A home studio specified and built as one system rather than a pile of gear, with the work running from the wiring down into the instruments themselves.

Architecture. Eleven linked documents cover I/O allocation, DI assignments, loop allocation across an ML10X, signal flow per scenario, MIDI and USB routing, patchbay allocation, power and a cable list. Five workflows (live tracking with DI capture, reamping, software instruments, outboard summing and sound design) are reachable without rewiring; moving between them costs a patch cable or a MIDI preset recall.

Boss SY-300. The SysEx checksum was undocumented, so it was reverse-engineered by testing five candidate algorithms against the unit's own checksum across more than a thousand messages. That made scripted patch transfer and restorable backups possible. A patch counts only once it has been auditioned on the hardware.

Korg NTS-1 mk II. Six custom units in C and C++ against the logue SDK, cross-compiled to run inside the synth: three oscillators, a delay, a motion effect and a template. Each must fit a size budget and a per-sample deadline, and is qualified on the hardware for DC and headroom, continuity from C0 to C7, level across the range and survival of a power cycle. All six passed.

Commodore 64. SID Lab is native C64 software, a C shell with a ca65 raster interrupt owning the SID writes, with eight deterministic scenes that make a 1982 sound chip measurable in a modern chain. One scene reduces sixteen bars of Spectre output, so a generative composition plays through 1982 hardware. Its output is measured through the NTS-1 at the SY-300, which isolated a level problem to a single insertion point.