The synth is finished. I may never play it And that’s completely fine.
There’s a module sitting on my desk right now. It took me three weekends to build — sourcing components, squinting at a schematic, burning a finger on a rogue solder joint. It hums faintly when I power it on. It generates a slow, wandering drone that fills the room.
I have not written a single bar of music with it. I probably never will.
Ask me if I care, and the answer is no.
There’s a persistent assumption in creative hobbies that the output is the point. The woodworker wants a table. The knitter wants a jumper. The musician wants a song. But spend any time in the electronics and modular synth community and you’ll meet a different kind of person — someone for whom the act of making the thing is the whole game. The finished object is almost incidental.
The process is the performance When you build a synthesizer circuit from scratch, you’re making hundreds of tiny decisions about sound. The value of a resistor. The type of capacitor. The topology of a filter. Every choice shapes the eventual tone in ways you’re reasoning about long before anything makes a noise. That is an engagement with music — just happening at the level of physics and electrons rather than melody and rhythm.
The builder isn’t avoiding music. They’re approaching it from a different direction entirely.
GAS is a symptom, not a disorder Synth culture has a term for the compulsion to acquire more gear than you’ll ever use: GAS, or Gear Acquisition Syndrome. It’s used as gentle self-mockery, but I think it misses the point. For a lot of people, the browsing, the planning, the sourcing — that is the hobby. The rack full of half-patched modules isn’t evidence of failure. It’s the whole collection, displayed proudly.
There’s real precedent for this outside of music. Plenty of cooks care more about technique than dinner parties. Plenty of photographers care more about lenses than prints. The making and the thinking-about-making can be entirely sufficient.
You don’t have to be a musician to build for musicians. You just have to have paid attention.
The drone is still going. It’s been running for six hours. I keep walking past it and smiling. That feels like enough.