ELMYRA2 DIY was irresistible when I saw it on sale at Thonk.
You can find lots of demos of this mini-synth, so I’ll mostly focus on the DIY build. But here’s a quick overview.
Four voices (each can have up to 3 oscillators) with pitch and volume control, four wavetables, and ten available modulations are mixed with preset saturation and then sent through a filter, a delay, and a distortion unit (OUCH), go to a mono output. The voices can be gated by touch or by CV, or put into droning mode.
DIY Build
I got the Eurorack DIY kit, which includes everything needed. All SMD parts are soldered for you.
It is quite a lot of parts, but not hard to sort them. The build instructions are clear and easy to use. It took me about three or four hours from start to finish. I followed the given build order, except for one thing that I disagreed with. The instructions say to solder all the jacks in the panel before putting nuts on them. Nope. I always snug jack nuts to the panel before soldering. The only problem I had was with the pin headers that are supposed to be flush with the front panel. They were just too tight. I left them flush with the rear of the panel and the plug-in circuits still fit OK.
The PCB design is amazing. The SMD is on the back and the panel parts mount on the front of course. It all fits on a single PCB.
I decorated it with a few Bananuts. I gave the LFO, Attenuator, and Mixer (ADD) outputs black nuts and the inputs to ATN and ADD gold. Easier to keep straight. Audio IN is gold, OUT is black. Then I put red Bananuts on the ENV outputs to make the separation between voice jacks clearer. I put a silver Bananut on the SYNC input, because I was confused as to whether it was an input or output. Silver Bananuts on my Eurorack modules indicate gate or trigger inputs.
The empty 6hp to the right will get the Happy Nerding FX-AID, loaded with reverbs. It’s nice to add a little reverb for a stereo result.
Demo
I made this recording concurrently with the video. There is just a bit of reverb added. Everything else is the ELMYRA2.
