Yves Usson is a Frenchman, living in Grenoble, dedicating lots of his free time on designing and building synthesizers. His YuSynth is a modular synth project which can help you as a guide in developing your own synth
Yves says: “When I was a teenager, back in the seventies I became fascinated by those weird sounding machines with those huge panels full of blinking light bulbs and knobs. My first encounters with music produced by Moog synthesizers were two radically different pieces: Popcorn (by Gershon Kinsley) and the original soundtrack of Clockwork Orange (by Wendy Carlos). This was really weird at this time but I sure knew that I liked that very much! The music I was listening to was that of bands like ELP, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes and so on… Then the Germans came … Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Kraftwerk, Ash Ra Tempel : fascinating, hypnotic and repetitive. In parallel, some other really interesting musicians extended the realm of synth creativity : Tim Blake, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis and others. At the time, I had this hobby of building electronic circuits (mainly for short wave listening) and it became obvious that I had to build myself one of these big modular thing. Well, considering the fact that I had no money, this was a very optimistic goal. I eventually managed to build a modest modular synth (US1). Then I discovered computers, I bought a Sinclair ZX81 kit and started programming. This took me away from SDIY for about 25 years! Back in 2000, while surfing on the net, I accidentally came across a site dedicated to SDIY. And that was it ! I was bitten again by the virus !”
Here are some pictures of systems in Yves’s studio. All info can be found on http://home.yusynth.net/
