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 imbued with creative functionality: the effects loop, for instance, has a Feedback knob for sending the wet signal back into the external unit, instantly potentiating some interesting ways of using whatever hardware is patched into it (I’ve rather been enjoying self‑oscillating reverbs lately). The Amplifier isn’t just a line input: you can either drive an input signal into tasty transistor‑based distortion, or with its switch set to Mic, physically tap, stroke and scrape the Workshop System to create sonic source material. Go gently on that last one — or not, it’s your prerogative.

The 4 Voltages section is an elegant little quasi‑random voltage generator, ostensibly spitting out static random values from its four outputs when one of its four buttons are pressed, though you can return to a previous set of values by pressing the previous button, which is key. Its primary role, in this sense, is simply to shake things up, and I’m a fan.

Next along is a pair of ‘Humpback’ analogue filters, offering low‑pass and switchable band‑pass or high‑pass responses. These are ’70s‑inspired — designed by Philip Goulding of Berlin‑based developer God’s Box, no less — and very characterful: at high resonances they don’t whistle smoothly like a ladder filter, rather they drive right into enjoyably unruly distortion, not a far cry from the beloved likes of the Korg MS‑20. As with the oscillators there’s some minimal normalling here: unpatched, the top filter’s output is connected to the bottom filter’s input, which is handy.

To the left of the filters is a brace of function generators; loosely based, we’re told, on the Serge VCS circuit. These are subtly different from one another in that the top slope is linear in response, while the bottom one is exponential. Each has a switch for cycling the function (so you could, for instance, use one as an envelope and one as an LFO, à la Make Noise Maths), but again, there’s a nice performative touch here, with the switches’ lower ‘Blip’ position representing a momentary manual trigger.

Furthest to the right is a fairly simple four‑channel mixer, channels 1 and 2 of which offer panning. There are also not one but two headphone outputs, the second of which to me immediately screams either aux send Or feedback patching — but that might just say more about how many friends I have (presumably, in that original workshop context, the second output would enable a supervisor to plug in their own headphones to listen to works in progress). This mixer isn’t the most intuitively laid out, but in this real estate to have a mixer at all is wonderful, especially one with a nice big master volume knob. For that matter, all the knobs here are very nicely chosen and make for a perfectly scaled workflow.

OK Computer

To the Computer, then: this in many ways is the crowning glory of the Workshop System. A multifunctional circuit, its jacks and knobs are generically labelled to fulfil a purpose according to which microSD card‑sized program card is inserted in the slot at the bottom. It ships with a cute little collection of cards on a keyring: with these it can be a Turing Machine (yay!), a USB MIDI interface, a reverb unit or any number of things. I say ‘any number’ because it’s possible — encouraged, even — to program your own, and indeed many third‑party coded functions are already appearing on GitHub. At the time of writing these include a Mutable Instruments‑inspired wavetable oscillator, a quad LFO, USB audio output and more. It’s really very exciting; almost like a screenless, slightly downscaled version of the Expert Sleepers Disting.

As for those pre‑programmed cards, they demonstrate aptly what the Computer is capable of. For the uninitiated: the Turing Machine really is an excellent design. In short, it randomises stepped quantised voltages according to a scale (which, alongside other parameters, is editable via a web app). This can then be adjusted in all manner of ways, with phrases of variable length able to be locked, looped and clocked in interesting ways thanks to the excellently named ‘Diviply’ control. The Turing Machine’s most distinguishing function, though, is that its randomness can be adjusted across a continuum, in this case with the main knob at the top of the Computer panel. At 12 o’clock things are completely random; at one extreme it locks into a repeating pattern; at the other, another repeating pattern but of double the length. Moving between these, things start to ‘slip’ in various ways, with patterns being more or less predictable but with occasional randomness creeping in.

I say all this because it’s the ideal control source for a system like this: it’s intuitive and impulsive, and if you’re in need of melodic patterns but don’t want to lug an external sequencer around or rely on MIDI from your laptop it’s ideal.

MIA

If there’s one thing I found myself wishing for on more than one occasion, it’s a mult. Granted, the panel here is packed, and perhaps utilities (a VCA also comes to mind, though technically the ring mod circuit can double as such) would simply spoil the fun. But in this way the Workshop System is simply a victim of its own excellence — I just wanted to keep patching! And there are compact systems out there that ship with a passive mult, for instance the 2HP Picnic Basket.

But let’s be honest: with things like a bespoke foam‑lined hard case in the picture, I’m hardly going to start complaining about everything the Workshop System doesn’t ship with, especially when you consider the price.

It’s as much a playground for processing sounds as it is for generating them from scratch.

Conclusion

Hopefully by now you’ve gathered that the Workshop System is not only a capable portable synthesizer system, but also that it can be the very centre of a setup — portable or otherwise. Feed a dynamic mic into the Amplifier, your laptop into the stereo input, a pedalboard into the Stompbox circuit, the list goes on. In my experience, sometimes these sorts of instruments, while attractive, can quickly lead to patching ruts with their reliance on simple waveforms for source audio and filters for audio processors — even if they can accommodate external signals. Here, though, we have control over signals, effects, ring modulation, a piezo microphone — not to mention the legions made possible by the Computer. It’s as much a playground for processing sounds as it is for generating them from scratch. Fabulous in almost every way.