Boutique modular instruments
OSCILLATE builds analog Eurorack modules and standalone synthesizers for sound designers who treat signal as raw material.
Hand-calibrated oscillators. Through-hole guts. Knobs with a detent you can hear. Every panel leaves the bench measured, not estimated.
FILE 01 — THE STUDIO
OSCILLATE is eleven people in a Brooklyn workshop — circuit designers, two machinists, a panel printer and a resident composer who breaks everything before it ships.
Discrete transistor cores, real reactive components, temperature-compensated tuning. Digital only enters where it earns its place — clocking, recall, and morph tables.
— Through-hole · ±0.5¢ drift
Every knob is a sealed conductive-plastic pot with a custom torque curve. Sliders ride machined rails. You should be able to play a patch blind, by feel.
— Tactile detents · 300° sweep
Published schematics, calibration trim points labelled, firmware on a public repo. An instrument you can repair in twenty years is an instrument worth buying once.
— Open schematics · lifetime parts
Each unit passes a 40-point bench test — frequency tracking, CV scaling, noise floor, jack tension. The test sheet ships in the box with your serial number.
— 40-point QA · signed sheet
A through-zero analog VCO with continuous wave-morph from sine to saw to square, a hard/soft sync pair, and exponential + linear FM that stays in tune past audio rate.
Four-pole transistor ladder with a resonance that screams musically and self-oscillates clean enough to use as a sine source.
Three cascaded fold stages with asymmetry bias. Turns a plain sine into a buzzing, metallic spectrum that tracks pitch.
True analog noise feeds sample-and-hold, two random voltages, and a fluctuating slew — the heartbeat of generative patches.
A function generator that is an envelope, an LFO, a slew limiter and an oscillator at once — looping, voltage-controlled, with end-of-cycle triggers for chaining patches.
Bucket-brigade tape emulation with true stereo spread, tape wow & flutter modelling, and a feedback path you can push into chaos without clipping the rails.
WAVESHAPE
Pure vanilla JS — no audio is played. The trace is drawn frame-by-frame on <canvas> from the controls above. Reduced-motion shows a single static trace.
A design starts as a hypothesis on the bench — discrete components on a breadboard, a scope, and weeks of listening. Nothing advances until the resident composer can break it musically.
Boards are routed for low noise and serviceability — trim points labelled, test pads exposed. Panels are designed in-house and screen-printed, not laser-etched, so the legending lasts.
SMD is machine-placed; every through-hole part, jack and pot is hand-soldered in Brooklyn. A human sets each knob and checks each solder joint under magnification.
Each module runs an automated bench fixture — frequency tracking across ten octaves, CV scaling, noise floor, jack tension. The fixture prints a signed test sheet tied to your serial.
Foam-cut boxes, the printed test sheet, a patch idea card and ribbon cable. Your serial is registered for lifetime parts support — we keep components in stock for a decade.
A complete OSCILLATE voice: an oscillator folded into harmonics, filtered by a random voltage, shaped by an envelope and smeared through tape. No two patches sound the same twice — that's the point.
The VCO-9 is the first oscillator I've owned that I trust to stay in tune through a six-hour scoring session. It feels like an instrument, not a gadget.
Mara OkaforFOLD-3 into LP-24 is my entire sound-design rig for the studio's horror line. Nasty in the best way.
Diego SalasI run four RND-2s in a generative installation that's been playing for 14 months straight. Zero failures, signed test sheets framed on the wall.
Yuki TanakaThe published schematics sold me. I repaired a knock from shipping in ten minutes with their labelled trim points. Who does that anymore?
Henrik VogelECHO-T's feedback path is dangerous — I've recorded entire ambient records just by patching it into itself and listening for an hour.
Lila MoreauKnobs with a real detent. Sounds small. It changes how you play — muscle memory finally works.
Sam ReyesFILE 07 — PRE-ORDER BATCH 19
Batch 19 of the VCO-9 opens to the list first. Drop your email — no spam, just a single shipping notice and the patch ideas we're testing this month.
96kHz · ±0.5¢ tracking · lifetime parts · shipped from Brooklyn