Serge Modular Music System

The Serge synthesizer aka Serge Modular Music System or Serge Modular system is an analogue modular synthesizer originally designed by CalArts professor Serge Tcherepnin, beginning in 1974.

History
In the early 70's Serge Tcherepnin began to design and build synthesizers while teaching at California Institute of the Arts. Before long, other professors, students, and musicians became interested in these new synthesizers. Serge set up an odd manufacturing arrangement where interested people paid $700 up front for parts, then worked for him building modules. When done, they were rewarded with a six-panel system of their own.

In 1992 Serge production and intellectual property were taken over by Sound Transform Systems (STS) of Oakland, California, founded by Rex Probe in 1984.

Paperface
A few different methods of panel marking were tried, and the one settled on for some of the early units was to print (photocopy?) the panel markings onto a piece of paper, one per module. These were then stuck on the 17" x 7" aluminium panels that were pre-drilled with a grid of 1" (5 HP) centre to centre spaced holes, irrespective of whether all holes would be needed. The top edge of these pieces of paper folded over on to the back of the panel, and contained brief markings to help wiring the jacks of the module in question to its circuit board. All of the pieces of paper were then covered over with a single piece of adhesive mylar film or "Contact" type book covering film.

Intention
Unlike other synthesizer systems with components designed to control the basics of musical sounds, such as pitch, duration, amplitude envelope, timbre. The intent of the Serge system is that the electronics speaks for itself. It makes interesting (although "un-musical") functions such as positive slew, negative slew, peak and trough, comparators, processors, wave shapers, etc. available. Typically Serge modules are multipurpose, e.g. the Serge TKB is a touch activated keyboard, analogue programmer and sequencer, while the Serge Universal Slope Generator can serve as an envelope generator, slew processor, LFO, VCO, frequency divider, lowpass VCF, trigger/gate delay, or envelope follower.

Patching
Serge uses banana jacks for patching. The Serge connector color scheme is more about the type signal than its function but with some flexibility e.g. some CVs can go negative. Many black inputs are AC coupled, but most black outputs are not.

Kits

 * EuroSerge Series kits by ELBY Designs
 * Random*Source DIY Serge kits
 * CGS