Who wants to stripboard a Roland System 700? Your mum would’ve loved one for Christmas, I bet.

Given how rare they are – rumoured to 40 or 50 full sets ever made – there is zero chance of finding one for buttons in a car boot sale, or at the local auction house (“large home keyboard, only makes wobbly sounds“) or on ebay. The only chance I’ll get to have a go on one is to build one from scratch.

It’s ridiculous given that the 100m is similar-ish to the System 700, and I’d bet that Roland will do an emulation as a plugin for their System-1 or other new analogue modelling AIRA product this year. And looking at the front panel, there’s nothing really that unusual about any of the modules, but mostly I like the fact that it’s massive, there are sliders on the inputs, LED indicators for level (“is it making any sound?”) and that the modules are normalled to each other, making it possible to get sounds without having to trail patch leads everywhere.

I’m looking at just doing the main console initially – the sequencer might be a step too far. Forget about trying to Eurorack-ify everything, I’m just going to try and build it like the original, at the same size. I’m going to struggle with the sliders (50K dual audio for the 703 resonance pot?) but I’m going to attempt to keep it the same.

I’ve already had a crack at stripboarding the 706B VC-LFO and the 703B 2-pole HP/BP/LP filter which both work ok, write ups coming shortly, and I’ve just done my first proper PCB layout for the 704 VCA. Depending on how that goes, I might switch to doing layouts for the rest of the circuits.