I have just finished building my Shruthi-1 kit, after buying it way back in February this year.

It has brought back lots of memories for me. I used to enjoy building circuits from schematics I found in magazines as a teenager, from my pocket money. Every once in a while something would not work as it should after days/hours of work and I did not have a clue where to start diagnosing the faults: Still the transmitters, flashing LED's, more than made up for it.

Fast forward to 2011, when I finished soldering all the pieces of my Shruthi-1, it did not seem to produce any sounds. This time, however, thanks to Mutable Instruments, it was explained very clearly how to trace problems. 3 a.m. Saturday morning, I found myself vandalising an audio cable lying around to trace the signal on my SM-4 board. A-ha! It does produce tones... At all points, except point 8. Quick look at the schematics, and using the cheap old multimeter, it took me less than 10 minutes to narrow it down to 1 specific connection and resoldering this solve the problem!

I could not get the filter to self-oscillate. Resonance seemed to work but for some reason not as high to make a sine wave. Who cares?! I put it in the box connected the leads, to try it out...

The sound on this thing, however, is still amazing! I have loads of digital and analog equipment in my set up but none of them have the quality of presets that this little thing does. I was expecting to like the sound but I was taken aback by how MUCH I liked it.

The next day, I decided to go through the sequencer patterns. Blimey! The first 10 or so, particularly! They are exactly the patterns that I try to program on every synth...

I just want to say, THANK YOU to Olivier for developing this little gem and for the clear instructions for people like me who may or may not know what they are doing.

I need to go and play it a little more now!