Dark Arcade – a $120 paraphonic synthesizer module with digital oscillators and an analog filter, amplifier, envelope generator, and LFO

[siike92]

Hey guys I'm siike92, the designer of Dark Arcade. Over the past 2 years I've been developing a low cost ($120) paraphonic synthesizer module called Dark Arcade. I've been designing DIY audio projects since high school (I'm 26 now) and this is my first big project that I'm actually sharing. I started off building simple oscillators and other synthesizer building blocks before taking a class at Columbia College Chicago called Sound Art Electronics that really pushed me to design more elaborate projects that also featured microcontrollers. Shortly before graduating with my bachelors I set out to build a simple hybrid digital/analog bass synthesizer with MIDI control. I also entered graduate school pursuing a master's degree in computer science, which allowed me to optimize that original design considerably. After 2 years of development that original design morphed into Dark Arcade, a paraphonic digital/analog hybrid synthesizer with digital oscillators, an analog OTA-based filter section, analog OTA-based amplifier section, analog envelope generator section, and analog LFO section. It also has an 8-bit karplus-strong mode that's pretty cool. Check out the Kickstarter page (

) for videos and audio and follow siike92 and the.room.dis.connect on instagram for updates.

 

I'm holding a giveaway for 2 free Dark Arcade units (

) and I'm also holding a contest to get your music on the vinyl album that will be released along with the synth (

).​

 

Since I'm a graduate student without an adequate budget for marketing, I'm relying on forum posts and reddit to get the word out. Please let me know what you think about my synth and if anyone has any advice for me in regards to marketing I'd love to hear it in the comments as well. Thanks for checking the project out