Instruments built one panel at a time, by people who solder their own patch cables.
Kestrel Modular is a six-person workshop making fully analog synthesizers, filters, and sequencers. No firmware, no menus, no presets to scroll through — just voltage, and the decisions you make with your hands.
Featured Instruments
Four of our current builds. Step through them one at a time — nothing here moves on its own.
Featured Build
Meridian VCO-3
$1,850A three-oscillator monosynth built around discrete transistor cores, not chips. Cross-modulation is hardwired into the front panel, so every patch is an experiment rather than a recall.
- Oscillators3, discrete core
- Filter4-pole low pass, resonant
- CaseWalnut & powder-coat steel
- Lead time6–8 weeks
Six people, one bench, no assembly line
Kestrel Modular started in a garage in 2014, when our founder Dana Whitlock got tired of synthesizers that asked her to update firmware before she could make a sound. Today the shop is still small on purpose: six builders, one calibration bench, and a waitlist we're honest about instead of hiding.
Point-to-point wiring
Every unit is hand-wired and hand-calibrated against a reference oscillator before it ships. No two boards leave the shop with identical tuning curves — that's the analog part.
Repair-for-life policy
If a Kestrel instrument breaks in twenty years, mail it back. We keep schematics and spare panel stock for every model we've ever made.
"It's the only synth I own where I can actually explain what every knob does to the signal — because someone here can explain it to me first."
Voltage doesn't have a preset button
We're not anti-digital — half the shop uses digital multitrack recorders. But a synthesizer is different: it's an instrument you learn with your hands, the same way you learn where the frets are on a guitar. Presets teach you to recall someone else's sound. Knobs teach you to find your own.
Temperature drift, on purpose
Our oscillators drift slightly as they warm up, the way vintage originals do. Some customers ask us to "fix" this. We don't — it's part of why analog still sounds like analog.
Serviceable for decades
Through-hole components and socketed ICs only. A tech in 2050 should be able to open the case and understand exactly what they're looking at.
Come play before you buy
Every instrument on the floor is patched in and ready to go — we'd rather you spend twenty minutes with a synth than read another spec sheet. We also take on a small number of custom builds each year for players who need something we don't make yet.
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