I’ve been tinkering with electronic music for about 25 years, published a few tracks and built a fairly pro studio before selling the lot to go travelling with my missus. The one thing I couldn't bare to sell was my replica of a Roland TB 303 because I built it from scratch without ever having soldered so much as a leaky pipe in my life.  If you know the Roland 303’s history you can skip to the next section but if you don't here’s a quick summary of the 303’s rise to fame.

The Roland TB-303 is a monophonic bass synth released by Roland in 1982. It was meant to be an accompaniement to guitarists but never took off because, well, it doesn’t sound like a bass guitar.  Production only lasted about 18 months and 10,000 units were sold.  Skip forward a few years and after being used on a few Italo disco bangers in the mid eighties a few cats in Chicago use the 303 to accidentally create a completely new genre of music.  Acid house. Phuture release "Acid Trax" on Trax Records, the world goes crazy and the rest is history.

As I mentioned the production of the 303 was limited and it’s scarcity today means an original in good condition sells for £3000+. It’s original price in 1982 in the UK was £254 which in 2020 money is about £750.

I’ve often dreamed of owning an original but not sure I could ever justify it, and I don't think my partner would understand dropping that sort of cash on a 30 year old box of dreams.  I’d known about about the DIY scene for a while and XOXO boxes but when the Din Sync RE-303 popped up it quickly became the best opportunity to get as close as I could to owning the real thing and adding it to my sonic arsenal for my own productions.

A faithful replica of the circuit boards with a BOM (bill of materials), the  obsolete and hard to find parts I had to source myself. Oh yeah, you have to solder the whole thing and find a case to fit all the bits in and find an origianl CPU to make it do anything, oh yeah and the buttons for the caps. That's part of the fun!

Skip to the bottom if you can't be bothered to read the build steps

The image below is of the RE 303 Space Cadet bundle which you can buy here:
https://shop.re-303.com/product/space-cadet-bundle/

Sooo, the image above is what I got in the Space Cadet Kit.  The other parts listed in the BOM are available from places like mouser.com but they don’t sell the obsolete parts. Some unscrupulous people are selling dodgy parts due to scarcity and it’s not difficult to be duped so I needed to be a little forensic in the search for those bits. The RE-303 forum were really helpful in helping avoid and rectify things when you've gone out of sync too. I found parts from eBayer's in Greece, Australia, Italy and Spain which is painful because your build cannot progress without these parts. To get the BOM together fully took  about a month of research. To begin building without at least the parts to get the power, VCF and VCA populated would mean too many interuptions and picking up where I left It quickly dawned on me that it is just not going to be as simple as all that .

There's a lot of very closed quarter soldering on this board, a delicate job which took a couple of weeks to complete.  Stupidly under-ordered various components, broke some, lost some, stalling the build and losing momentum. Patience is a skill I developed remarkably well during this project.  It’s definitely not for the faint of heart and I maybe should have chosen a smaller project to begin my synth building career but I got it done and it sounds awesome! Here’s how my build went down in summary.