About Us
Electric Druid started long, long ago, when founder Tom Wiltshire’s interest in audio electronics lead him to start building fuzzboxes for budding-rockstar friends at school. This early Electric Druid built many different guitar effects and experimented with all sorts of designs. Particular favourites include the “one million times gain fuzzbox”, which was housed in a solid wooden case, and picked up Radio Moscow as might be expected.This early experimentation with electronics and sound lead towards analogue synthesizers, and they became the focus of a life-long obsession.
After a long period away from electronics, Tom started building his own synthesizer in 2008. The initial plan was to use the old CEM or SSM synth chips, but unfortunately these were all virtually unobtainable for any reasonable price.
However, since the late 70’s/early 80’s heyday of such chips, modern microprocessor technology has come so far that you can now buy a cheap microcontroller that can do a decent simulation of at least some of these chips. Thinking this might be a worthwhile approach, Tom began developing designs for his personal synth project and publishing them online.
This generated a large amount of interest from others involved in Synth DIY and offers of work designing chips and firmware for other people started to come in, so much so that Synth DIY rapidly became a profession rather than a hobby.
The new Electric Druid business was born to help other people who are trying to build their own synthesizer or stomp boxes. Audio electronics is what we do and what we love! By designing simple, easy-to-use, but flexible chips, we can reduce the component count in your synth or pedal, whilst adding powerful features usually only found in professional instruments.