Heavily inspired by the Dirty Electronics Ensemble’s workshops, and the music of The Breadboard Band, I have developed a small analog-synth-making workshop that uses knitted samples made with conductive yarn to modulate either the pitch or LFO of an astable oscillator.

As of February 2024, I’ve run this workshop officially twice – once by invitation to B. Claxton and Eva Sajovic’s Hack’n the Knit workshops at Camberwell College of Art, and once at Chelsea College of Art along with Murad Khan, Valinnie Crasto and Lexin Zhou. I’ve also informally multiple times as a demo for students visiting the CCI workshop, to illustrate concepts such as resistance, capacitance and timing circuits.

I wrote a guide to making your own version on the CCI wiki.

Testing a stripboard version in the lab with Val and Lexin:

The stripboard prototype:

With a breadboarded version, using a sample made by the Chelsea knit students: