The Ekdahl Polygamist - A synthesizer for the Whole Family!



The Ekdahl Polygamist has been DISCONTINUED !!
It breaks my fucking heart, but i see no alternative.

Long story short, the Polygamist in its current form is much too complicated to build, takes too long, have too many things that can go wrong with it, is nowhere near generating enough cash - and all this, makes it infuriatingly frustrating to build.

Nevertheless, there might be another Ekdahl Polygamist in the future if i can change production methods.

Sorry to disappoint, however nobody's as disappointed as me :(


Owning a couple of analog synths i was getting a little bored with all of them just sounding nice. Owning a bunch of circuit bent gear i was tired of them only sounding circuit bent and not reliably repeatable or controllable. Out of this combined frustration, the Ekdahl Polygamist was born. THIS is not your typical synthesizer.

The Ekdahl Polygamist is mainly designed with experimental / drone / noise / improv in mind but can really take you wherever you wana go. The basic architecture is classic VCO/VCF/VCA design but all of the building blocks have been designed to allow for much more interesting / chaotic sounds then you get from your bread-and-butter synth.

Highlights includes VCO1 which features a "Tilt" output which is a triangle wave that can be *tilted* from sawtooth, to triangle, to ramp. VCO2, the "Pitch multiplying oscillator" consists of a fundamental and three "sub harmonics" that mimics additative/FM synthesis for very complex waveform and chaos generation. The ADSR is loopable and can be used as an oscillator, it can also be paused in its transition. The three LFOs all go to audio range and two of them go down to about 4 minutes for one waveform period. It also features a duophonic, pressure sensitive ribbon controller which sends MIDI data. It has two independent MIDI/USB-to-CV converters which can be ganged in duophonic mode. And there is of course, much, much more.

For detailed specifications go here.

The list price for the Ekdahl Polygamist is $1450, due to the fact that this is higher then anticipated, and that Knas has no interest what so ever in just pandering to people with unlimited funds, I will introduce a tiered pricing system for musicians who have a limited income. If this applies to you, please stay tuned as this will be introduced some time after the initial sales.

There's a waiting list and to get on it you need to paypal a deposit of $700 to cover parts and secure the buy, please contact me before paying the deposit and for more information.

Now that you've read all of the important information above, contact me at in regards to how to get your very own Ekdahl Polygamist!

A big THANK YOU goes out to all of you who have helped me make this happen: Martin Schmidt, Sebastian Tesch, Jason Willett, Nicolette Le Faye, Jay Lesser, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Stephin Merritt, Josh Atkins, Miguel Sabogal, Drew Daniel, Joshua Lewis, Rjyan Kidwell, Benny Boeldt, James Bahleda, And many more that i probably have forgotten right now

Downloads

Ekdahl Polygamist manual
Ekdahl Polygamist patch sheet (natural size, resize for regular printers)
Ekdahl Polygamist firmware version R2
Bootloader software for Linux


Family album


Here's a few sounds, this set will be updated as i go along.