Music Thing Modular Workshop System

Music Thing’s Workshop System is a modular toolkit that’s designed to inspire.

If, like me, you’re generally more interested in just using the thing than you are in building it, you’ll be pleased to know that Tom Whitwell of Music Thing Modular opted to send me a constructed Workshop System to review, though currently it’s solely available as a DIY kit. Music Thing Modular are, of course, one of the most established names in DIY modular; one of the prime movers in the rise of the great Thonk over a decade ago and the creators of the much lauded Turing Machine random looping sequencer. Its developer’s most expansive project to date, the Workshop System was originally designed, as you may remember Tom explaining in January’s Modular Profile, for participants in the Cornwall‑based Dyski Sound Maps Residency in April of last year.

A standalone (but case‑mountable) unit in 42HP, it hosts 10 circuits (give or take), comes in its own flightcase (that’s right), is USB‑powered (I know!) and is analogue everywhere that matters. I’ll say it now: if DIY is your thing, the Workshop System is bound to be a rewarding and enjoyable build. If not, see it as a necessary hurdle you will not regret overcoming.

Case Study

From left to right, the Workshop System presents the mysteriously named Computer (which I’ll return to), then a pair of analogue oscillators offering sine or square wave shapes. It’s worth pointing out now that the three fundamental circuits of the Workshop System (that is, the oscillators, the filters and the function generators) come in near‑identical pairs, laterally splitting the panel in half. This is a very nice piece of design, since it means that they can be treated as two discrete synth voices or chained any which way. If you were so inclined, you could just patch in a CV keyboard and more or less play the whole thing as a Minimoog‑style dual‑oscillator synth.

The triangle‑core oscillators themselves leave little to be desired: as Music Thing Modular themselves volunteer, these aren’t flawlessly precise but will track fine over three or four octaves once calibrated. I like the binary choice of square or sine, which covers multitudes of low‑frequency or audio‑rate functions, and in one of the System’s few patchless connections (which are of course editable, it being DIY) the sine wave outputs of both are normalled to each other, making some quite complex FM sounds quickly achievable.

Next to the oscillators is a raft of diminutive circuits: these consist of a simple stereo line input, a ring modulator, an external ‘Stompbox’ effects loop, an ‘Amplifier’ section offering another external signal input or even a contact microphone, and finally a four‑button interface called ‘4 Voltages’.

All of these are generously...