[sdiy] Anadigm...

[Olivier Gillet]

> This demonstrates to me that hardware design is actually the simpler part of modern analogue synth design. The software design is the larger and more complicated part of the process, since it probably includes all the envelopes, LFOs, modulation matrix/routing, as well as the system-level stuff like programmability, MIDI handling, control surface, etc etc. The hardware for stuff like this is straightforward. Making it actually work is not.

What I found is that getting all this stuff from "nothing" to "can be
demoed" can be done very quickly. Gordon talked about one afternoon, I
got the first Shruti code from scratch in 15 nights (including MIDI
handling, note stack, menu system, oscillators synthesis / CV
generation), but this was before this was my first microcontroller
project. Then it took months to perfect, refine, and get to a state
where I could say things sort of "felt right". You can't replace the
lessons learned from hours of testing: rare bugs, UI things, creative
moments when you want to do something and you are shocked you haven't
planned a way to achieve it and feel the urge to fix the product to
let you do it... It takes weeks of field testing and/or experience
with several similar past projects to figure how some things should be
done, even if, in the end, they materialize only a dozen lines of
code... The devil is in the details after all. Which makes me believe
that if you want to ship a synth in 12 months, you need to have it
almost right in 2 or 3 months.