Making Your Own Synth.

[Super Alex]

Look up CMOS Synthesizers. They're stupid simple and a lot of fun

[trojanmantony]

there is a synth kit for the arduino, i think its a ribbon synth

as far as building a synth it depends on what you want it to do, analog synths use a metric shit ton of simple circuits that are all in parallel so you can apply their effects and the output at the end is the sound. how complex you wanna make it? a 3 oscillator synth that does only sine and square waves, and has a few filters and distortion, and phase knob could be done with a few bread boards as well as guts from a keyboard controller.

[dreadkid08]

Hora from the Japanese electronic duo Schwarz Stein used a synth that he built for performances. If I remember reading correctly he built it using a kit. So maybe there are kits out there that you can buy

[Rmonik]

Have you actually looked? There are looooads of kits.

[wipethatsound]

I'm also a mechatronics student!

A good starting place would be the meeblip - is a digital monophonic synth kit - you can google it and I think they are about $40 for the basic kit - based on an AVR chip and very easy to mod... I about half way through modding/completing mine (currently prototyping an arpeggiator and a midi delay on an arduino).. so far it sounds really cool!

next project is going to be a digital sampler/mpc type thing using a Rasberry Pi (so I can do stupid touch screen stuf etc etc)

also - in regards to building synths, I work at Fairlight/Peter Vogel Instruments (the Fairlight CMI is a digital sampler though) the stuff I do (patch programming for the CMI30A) is fairly simple but the overall design of the CMI's is pretty intense