt at a modular into a huge dumpster as we hurriedly cleaned house and prepared to move. (Man I wish I still had that thing.)

After my work focus shifted entirely to software development, my need to work with electronics brought me full circle and back to synth-DIY with a vengeance. I started a website called Ray-Land (perhaps Im a tad bit narcissistic) and began to publish the circuits, PC layouts, and circuit descriptions I was coming up with. I developed a simple, battery-powered mini-synthesizer called the