If you want to get your hands on a Knight School Synth, we’re offering them fully in kit form if you fancy building one yourself. Assembly is very straightforward and requires only a soldering iron, some solder, and proper ventilation; we’ll take care of the rest.

Here’s a tale from the annals of my personal DIY history: I learned how to breadboard and read schematics right before college, and I breadboarded many designs posted on ampage.org. Shortly after that, I found a new DIY website. This one was called Beavis Audio. If you’re familiar with this, it’s for a good reason; BA was one of the premier DIY sites out there, and it refreshingly wrote everything in plain English. One of the projects there was called the “Heterodyne Peyote Space Explorer”. This introduced me to the CD40106 chip and I played around with that device for what seemed like double-digit hours when I was taking EE classes. 

One thing I stumbled across was when I combined a boost circuit I was working on with the 40106. It made an oddball noise, but one I thought could be cool with some refinement. It took a lot of tinkering, but it worked much better when I put a second boost circuit in front of it. I couldn’t really explain why, but it sounded cool, and I built a couple for my friends. Some time later, I stumbled across a webpage authored by one Tim Escobedo. There’s a ton of good info on his “Circuit Snippets” page, and it still exists today. As it turns out, Mr. Escobedo discovered a form of this circuit back in 2002, and comparing his circuit analysis with mine and the Space Explorer was a real “Eureka” moment for me. 

Our Knight School Synth is our most ambitious project to date. I’ve since leaned into Mr. Escobedo’s method for producing the pre-gain, as it’s simpler and uses far fewer parts than my original. Essentially, it turns your guitar signal into a square wave, and then uses the CD40106 to vary the pulse width of that square wave. There’s also a switchable LFO, which automatically varies the pulse width for you, along with a Depth control to change the intensity of the shaping. It’s a truly cool effect that emulates the monophonic synthesizers of yesteryear. Dare I say there’s not a lot on the market these days that sounds like this!