Ambika
A six-voice polyphonic synthesizer I built from a bare PCB set — Emilie Gillet's open-source masterpiece, brought to life with days of soldering, seven flashed microcontrollers, and a fully-loaded set of mix-and-match analog filters.
- 6 (fully loaded)
- Voices built
- 7
- MCUs flashed
- 700+
- Patch library
the problem
I wanted to build a serious analog-hybrid synthesizer with my own two hands — not a kit-and-clip job, but a deep, board-by-board build of one of the most respected DIY designs ever released.
Not my design — but every joint is mine
The Ambika is the work of Emilie Gillet, the brilliant designer who went on to found Mutable Instruments; she open-sourced it (the cc-by-sa credit is silkscreened right on the boards). My role was builder — and it was a serious build. I sourced the full bill of materials, then hand-populated the motherboard and all six voicecards: hundreds of through-hole joints, DIP sockets, electrolytics, pots, and jacks.
Each of the six voices is its own little computer — one ATmega328p per voicecard, plus an ATmega644p running the motherboard — so I flashed seven microcontrollers individually with avrdude, getting the fuse and lock bits exactly right (one wrong byte bricks the chip). I went fully loaded: four SMR-4 filter cards and two 4-pole cards, leaning into the Ambika's signature mix-and-match-filters design so the instrument carries two distinct tonal characters under one roof.
Finishing it like it matters
A build like this only feels done when it's an instrument you'd actually want on your desk. I had it finished in a clean white enclosure with real-wood end-cheeks, calibrated each voice, and curated a library of 700+ patches across its SD cards. It lives in my studio rack now — six voices of hand-built analog polyphony that I soldered into existence one joint at a time.
built with