[sdiy] Building a Modular- Paia vs. Blacet, others?

[David Anderson]

Hi,

For what it's worth, I've built a pile of odd stuff. I have two Blacet
modules and plan to add more. They are excellent kits, well designed and
very attractive. Plus, as you noticed, they are as strange as possible :)

I've also built stuff by Tom Gamble. Tom, by and large, sells PCBs. Lately
he's gotten into overlays for panels and parts kits. Tom's kits assume you
can read a schematic and the instructions sometimes have small mistakes.
His designs tend to improvements of classic designs. For instance, he has
several filter boards available, designed after Moog, Korg, Oberheim, and
other stuff. http://www.ele4music.com/

I also have two kits from Chris MacDonald (of the Evenfall Modular fame).
One's a VCO, the other a VCF. Beautiful PCBs (don't know if he's still
doing that); used to have the uncommon parts if necessary (like the Q81
resistor for the VCO). http://www.evenfall.com/diy/index.html

My latest discovery is Ken Stone. His PCBs are cheap and super cool. I've
purchased at least seven or eight PCBs from him in the last year. My latest
acquisitions have been a drum osc, chime osc, and some other nifty stuff.
Ken's pages seem offline, but the url is www.blaze.net.au/~sasami/synth.

I've considered the Paia stuff off and on. While I'm generally impressed
with the design and construction (I've built a number of Paia kits over the
years), I'm put off by the 1/8" jacks. It's not about the jack wars but
rather the normalization. I like banana plugs for my stuff. The Blacet
stuff is usually easily converted to banana, but the Paia stuff uses
switching jacks, so I'd probably have to build a converter panel. 

You may want to check the Synth DIY page on dmoz.org (I'm the editor):
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Instruments/Electronic/Synthesizers/Do-It-Yourse
lf/

David Anderson