William Stokes
 Welcome to the Sound On Sound Electronic Music podcast channel. I'm William J. Stokes and this is My Life in Modules, a podcast about modular synthesis, where each episode I invite a guest to select the Eurorack modules that have meant the most to them and talk about why, before treating us to an exclusive performance using only that modest selection.

This episode is something of a Make Noise special because I'm very happy to welcome Asheville, North Carolina based musical artist and instrument designer Tony Rolando, best known to many of course as the man behind Make Noise, which is surely one of the most recognized names in Eurorack, not to mention a hugely influential force in the last decade or so's modular synthesis renaissance. Founded by Tony back in 2008 after a formative spell working for Moog Music as well as building bespoke instruments independently, Make Noise in its own words was to represent a revisioning of jettisoned music technology, what a great phrase and has gone on to create instruments beloved by artists from Tom York to Aphex Twin and many, many more. Welcome Tony.

Tony Rolando
Hello. Thanks for having me, William.

WS
Now, obviously it's worth saying, you know, we delayed the recording of this episode a little bit because of hurricane Helene, which as we know has hit the east coast of the States pretty hard, including of course, Asheville. How are you guys doing over there?

TR
We're doing a little better. We have, we got water to flush toilets with now which is surprisingly luxurious. We were having to fill the toilets manually and the water came back on, but it's only suitable for flushing at the moment, so yeah, so we're still, but we got Make Noise reopened and the crew is in there building Bruxa's actually as we're doing this and we did that by, we're importing water from South of us. There's a Mountain Spring Company whose water was not compromised and so we're importing water to the shop for people so they have, you know, water to wash hands with, make coffee, that sort of thing. But yeah, the city itself, or the town I should say really, has a long road ahead of it. There was quite a bit of damage, infrastructure damage, obviously, to the water system and the electrical system, but also a lot of businesses were just completely decimated. So it'll be, it's going to be a long road for us. I hope we don't lose too much of our creative sector, we have a lot of creative people here in Asheville and I know some of them are already on their way out to, you know, they've got to make a living and they can't do it here right now. Hopefully they'll come back.

WS
Wow, yeah. Pretty, it's pretty wild. It must be the biggest storm that you've had while you've been at make noise. At least it seems that way from what I've seen on social media.

TR
Yeah, it's the biggest storm. It actually broke, there was a storm that happened here about a hundred years ago and that's always been talked about. It's like the thing that everybody will mention, you'll see markings on walls for how high the water got and this storm actually was bigger than that one. The only other storm that even came close to this was back in the early 2000s, there was a storm that washed out some bridges, that was a pretty bad one. But yeah, no, this is definitely, this is a, you know how they say it these days, it's unprecedented, it's a once in a thousand years storm but then that problem is we just had another one, you know, 20 years ago and then there was one 80 years before that, so I don't know. It's, I'm definitely going to be preparing for more of these, I guess becoming somewhat of a prepper. Actually before we took our call, I was investigating hand cranked weather radios.

WS
Wow, yeah. I mean, I shouldn't laugh but that's, I mean it's obviously incredibly serious but...

TR
Yeah, no, it is, it is. I mean, it is also kind of funny. It's not anything you ever thought you'd be doing. There's no manual for it here. You know down in Florida I think they get these kind of things a lot and they've developed as a whole, I don't know, there's like almost like a whole economy around it and here it was the thing that we were told was never going to happen and so no one was really that prepared for it, honestly.

WS
Synthesiser developers just can't catch a break, can they. There's parts shortages and COVID and now, you know, incredible storms. It's, you know, it's, we're kind of, it's weirdly fitting talking about being a sort of a prepper. This is something of a kind of desert Island modular system, so the kind of system maybe you'd keep in your safe room.

TR
Right.

WS
I mean, you guys have seen on your Instagram, on your social media a pretty quick response and appeals to people to help and I do encourage, you know, those listening to head there. Speaking of Instagram, which, I mean, I do hate I'm afraid to say but you know, social media has won hasn't it, it's beaten us all. But the general, I do have to say the general communications from MakeNoise online are really brilliant. It's a really great mix of education and experimentalism, isn't it? I mean, it seems like to me that you guys really wanted to focus on that fairly early on as a way to engage people with some of your designs. Is that fair to say?

TR
Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually a, it's an interesting question because it kind of leads into some other things that I was thinking I would talk about today. But yeah, early on I'm not sure, actually I can kind of pinpoint an exact moment. We were out in LA and I was having dinner, this is quite a while ago, probably like 20, it was after a NAMM show so probably like 2013 or something like that and I was having a meal with Baseck, I don't know if you know who he is and another fellow who now works for us who goes by the name Rodent and they were both, you know so Rodent, along with Bana Haffar are the folks who started the modular on the spot movement.

WS
Oh, yeah.

TR
They were the ones who started doing that. They started doing it out in L. A. and you know, Baseck, obviously, is a, an incredible musician who is also living, still living out in L. A. and still performing out there and we were having this meal and they showed me this thing, they said hey, you're not on Instagram and I said oh yeah, I've heard of it, I don't know, isn't that just like a photo filter or something? And they say, no, no, there's all kinds of great stuff. People are posting patches and kind of sharing, you know, patch tips and things like that, you know, you should go on there and like share with people how to patch maths and how to use your modules. And I took them seriously. I looked at it and I thought wow yeah, that's a good idea, we should do that. And so that's honestly in my memory how all of that stuff started, but way back then with just those two dudes saying hey, why aren't you doing this and yeah.

WS
It's funny. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this cause I feel like modular synthesis in particular, because it's very visually striking, you know, all the different lights and patch cables and everything and people having, you know, huge great systems and it's kind of perfect in many ways for social media posting, you know, and there's people that have cut sort of decent careers for themselves pretty much in that ecosystem, where, you know, there's an appeal to it, regardless of whether or not you even listen to the music that they're making with it. But it can of course, there's a kind of a slightly, there's a dark side to that where it can kind of become about that sort of like first 10 seconds, endorphin hit appeal, you know, where the actual musical ideas, let alone the philosophical ideas that are being explored and you know, we'll talk a bit more about that later on in this interview, but you know, they can get just kind of thrown out the window basically in favour of this slightly pornographic, you know, gear acquisition syndrome. What, you know, what are your thoughts when it comes to that sort of side of it? Do you kind of, one thing I have noticed with Make Noise videos and that sort of thing is that they are very focused on like one or two modules or like here's how we're going to do this with the with the Strega here's how you know to do this with the Maths or the Morphogene. Is that is that on purpose to keep it focused like that?

TR
Yeah so our social media, we're not trying to be social media superstars, we're not trying to, we don't monetise anything, we actually tried like hell to not monetise our YouTube channel and then they finally came to us and they, it was forced upon us actually to monetise it. They didn't, they said your channel is being monetised. I really didn't want that cause I don't want people to have to watch a commercial just to learn how to use a module they just bought from us but I also don't know how else to disseminate, you know, video tutorials, it's absolutely the best way and it's also the most affordable way for us, so we'll keep using it and YouTube knows that, so they're going to put some commercials on our videos, but yeah, no we don't see it as a source of income, we see it as something that, when you buy one of our instruments, it's another way of learning about it. Some people learn by doing, some people learn by reading and some people learn by watching so we try to offer all of those opportunities. We always, we try to have a manual, but we also try to have some visual aids to help people learn how to use what we make. But on a grander scale, just to kind of address another part of your question, you were talking about how modular is kind of perfect for the social media atmosphere and I think that was true for a while, for a long time, I mean I can even remember myself going to play performances and stuff and you'd show up and you'd open up your modular and it would just strike awe in everybody around you, they would ask you questions, what is that, you know, how does that work, where did you get that and so on, but I think that that age of modular has passed, I think most musicians know what modular is. I mean, you can purchase it at Thomann or Sweetwater, it's, it's very widely known, it's very widely available. There's now software emulations of it. It's no longer the mysterious, I guess, the mysterious unknown instrument that it once was. So I think some of that has, I think that's kind of passed and I think folks that are still operating under that assumption are a little passe, if you ask me. It's time for Modular to recognize that it is, it's of age, you know, it's kind of come to that point. It's, you have everyone, like you said, from Tom York and Apex Twin down to, you know, virtual unknowns producing experimental, strange experimental music that 10 people are playing on, on Bandcamp. Yeah, it's been used in Taylor Swift songs I'm told. It's just we, it's reached that point it's no longer interesting just because it's modular. I think we have to start thinking about that more.

WS
I think that's a really good point, particularly you know, when thinking about it in terms of these kinds of waves of interest in the Eurorack format, obviously when, you know, when Dieter Doepfer sort of coined it, I suppose the, well certainly, you know, specified it, you know, that is, that was an inhospitable marketplace where people were not really, firstly, it was pretty inhospitable and kind of considered a bit dated, but secondly, it was all about analogue and so there was a barrier of entry there to a certain degree and that's something else that I've noticed in, well certainly in recent years, there's been an, you know, I think that's a really good way that you just put it, you know, modular has come of age and I think that with that coming of age there are some really interesting ideas being thrown around now about, particularly in digital, I think there's some really, really interesting innovation happening with microprocessors,  but also kind of this strange kind of analogue does digital. There's binary counters and that kind of thing that are firing out gates, you know, counting from one to, you know, 16 in binary, you know, just brilliant ideas just, you know, all about the musicalisation of computer-type language but bringing that back into this kind of old school, well quote unquote, old school environment. And yeah, like I was saying to you just before we started this interview, this is kind of a personal one because you were the one who kind of got me into Eurorack in the first place. It was, the 0-Coast was my first sort of patchable instrument and I just thought it was just such a wonderfully designed thing with, you know, this kind of miniature modular system.

HERE!
Yeah, it is. It's a good little collection of circuits to start from for sure.

WS
That was also a kind of introduction to West Coast synthesis in the sense that it was, my first thought I remember looking it up was and it was of course Gareth Jones that, who recommended it to me. I remember if I'm not mistaken, I was thinking about getting, it's quite funny considering your career as well, cause I was thinking about getting a Moog Mother 32 and then Gareth Jones said, well have you considered this, which considering that you went from Moog to Make Noise, it's kind of fitting. But the first thing I said was ooh, one oscillator, no filter, okay and that kind of, that workflow, straight away I thought I think I'm going to learn something. It's been amazing actually since then to see the kinds of designs that Make Noise are coming out with really just time after time is innovation after innovation and collaborations, you know, whether it's that's with Tom Ebb or Alessandro Cortini and you know, all sorts of, you know, artistic, you know, movements happening both on the developer side and on the musician side, which is not really something you can say about many industries, particularly not in music technology. Anyway, in fact, talking of music technology, I want to return to that phrase, a revisioning of jettisoned music technology. What do you mean by that, or what did you mean?

TR
And that really is the, that's the early, that's the start of Make Noise. I don't know that we're really doing that anymore, but that was definitely the initial years of Make Noise. It stems from when I was living in New York City, I would go to the public library, which was very close to my house in Brooklyn, it was right across the street from the park, the Brooklyn Public Library. And they had a whole collection of electronics text and, but most of them were quite, they were a little outdated and it was in the reference section, so they weren't, you couldn't check them out, you had to read them there at the library, which was fine because we didn't have AC and the library did, so I did not mind spending time there. It's actually a very nice library and a lot of what I read at that time was these ARRL books that had all these neat circuits in them, it's Amateur Radio Relay League, which is basically ham radio, shortwave radio folks, they would publish a book every year with the latest versions of all the circuits that they used and a lot of those circuits are, they can be applied to music and were applied to music by, you know, folks such as Dr. Moog and Don Buchla and others like John Simonton over at PAIA, many more I'm sure. But yeah, things like balanced modulators, voltage controlled oscillators, filters, all sorts of things, amplifiers. They're all detailed in those books, but in a way that's not musical at all, it's for the purposes of communication and so I think in my mind I'd always, I don't know how much this connection actually exists, but in my mind I've always assumed, I've always thought that folks like Dr. Moog or Don Buchla were walking into their engineering lab and seeing something like an analogue computer, you look up something like a Comdyna analogue computer and it looks like a modular synth. If you look at a picture of it you'll say wow, that actually looks like something I wouldn't mind owning and we actually have one at the shop and they are kind of fun, they are pretty neat. They look like a Sarge and I think they were looking at these things and thinking about how to use them in other ways and those things were designed for things like communication, for doing differential equations, they were the cutting edge technology of the time, probably developed for the military and so I think in my mind I'd always had this idea that, you know, the military develops the technology, you know, because they've got the money and they've got the research, the time and the money to do the research and development and then it kind of gets jettisoned because they move on to the next thing, you know, the infrared heat seeking missiles of the 70s aren't the cutting edge of the 80s so they developed the next technology. Meanwhile, that technology is jettisoned and we're, you know, the civilians are left to see what we can do with it and so I think that was just what was playing out in my head. I was taking these circuits and these ideas that were at one point cutting edge and were probably used to communicate war orders or some sort of thing like that and now I'm using them to make noise. So yeah, I think that was going through my head. I think actually now that I think of it, I feel like maybe we are still doing that to some degree because all of the digital technology that any of us are using, not just Make Noise, but any company in the modular market, it's all been jettisoned already by the folks who developed it, you know, the bigger companies that are doing bigger, faster projects, you know, bouncing signals off the moon and you know, like, making driverless cars.

WS
Yeah, we're waiting for the Eurorack module that can bounce a signal off the moon. That will come, I'm sure. 

TR
Yeah. So yeah, maybe we are still doing that actually, you know, the STM37 or, I'm sorry, the STM32 processor that damn near every modular company uses, is probably pretty low tech, you know, when you look at some of the other things that some of the more cutting edge companies out there are using. 

WS
Interesting. I mean in some ways that's a tale as old as time in electronic music. I'm immediately reminded of things like the vocoder, you know, which was originally a military technology.

TR
Exactly.

WS
Yeah, which sort of, it's, there's something strangely, ironically poetic about how some sort of weapons of war can be reappropriated to make beautiful art.

TR
I know, right? It is. It's fun to think about, it's fun to think about and if you look at, there's other examples, vocoder is a great example though and I think it's a good example because most people, even if they're not into modular synths, most people who are just into music know what a vocoder is and I don't know if you've ever read that book how to recognize beach, there was a book.

WS
No, I know about it though.

TR
It's a great read, it's hilarious and it totally gets into all of these things that we're sort of brushing on here with the ways that the military can influence music, electronic music especially and just these technological developments and how they can sort of filter down into music, it's a great read, but yeah, the vocoder is the perfect example.

WS
So I think we should probably get into your choice of modules which, this is kind of going to sound like some sort of going back to our talk about social media, some sort of plug, you know, you won't believe number three, but this is ending, the last module we're going to talk about is a mystery module, which you told me before this interview, you said it's a 10HP prototype that I cannot name or discuss the features of. Hopefully he didn't give it away by talking about bouncing signals off the moon, but which I promise will provide great discussion about the future of Make Noise and also what my life has been like for the past year or two, so I'm very excited to talk about that at least with as much unembargoed information as we can and you have used, or you've chosen it rather as, you know, for this to be able to play it in your piece later in the episode which is really exciting. But let's start with Maths, which is I suppose, I mean, this is consistently, you know, considered one of the best selling Eurorack modules ever. It's consistently at least the most popular sort of year on year, face of function generator, you know, it can be an oscillator or a pair of oscillators, it can interpret signals, it can be, you know, LFO, it can all sorts of things. I mean first question, why do you think it is so immensely popular?

TR
When it came out there was nothing else like that in the Euro format. Doepfer had done a couple of, and really the idea for Maths kind of came from these modules, Doepfer had done a couple of these two stage function generators, where they put four of them on one panel. I really wish Pete from Make Noise was here because he knows the Doepfer for catalogue numbers by heart, he could name the exact one, he'd be like that's A143-2 and it might be that number, I'm not positive, but it was basically a quad function generator they did.

WS
You just gave me a great insight into the kinds of drinking games that must happen at Make Noise HQ.

TR
Oh, whoa, that is actually a really good idea, I will pose that for the Christmas party.

WS
Doepfer bingo.

TR
Yeah, that would be cool. So I had that module and I liked it a lot, but it's laid out horizontally so it goes left to right and then also there's no mixing on it really, there's just a one mix out but you can't control the levels or anything, if I remember correctly and also just the shapes of the envelopes weren't quite plucky enough. To me, I just have this thing, I like really sharp, hard transients, like the kind that you get from like an ARP2600's envelope when you drive the filter with a little resonance turned up and you get those plucky pings, it's just always something I've really loved and the Doepfer ones, the envelopes were still a little squishy, they were a little lumpy. Not quite lumpy on the level of, like, an EMS Synthi envelope which is probably the lumpiest envelope I've ever used, but definitely not as sharp as an ARP2600 and so I started looking around at different circuits and trying to find some other envelopes that were a little sharper and it was a lot of experimentation and actually I think it might've been Grant Richter that pointed me in a great direction. He says, you know, all of those seventies envelopes kind of use this same, the modular ones from Buchla and Serge, they both use this DBX gain cell, it's a Blackmer cell, it's a transistor based gain cell. He says, you should look that up and learn about it cause that's, you can use that as your integrator and it's gonna, it's really fast, it's gonna let you make these really fast envelope, but then also really long envelopes. So when I made the Maths I sent a prototype of it to Sean Cleary at Analog Haven because he was basically my only dealer, him and Schneider, cause this is, no other shops were really selling modular at that point.

WS
Which says a lot about the environment you were entering into.

WS
Oh yeah. No, I mean at this point I had a hundred customers and I knew them all and you know, so I sent some out to some friends to test and I sent one to Sean just to say, you know, hey, check this out, do you think this is something you could sell? And he gets back and he says, I don't know, it's too, I don't think people want something like this, it's too fussy, it's too complicated, maybe just do like a simpler version of that without all the mixing and all that stuff and I said well, you know, but the mixing is what makes it Maths, you know, you add and subtract your envelopes and make these more interesting shapes by using two of them because what I had done was I had taken the two of the envelopes from the Doepfer module and I used one of their bipolar mixers to combine them and make different shapes and so I wanted a module where I could do that more easily and against Sean's advice I still went ahead and made it and honestly it really wasn't that big of a seller when it first came out. It was a more slow growth, you know, over a couple of years, it started kind of catching on. It does, you know, I wanted something that could do really long envelopes and really short envelopes and it does everything from a half hour to a millisecond, so that's a pretty wide range.

WS
It's an interesting thing you touched on there about the sharpness of it because, you know, those who haven't used the Maths but have used the 0-Coast for instance, will recognize the slope circuit on the Make Noise, which is the same component if I'm not mistaken as it's used in the Maths module. 

TR
It's a modified version but yeah.

WS
The thing that I really remember myself about my first interactions with the 0-Coast was that sharpness that, you know, being able to, that exponential slope or, you know, being able to move from logarithmic to exponential and not masses in sort of in between in terms of equal rise and fall. You kind of, you move past that spot pretty quickly and you're, you know, there's a characterful slope kind of whichever way you choose to trigger it and that was really, that was just really characterful and I think really defined a part of this type of approach that, yeah, I felt like I was immediately getting results that I wasn't able to achieve before with a conventional ADSR. Obviously you know, I love ADSR, you know, envelopes and there's so many amazing ways to use them and that, you know, they're so expressive, but certainly, you know, getting kind of more, you know, like you said, that kind of that 2600 style sound into an ecosystem previously that, you know, had only kind of understood, I'd only kind of understood ADSR as a way that things could move, you know, or triangle wave LFOs or that kind of thing and you know, obviously we're getting into sort of the East West kind of conversation there. I know we're sort of flirting with that, which I kind of want to steer us away from a little bit. Maths kind of really kicked off things for you, didn't it at Make Noise.

TR
Yeah, so yeah, so there's a few pieces of this story. When I made the Maths, it was just me, it was just a one person operation and I didn't really expect it to grow into a real business. I was just doing it I think just because it was of interest to me and I was making some money doing it, which I needed, I didn't have any money, so I needed the money too. So but the thing about Maths is it has kind of fueled a lot of the, even though Maths itself is not terribly innovative, I mean it's not really innovative at all. I mean, it's an old, a bunch of old circuits collected into a 20HP panel, it's seventies tech. But what it did do is it allowed us to, it allowed me to make some money to reinvest into Make Noise and do some more innovative things. Without the Maths, I wouldn't have had the money to do a project like the Phonogene, which the Phonogene even though by today's standards it's lo-fi at best and it's definitely been eclipsed severely by not just our own Morphagene, but other companies products, but at the time the Morphagene was very cutting edge and it was expensive to do and I wouldn't have had the money to do it without sales of a module like Maths.

WS
Yeah that's a, I mean, what a perfect segue into the Morphagene which is your next module that you've chosen. I will say, I do want to fly the flag in defense of the Phonogene because the audio quality of that, I was, you know, the last episode of this podcast with Scanner, we were talking about the Phonogene and about that, kind of that real, it kind of has some of the raw digital kind of aliasing that you know, you tune or associate with, you know, the old, I don't know, the old Akai samplers or something like that. It's this lovely artifact of quite a raw digital age of design in musical instruments which I am very fond of and I think will age very well and so let me officially encourage you to reissue that at some point.

TR
Yeah, I think part of what you're hearing there is the original Phonogene firmware to change the sample time. You were actually changing the sample rate which is very uncommon. There's only a few samplers that did that. The Synclavier did that, the Akai S612 was a sampler that did that and that was a sampler I was very fond of, especially it had those sliders on the front to adjust the start and end times. It was just, I mean, that was, just felt incredible even though it was one of the most lo-fi and limited samplers out there. You could, it was, you know, in the nineties it seemed like a real treat. So yeah, that's probably what that is. As you turn it down, you are literally just playing the samples slower, the sample rate is just going down so yeah, it can get a lot of aliasing and there's also, there's no, so unlike an instrument like the EMU Emulator II, where they're using a lower sample rate, I think it's something like, I can't remember if it's 22 or 32 kilohertz, I can't remember what it is. It's eight bit, but they also have a lot of filtering, both on the inputs and the outputs and at the time I had never looked at schematic for something like the Emulator II, it just didn't occur to me to look at that for guidance and now I have and I see all the things that they did and we didn't do any of that, we just did some real, some mild, just very simple filtering and there's no companding or any of these extra steps that they took to gain fidelity in an instrument like the Emulator II. Instead we just put the audio in and take it out as it is and that result can result in a very distorted, aliased sound which some people really like.

WS
Yeah, definitely. It's kind of, it's you know, returning to what you said before, you know, this just is a lovely phrase, you know, modular has come of age. We can say going into the wider, sort of the wider ecosystem of electronic music, musical instruments that we can sample in lush, beautiful lossless, so well, you know, 32 bit stereo now, you know, so where'd you go from there. Well, you could maybe go back again.

TR
Yeah.

WS
And I for one really love that. But with, of course the Morphogene, you know, several things changed there. Firstly, obviously SoundHack got involved. Tell me a little bit about that collaboration and how that came about. 

TR
So I had gone to the NAMM show to show the Phonogene actually and Tom Erbe, he has been going to the NAMM show since he was a kid actually, I found out, well not, maybe not a kid, but for quite a long time. He goes every year, it's just something he likes to do and he saw, he read something somewhere, maybe it was Sonic State or something, he read something somewhere that someone was showing, a company was showing a product called the Phonogene and Tom being a music scholar of course knew  what that name was referencing, Pierre Schaeffer's bespoke instrument the Phonogene and he decided he needed to see it. And he hunted me down, which was actually probably pretty hard because we were in the basement amongst the imported ukuleles and karaoke machines and we were in a shared booth as well, so the Make Noise name was not actually listed on the NAMM catalogue, it was listed under Analogue Haven. But he found me and introduced himself and just said I needed to see what this Phonogene is, I'm amazed that someone is showing a Phonogene at the NAMM show and that's how our relationship kicked off right there. I should add that I actually knew who he was, well I didn't recognise him because I'd never seen a photo of him, but I knew who SoundHack was because I had used the SoundHack software back in the days when I lived in Chicago. I used it to process sounds before I put them into my Ensoniq EPS sampler so yeah, I was stoked that he came down to check it out. And then, on a whim, so while I was doing the Phonogene project, which was done with a fellow named Fleming, a.k.a Gotharman, he has made some modules, mostly he makes desktop synths, I think he's out of the Netherlands still.

WS
Okay.

TR
I've only gotten to meet him once in person unfortunately, most of our relationship has been over email and you know obviously we don't really talk anymore because he just did the one, the Phonogene with us. But I'd also been trying to do another project with him, which was the Echophon and I wanted to do a sort of rotating tape head type echo a.k.a Tempophone, Springer Tempophone type device and, you know, Fleming, he wasn't as versed in music history as myself or someone like Tom and he didn't really know what I was talking about and all the prototype firmware that we had done for it didn't really sound good to me and so on a whim I just mentioned it to Tom and his eyes kind of lit up and he said, I know exactly what you're talking about and he was really excited about the prospect of trying to do a module that sort of gave that type of effect and that became the Echophon. That was the first project that we did with Tom and then I think we did the Erbe-Verb next and then Morphagene, which was a really long project and is kind of my attempt to right all the things that didn't go quite the way I wanted them to in the Phonogene for numerous reasons, not, the hardware limitations, memory limitations, financial limitations. And I just wanted to make the more ultimate version of that vision and that vision was Music Concrete, and modular merging, which is something you don't really have in the past and if there's one thing that I do feel like Make Noise has done that is pioneering, it's bringing those two worlds together because they were really quite separate up until recent years. Music Concrete was one thing and synthesizer music was another and those two things rarely intersected.

WS
I mean, you're really talking about tape noise and - tape noise - tape music and synthesizer music, you know and that's, the thing I love about that collision of worlds that you've kind of really engineered, you know, in your range of modules is the way that it kind of precipitates such a philosophical discussion about music and sound and which I love about, you know, Eurorack in general, it often does, but particularly in, I feel like this is going to sound so, I don't know what the word is, dorky or something, but reading the manuals for modules like the Morphagene, they read so philosophically at points and you know, the kind of, the intersection between maths and philosophy and art, it's kind of, there's some sort of Galileo, da Vinci sort of kind of ecosystem happening there.

TR
Yeah. I mean, what you're talking about there is the combination of myself and Walker, especially Walker in more recent years, as you probably tell from his YouTube exploits, he's getting more and more deeper and deeper into the philosophies of music which I'm all for. I feel like music is, we've reached this point where, you know, to the greater general public, the most exciting thing in music is the fact that we might be able to type some text prompts in and generate the exact music we feel like hearing at any given moment but from a musician's perspective it's like I find myself going inward and trying to, you know, at 1am when I can't sleep and I come down to my instrument, what is going to soothe me, what is going to make me, what's gonna wear me out make me tired and able to go to bed and you know, so philosophically speaking I guess, you know finding the the joy in making music instead of trying to make the product of music I think it's gonna become a bigger and bigger pursuit for a lot of us. But yeah, but back on topic of the Morphagene, it is that intersection and I think my interest in that started a long time ago at a library record sale and I've mentioned this in several interviews so I won't get into the full details of it, but essentially libraries used to sell off their lesser checked out albums, or if they had an album that had been checked out too often and they needed to get a new copy of it, they would have these sales, at least the one in my town would. And I would go there and you could get records for 25 cents to a dollar each and back in the late eighties, probably like 89, maybe 90, I had gone to one of these sales and I found, I bought these albums largely based on cover art. I mean, these were, they were typically artists you'd never heard of. It's stuff the library's getting rid of and one of the records was Silver Apples and the Moon, Morton Subotnick and that record I think, had been checked out maybe twice and that record, you know, was obviously later of great importance to me at the time. I, you know, I saw the word Buchla on the back of it, but I, you know, I didn't have any idea what a Buchla was and there was no other books about a Buchla in the library, I went and searched, there's nothing else. But the sounds on the record were very intriguing, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. But there was another, there was two other records I picked up that day and they were both collection, well one was a collection of Music Concrete and the other was a record called Electrano Music and I should have written down the name of the artist before this interview but I forgot it, it's kind of a hard one to find, I don't know if it's been released into streaming yet, you can find it on YouTube I think. It's a fantastic record and it was also tape music and these records really, they clicked with me for some reason. I think maybe just because I was already getting into recording things to cassette and stuff and the idea that you could make music with tape as the instrument just seemed like phenomenal to me. And you know, we didn't have, this is, you gotta keep in mind, this is you know, 1989, 1990, there wasn't access to the internet where you could just go learn about the San Francisco Tape Music Center and all this stuff. It all seemed so mysterious at the time. And you know, also prior to that, you know, I lived through the release of, you know, of the sampler, you know, the idea of like sampling being music and, and I can still remember hearing on the Cosby Show, the episode where Stevie Wonder's on there and he runs into their car and then invites him up to his studio and he has a Sinclavier. I didn't know it was a Sinclavier back in the day obviously, I just saw that he was playing this big machine and he had a microphone and, you know, Theo would lean into the microphone and says, jam it on the one. And then Stevie Wonder starts playing that on the keyboard and stuttering it and repeating it, slowing it down, speeding it up.

WS
That's great.

TR
And my little, you know, 10 or 11 year old mind is just like reeling with this, like how is he doing this magic. And around that same time, I remember going to the mall, which was very close to my house, you could walk there, so I would walk to the mall sometimes and just like, hang out like a, you know, annoying 12 year old. I went into Sears and Roebuck and they had a Casio, a big Casio SK1 display. It was brand new, it had just come out and I didn't know what the hell it was. I just, you know, saw this keyboard, there were speakers on it. So I went up and I tapped a key.

WS
This is a, for those, just for a visual, the SK1, this is a small, this is junky car boot sale stuff by modern standards isn't it. But like when we're talking, I can imagine pristine, you know, with their little horrible teal graphic on the, you know.

TR
Oh yeah, for sure. But I mean at the time it looked like the future, but yeah today obviously it looks like something, it's definitely something you'd find in a thrift store, but at the time it was the future. They had a big display for it and there was one sitting right in the center that you could play and I walked up and I tapped the key and out of the speakers, Aram Masram, Aram Masram. Tap lower, Aram Masram. Tap higher, Aram Masram. Aram Masram was a kid who lived three doors up the street from me and so I'm just, I'm thinking how, like how is, how in the hell is his name on this thing because I just didn't even, I didn't have a clue what the hell sampling was. And you know, but there was like a little like, you know, how to thing on there and showed you how to sample, make your own samples and stuff. But I mean, that moment is just burned in my brain, you know and then, you know, the Tone Lōc song comes out with the Van Halen sample. I was a mega Van Halen fan so the minute I heard it on the radio, I was like wait, what is this, you know, this isn't a Van Halen song. And so just kind of living through that whole thing of like what it means to make music from pre-existing sounds, whether they're your own or they're nature's sounds or they're someone else's sounds, it's something that I have lived through and it's kind of always been very fascinating to me. And so when I got into modular, it was one of the things like right away I just, I really wanted a way to do that but within the context of a modular. And to give credit where credit's due, the Harvestman had already done his Tyme Sefari Module which was one I really, really loved, but the Tyme Sefari wasn't, it didn't do all the things I, it wasn't fast enough, it didn't have the responsiveness that I really wanted and but I didn't want to, it still isn't, it was an incredible module and especially at the time that came out, it was, I mean it was another mind bender, I don't think anybody was really ready for it when it came out. So yeah, so that's what led me to do the Phonogene and then later the Morphagene, just this desire for the worlds of synthesiser music and Music Concrete to kind of collide and see what happens.

WS
Yeah, totally and that's, I mean, we could spend this whole episode talking about that, which I wish we could do cause I'm also as you're talking I'm, you know, I'm thinking about how the tape workflow or that you could say the tape mindset, that's something that's been really, you know, Teenage Engineering have gone feet first in for that type of workflow with their instruments in various ways and it's definitely, there's something about it that's, you know, and there's obviously, there's some great modules out there that are taking that baton as well, you know, Instruo for example, you know, there's some really brilliant designs really congregating around, there's something about the responsiveness, the transients and that's before you even get to the sonic signature of working with tape, you know, the varispeed idea, you know, even though you are working in the digital realm you're, it's one thing about the Morphagene that I really love is how it really does behave and misbehave sometimes like a piece of analogue equipment. But yeah like I say, we could...

TR
Hopefully, we don't fix too many of those things.

WS
We could go on all day about it but I want to move on to the next module, which was also very formative for you. This kind of links back to your time at Moog. I've read somewhere you talk about tuning filters in stereo and this eventually led to the Qpas.

TR
Yes, yes. So, yeah, on the Voyager and it's funny because I always felt like it was one of the undersold  components of the Moog Voyager was the stereo filter, I always thought it was awesome. It might've been because when I was, my workstation, I did it with headphones instead of speakers just because I, right next to me was the Theremin tuning station and we would interfere with each other, so we both used headphones.

WS
I've got to say, with utmost respect, I can't think of a worse desk to be next to than the Theremin tuning station.

TR
I mean yeah, except the guy who did it, Maestro Steve we called him, was an awesome dude and I'll tell you, he was a hell of a, he could actually play it, he could actually play a Theremin. He might still be, I don't know if he's still with Moog or not, I haven't seen him in years, but great guy. But yeah for sure, on the other side of me was the demo room which had a theremin plugged into every MoogerFooger in the line at the time and that was awful because inevitably every person that came in for a demo did that same thing where they just kind of waved their hand past the wand and they have all the effects turned on and you just get this like, this just terrible sweep of like pitch and every effect possible layered on it that was the classic demo move whenever anyone was in the demo room checking out that stuff. But yeah, I think maybe because I had headphones on while I was calibrating and quality controlling Voyagers, it just always really struck me how beautiful it was to have stereo filtering and with the Qpas I wanted to take it a step further and it kind of leans in a little bit to, it kind of leads in a little bit to the future of Make Noise, which is this idea of sort of clustering function blocks to allow for like, deeper patches, denser patches without having to have so many multiples of modules. So with the Qpas I stack four filter cores together but then I give a simpler way of accessing them. I don't just give, you know, it's not just four control voltage inputs, it's a left and a right and they push the filter cores in different directions, both, per side, so the left side, the two filter cores on the left side are crossing each other. But then also from left to right they end up intersecting and I think it's just, it's an effect that I really like. I like it more than panning. With panning it can be so, it's hard to, it's so flat sounding sometimes, it's kind of, I would compare it to the difference between a VCA and a low pass gate in the way that Don Buchla said that, you know, as something gets quieter it loses energy, it shouldn't be as bright anymore, right? And as something gets farther away, it should sound a little duller, it should sound less bright and I think that's another element that I like about using filters for panning and spatial for, filtering for spatial effects is that you get this depth, this three dimensional quality that you just don't get with just standard VCA based panning and level control. So I guess in some ways it's also related a little bit to the low pass gate in that way, that as something gets further away, as it moves more to the left or more to the right, it gets darker or potentially brighter if you're using the high pass or some combination of the filters. So yeah, I'm just, I'm proud of the design because as far as I know something like this didn't exist in Eurorack prior, didn't exist in modular prior. I could be wrong. There is the Doepfler, no I'm sorry, not the Doepfler the Buchla 291, which is a stack of three band pass filters. But the thing about that module is the way you use it. I'm sorry, I should say the 291E is the stack of three. It never felt we had that module at the shop, it never felt like there was any thought given to how to facilitate the use of all three, it always felt like you had to very meticulously program what each of the three were doing and you could get incredible results with it, don't get me wrong.

WS
But this is Buchla we're talking about, no shortcuts.

TR
No shortcuts yeah, everything took so long to set up and I'm, I like to feel more in the flow of things when I'm making music. I don't like to stop and have to like, you know, jump, you know, to a nested menu and really think, you know, in a planning way. I don't like to have to plan things, I like to just sort of move forward and so the Qpas kind of does that. It's just knobs, you're just turning them, you're moving things further away, closer together, more to the left, more to the right.

WS
Very, and I really, I think the adjective that always comes to mind when I'm thinking about the Qpas is watery. It's just so watery and wet.

TR
It is true yeah and that's something I'm really proud of, I love those kind of sounds. I loved, I'm not the hugest fan of the Serge system but I love the, there's one of the Serge filters I really, really like. I think they make three filters. I can't remember which, what the name of it is but it's, there's one of their filters that is just the most liquid sounding filter and I love that about it. It's probably my favorite thing about this, not my, probably it is, it's the thing I like about the Serge system is that filter. I actually used to have a Serge Animal panel mostly just to have that filter and for some reason during the pandemic I traded my Serge Animal for an MPC 3000. I have no idea why.

WS
Wow. That's a rogue pandemic move.

TR
I know. That was one of those like desperate moments where it's just like, I need something new to play with, what's something I know someone will want, you know, everyone wants a Serge Animal. So it was an easy trade to make. I don't know if it was a great trade.

WS
My, I have a, do you wanna hear my big trade regret story?

TR
Yeah, yeah.

WS
When I was younger I was a, I am still a guitarist but when I was younger I was, that was kind of the only thing I played when I was like 18 or something and my dad wanted to essentially facilitate me getting a new guitar and my uncle was really into his electronic instruments and had given some kind of synthesiser to, I guess to our family, which was in the attic. And my dad said, I wonder if we, why don't we sell that synthesiser and we could get you a new guitar with the money from the synthesiser. And I thought yeah that's, well no-one's using it, I don't know how it works. I kind of, I got it down a couple of times and tried to, you know, I just had no idea about the architecture of a synth. I could just make the filter squeal and that was pretty much it. And, you know, anyway, so I think we, my dad sold it for something like about a thousand pounds, 1500 pounds, you know that's, and anyway, looking back, it was an original ARP Odyssey that flew out the door quicker than you could, you know, pretty much the moment, you know, a thousand pounds for an original ARP Odyssey. Someone I think must have come over to pick it up and sort of looked a bit with a combination of sort of glee and pity on us grossly underselling this antique. Anyway, I always look back on that as a kind of, but it was key, you know, I make no, you know, no regrets. I was, you know, that guitar served me well.

TR
Yeah, you know, you weren't collecting, you were playing. You needed an instrument to, that was progressing when you were, to become a better guitar player you need a better guitar.

WS
Yeah yeah, exactly.

TR
I might have a story that can top that one.

WS
Oh, go on.

TR
Again this is pre-internet time, so I think obviously it would've turned out different at a later time. I had a Roland Space Echo that I had bought at a yard sale and it was working good and, but I needed a distortion pedal and I went to Guitar Center and this is probably 92, 93ish.

WS
So someone selling a Roland Space Echo saying, why would I mess around with this inconvenient tape when I could get this done digitally?

TR
Oh totally. It was big, a little bit, you know, funky and it didn't play well with, you know, rock bands and stuff at the time, you know, it's 1992 and I traded that Roland Space Echo straight up for a Boss heavy metal pedal. Man, that Guitar Center employee must have been high fiving people. I mean admittedly the Space Echo wasn't super desirable at that point, but that's still a pretty lopsided tree.

WS
Wow that is, I mean, not only for a basic guitar pedal, but for one of the most reviled guitar pedals of all time. 

TR
I know. At the time it just, it seemed like I needed a distortion, I didn't have a distortion pedal and I, the band I was in, they said I needed to get a distortion pedal on that. So I, you know, that's what I had to trade.

WS
I don't think anyone is going to top that story for bad trades. I think you definitely take the prize with that one.

TR
Yeah, Guitar Center Chicago. They really took me for a ride on that one.

WS
Well, talking of delays, it seems like you kind of, you've made up for some sort of, maybe there's some kind of, you know, some sort of vengeance you needed to have against your former self when it came to delays, because the Strega is obviously all about delays. This is something that you designed in the same form factor as the 0-Coast with of course, Alessandra Cortini of Nine Inch Nails and you have basically for one of your modules that you've chosen, your next module, you essentially took one of the circuits from the Strega appropriated into your rack. This is, am I saying this right, the Bruxa?

TR
Yep, Bruxa.

WS
B R U X A. It's essentially a multiple delay line module plus distortion plus feedback. Why don't you talk to us about that.

TR
Yeah sure. So the reason I put this one in here is it's kind of another milestone moment in my life, both as Make Noise, but also as a musician. So I had not really been making, I hadn't really been recording much music for about 10 years, actually a little over 10 years, probably in part because Make Noise was just consuming all of my energy but also I just wasn't really feeling super inspired. And Alessandro and I had become friends and he had expressed an interest in wanting to work together on a project and working on that project really rekindled the fire inside me to make music, to record it, to play it live. And I attribute that to just hanging out with Alessandro, he just, he's a very, he can be a very inspiring artist and just the way he talks about things. If you ask him a question inevitably the answer you get is never what you thought you were going to get, but always very, I mean, for lack of a better word, kind of profound. Even though the guy's younger than me, sometimes I feel like I'm talking to somebody who's been on this planet far longer than myself, so it just, I think that's why it's in here. I actually haven't used the Bruxa that much in my own music yet because it hasn't been available for very long but I have used the Strega quite a bit. But since this was modules only, I didn't want to break that parameter that you had set and I thought, and so instead I thought you know what, I'll just throw the Bruxa in there because it'll allow me to tell the story and it'll give me some of those sounds and so yeah, so developing that was just, I feel like it was really interesting and really, there was a lot of growth that I felt as a musician in working with Alessandro. And then also it was a very interesting project from the perspective of Make Noise as well, because I got a chance to do a lot of things that I normally wouldn't feel comfortable doing because of customer pushback. So the Strega is very noisy, the Bruxa is also pretty noisy and very mysterious. It misbehaves more than any other module that we make, even the Morphagene and we're a company that's kind of known for making somewhat abstract, mysterious, misbehaving modules, but the Strega takes the absolute cake on that, it really pushes that envelope. And the reason we were able to do that, I believe, is because anytime someone complains about it I can just point to Alessandro and say hey, this is what this guy wanted, don't complain to me. Talk to Alessandro, he's the one who said it should be noisier, he's the one that said it should overload more. You know, we're talking about a guy who told me when we started working together on the project, he says, well the first thing you need to do is you need to get a Synthi and study it, like, oh yeah, that's pretty easy, I'll see what I can do there. I actually was able to find a Synthi thanks to a long time synth friend, Logan Erickson.

WS
Are we talking, are we talking the wall sized Synthi 100, the electronic music systems.

TR
The Synthi AKS.

WS
Okay, right, right, right.

TR
Yeah, that's the one Alessandro likes, the small one.

WS
I was going to say, because that's, well otherwise we'd be talking about, I think, probably the most valuable electronic music instrument in the world.

TR
I saw one once, it wasn't functioning unfortunately, so we couldn't play it. Yeah it's insanely large. It's kind of, you know, you see pictures and then you're in a room with it and I mean it just, it looks like something that should be in a 1960s airline, air travel control center or something, it is so big.

WS
Absolutely. You know what, my bandmate in VocaGentle, Ellie, is, she's based out of Studio Mute in London and she works with a Synthi 100 to her right every day and a Roland System 700 behind her and a Moog system. Anyway, we're going off topic, we're going off topic.

TR
Oh yeah, yeah. So one of the things he wanted me to study was the way that the Synthi overloads and a Synthi is kind of unique to most other modular systems because the attenuation occurs at the output of the sources so all of your destinations are unattenuated and your source is where you attenuate and what it kind of leads to is that a lot of times from one stage or one function block to the next you're overloading. It's just, you can avoid it a little bit but generally you end up with a lot of overloading because of that same thing of like, you can't adjust the level going into the circuit, you can only adjust it at the output. So if you're trying to send a signal to two or three destinations, inevitably one of those destinations isn't going to be loud enough and one of them's going to be too loud. The too loud one's going to saturate and the other one's not going to be loud enough. You're going to turn it up to get it loud enough. Now the saturating one's saturating even more and each stage is like that, whether you're going into the filter, the, what they call the trapezoid VCA, the reverb, the EQ at the end, which I love that, that's probably one of my favorite spots. It all overloads and so that was the reason he wanted me to look at that instrument so deeply before developing the Strega was he, we didn't want to have something that had a distortion knob on it. We wanted something where each stage presented opportunity to overload into the next stage so you could get this sort of cascading of distortions and overloads and overdrives and you can also make some clean sounds with it too. If you listen to some of the real pretty, like almost synthetic string type sounds on Breakin is a Memory or Cool Echoes, that's all Strega. So you can get some pretty sounds with it too, it's just largely I think people push it full tilt and get the real decimated, like distorted sounds cause it's just so damn good at that.

WS
Presumably that was what was behind the decision to release that compilation of different people using it because, you know, it seems, you know, this is a compilation on the Make Noise subsidiary label, put on Bandcamp if I'm not mistaken, with people like Alessandro and Tony of course, but then also Marta Saloni is Daniel Miller on there, several people all pushing and pulling it in different directions. What a great way of showcasing something that is clearly beyond yourself as a musician.

TR
There are some great artists on there. There's a Katarina Barbieri has a track on there. Robert A. A. Lowe, his track is very haunting, Wonderful. Oh, Ben Frost, his track is one of my favorites, really incredible track on there. He did a soundtrack for  a Netflix series I think it was and I haven't watched it yet, but he said he had used it on there as well. He's such an, he's an incredible musician, such an incredible musician. I was really excited when both him and also Katerina, getting them on that comp really excited me because they're a couple of my favorites. And then of course Rob Lowe, but I knew he would do it if I asked him but I still love having him on there for it. Definitely some of my faves. I'm probably...

WS
Did you ever think that when you were going into making instruments that they would end up, did you ever think or hope that they would end up in the hands of people you respect so much?

TR
I felt, you know it was validating the day that Rob called me, for example. I can still remember I was still, it's when we were still living out in Marshall actually and the shop was basically a spare bedroom in our little house out there and I got a phone call from Rob who I hadn't talked to in a long time. I used to talk to Rob all the time, we were both in bands in Chicago and he worked at this club called the Empty Bottle, gosh I feel like I went to that place five nights a week and I went from seeing him all the time to not seeing him for years and then I got this phone call from him and I was very excited to see that it was Rob calling and he's calling with a question about Maths and I just it, I mean, it almost brought a little tear to my eye. I was so excited that this friend and musician whose band, I still love the 90 Day Men, but it was really incredible just to get the phone call from him because I was just excited that, oh wow, Rob's into this stuff, that's really great. And he had called me with a question about, he was trying to do something with his Maths and he needed help with the patch. Of course, he very quickly reached a point of knowing how to use this stuff better than I did. There was a point where he would call me and then there was this point where he was no longer calling me with questions like that, which I love to see but yeah, seeing him use it was, you know, just because I have such a long time relationship with him at that point, I had known him, I mean we met probably 1995 or so but no, I mean to answer your question more directly, I never even thought someone like, well, for example Thom Yorke, you know, Thom came through Ashville to play a show with their band The Smile, who are really, really incredible. I was kind of blown away at how good a band that is and he wanted to visit Make Noise. So of course I'm gonna facilitate that. Never in a million years, though, did I think that Thom York would be coming by Make Noise to check out, he wanted to check out a Strega, and he wanted to check out a Spectrafone and they actually, he picked up a Strega and then they, I guess they plugged it in at soundcheck and they liked it so much that they got back in touch and they said hey, you're coming to the show tonight, right? Yeah. Well can you bring another Strega? They wanted a second one I guess, so we did, we brought them one but yeah, never in a million, I never thought that so many musicians that I admired would be interested in what we were doing at Make Noise, it just didn't occur to me.

WS
What I feel is that when something is done with enough artistry and love, it doesn't matter whether it's on the music side or on the development of instruments side, that it's kind of, it's unequivocal and people pick up on that and that's something that has, I see, I feel has really captured the imaginations of a lot of musicians when they see a lot of the love and dedication that goes into instruments that they use on a really personal level, there's something, that feeling of, you know, having something that feels almost like a module, which feels almost like what an album feels like to an artist, it takes about the same amount of time often to develop. And it feels like there's this great dialogue between the, you know, the musicians who use these things and the people who make them and you know, that seems to me unsurprising that you would therefore be kind of interfacing with these really celebrated artists, you know.

TR
Something you said just kind of jostled this from my memory. Another thing that I really like about seeing someone like Thom or Rob Lowe or another friend of mine who was also in that band 90 Day Men, Brian Case, who got into modular as well, is that all of these artists, they're all older, you know, they're all close to my age, I'm 50 and they're all still developing. I love that, I love that someone like Thom, he could easily just coast along doing the thing that he did 30 years ago and just continuing that but instead he's enthralled by the potential of learning this entirely new instrument and interfacing with it and feeling inspired by it and I love that. And the same with Rob, You know Rob didn't have to get into modular, he was an incredible bass player, he could have just kept playing bass and that would have been great too,  but he wanted to expand and learn more and explore some different areas and it's led him into some really incredible paths, you know, he's doing a lot of soundtrack work now that I think was always a dream of his and I just, I love seeing that. It's just cool to me that these folks are still developing as musicians even though they're approaching their 60s, they're still developing. I mean, even you mentioned Daniel Miller earlier, you know, or Gareth, you know, these are people, they've already done so much, they've had, they've made so many musical milestones and yet they're still searching, they're still looking for that next spark and that's what's brought them into this world of modular synthesis. They're like, what's the next thing that's going to ignite my brain and really bring out some new musical energy. I gotta respect that. I hope I'm that way when I'm, when I reach my 60s, I hope I'm still feeling that spark.

WS
Yeah, absolutely. Well, what's the next spark in the Make Noise lineup. This is something that you can't talk about by name, but the next, this is the last module in our list, which is the as yet unnamed prototype, which we could come up with a code working name for it. Now I'm just looking around the room, I mean, I can see a drill in the corner of my studio.

TR
Sure, drill.

WS
Let's just call it the make noise drill for now.

TR
The module drill, yeah. So the reason I put this one in there is it and you know, this is a perfect time to talk about this, I'm talking about reigniting the mind, finding that spark again. So I had been really into recording and playing music and I had gotten a little less into designing new modules and was more into using the modules I had been a part of designing and then I, life had some very tragic turns. My partner Kelly was diagnosed with a very rare cancer.

WS
Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry.

TR
Yeah, yeah, thank you. We had to move out of Asheville because we couldn't get treatment for it. We had to move up to Boston for a year. And so for one year we were living away from the company, which was very strange, it's been a part of my life for 15 years, it's been my whole life, essentially and now suddenly I'm away from it for a year and a lot changed, a lot changed at the company, a lot changed in me, a lot changed in Kelly. So she's continuing treatment and she's doing pretty well, but it's a lot has changed in our lives and I was, when I came back from Boston after that almost a year being away there was a point where I almost just, I'll be honest I almost just shut Make Noise down. There was a lot of internal strife, there was no new products developed and we just had this grim, it was looking grim honestly. And I wasn't sure, I didn't know if I had the energy to keep going. And thankfully, you know, we actually, we lost some key employees to some folks, you know when, I think something like cancer will really highlight strong and weak relationships in your life. So we lost some very, what I thought were very dear employees, people who really mattered to me as a business owner and I wasn't sure, I was thinking, gosh, I don't know how I'm even going to replace some of these folks. And in some cases it was just people that I just liked, in other cases it was people that I really felt like would be really hard to replace and so I had to make a choice, you know, I had to decide if I had the energy to kind of rebuild and thankfully, right before this all happened, we had hired a GM, a general manager, which we'd never had before and it's a fellow, Ryan Jobes and we were really lucky to find somebody for a manager position who was also a very, he was a modular enthusiast, he loved Make Noise when we found him, you know, he was already, he already had a Serge system, for example. We got very lucky and I think, you know, between him and some other folks at Make Noise like Walker and Rodent, kind of gave me a feeling that we could do it, we could rebuild and we could keep the company going. And at that point I looked at the structure of the company and I thought gosh, for all these years, we've been building this company, we have a production team. It's not big, you know, it's usually somewhere between three and five people and maybe every once in a while there'll be a sixth. We had a media team, we had two full-timers and one part-timer, we had a tech support team, two people. But engineering was me, it was just one person and of course Tom Erbe for the SoundHack projects. But you know, those are very, you know, it's just those projects that Tom works on. So it was essentially myself and I thought gosh, we've got teams for all these other things, why do we not have an engineering team. And at that point I thought if I'm going to keep doing Make Noise, I need to build a team. And the reason I'm telling you the story is that this new module that we're going to launch in early 2025 is going to be the first module that we will do with this new team and so we sought out, we set out myself and Ryan Jobes the General Manager, set out to find some engineers to work with me and build the next generation of Make Noise synthesisers. And it took way longer than we thought, it was a really, really hard process of interviewing people. We got some incredible applicants and one of them was someone I've actually been trying to hire for years, he was an engineer over at Moog. His name was Mark Crowley and he's the young fellow who did the Moog Grandmother and the Matriarch and then the most recently the Muse. He was the lead engineer on these projects. He's a younger guy, but he's just, he's a phenomenal engineer. I've been trying to get him to come work with us for years, but I knew it would not, I didn't feel like it would ever happen, but with the recent changes over at Moog I think he felt like he wanted a new direction as well and he was one of the applicants which really excited me and so we snagged him up. And then, so he's analogue engineer. And then I, we also, I wanted a full time digital engineer as well because as you've noted several times in the program here, the future of Eurorack is more and more digital and that used to bum me out because I love analogue stuff. But then I started thinking about it, you know, there's a lot of digital synths out there. You take something like the Waldorf Quantum, a very powerful digital synth, I guess it's a hybrid, the Iridium, that's purely digital, very powerful. But it's nowhere near the type of experience that you get from using a 7U case full of a bunch of DSP modules from companies, you know, like ALM, Make Noise, Mutable, all the different companies making them, Harvestman or I guess Industrial Music Electronics is the name of Scott's company now. But using, you know, noise engineering, I mean gosh, there's just so many good, Qubit, there's so many good modules being developed in the digital realm. And the experience of interconnecting all these little computers is unlike using computer software or a full complete hardware synth like a Waldorf Iridium. It's a totally different experience and the results are also very, very different. I still have never gotten the kind of results that I get with a little tape and microsound music machine, you know, our little system with the skip system with the Morphagene as the star, I can't get those results with a computer and I'm pretty good at using a software like Ableton Live, for example.  

WS
Here's my hot take. I think that the reason for that is that because the protocol of Eurorack is and will always be analogue, I think that that, within that very boundaried set of parameters, it can go anywhere and feel, you know, authentic.

TR
Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah, we haven't succumbed to some sort of digital or really structured communication protocol. It's still a pretty raw, old school way of communicating between devices that leaves a lot of room for interpretation as well. The way one digital module interprets that LFO that you patch can be totally different than the next. So yeah I really came around to it, I really came around to understanding, you know, this is the future. As much as I love analogue, the future is, more and more it's digital. And so we hunted high and low for somebody that could do full time digital engineering for us and we settled on a really young fellow named Ben Surgeon Tannis and he's got an incredible amount of energy and I've really, really enjoyed working with him. He came to us from a company called Electrosmith. He worked on the Chompi for example.

WS
This is Electrosmith who, you know, make microprocessors like the Daisy Seed and that sort of thing, yeah.

TR
Exactly, yeah. So anyhow we picked up Ben and so now I have this small, but a very, for me, powerful feeling engineering team in Ben and Mark and it's been a really incredible ride for me because these guys, they're both younger than me, they both have a lot of energy and they're really pushing me. They're making me work harder than I've worked in probably five or six years so, and I appreciate that because I think that's what's going to keep, it's kind of comes back to what we were talking about is you grow older as an artist, being able to maintain that spark and that energy, these guys are helping me do that and then I really appreciate it. So that's the main reason I wanted this module in my collection to kind of talk about the future of Make Noise and my own music. I mean it's, I find myself really enthralled with modular again. For a period of time it was my main instrument, but it wasn't necessarily the thing that I was truly excited about. I was really excited for a period of time about Ableton Live for example, or Polysynths, I got really into those for a minute. But now I just feel, I just come back to modular and it's, there's something about it that's just so expressive and open ended and it just feels like an adventure each time I step up to it. And these guys...

WS
Well that's so nice, that's great.

TR
Yeah, and these guys are just helping us design the next generation of modules, they're going to take that another step and I'm really excited. This first one we're launching, like I said, it's very small but very powerful and it's, it's kind of the a core concept of this whole new idea that for the time being I'm calling it the New Universal Synthesizer System in USS, yeah and it's just, it's a bunch of concepts that we've come up with to sort of push modular into the next generation, next era. Yeah, so yeah, that's why I threw it in there, it's the thing I'm most excited about. I haven't used it very much and this is actually, this piece of music that I'm going to make is actually the first, will be the first recorded piece of music that I've done using this module.

WS
Wow, what a privilege. That's so exciting. I mean, it really seems like it's a turning of the page, a new chapter in the life of Make Noise.

TR
Yeah, it absolutely is yeah. And this, you know the, it's just to show you the kind of dedication that we have there now. You know during the hurricane we had no power for several weeks and we had this deadline coming up because we want to launch this thing in early 2025. Lucky for us, somehow the record store across the street from us, Harvest Records, incredible record store if you're ever in Asheville and you want to go record shopping, absolutely one of the best record stores I've been to, period. But they somehow got power before Make Noise did but they weren't open because, you know, buying records when you can barely find water and the folks over there were so sweet, they let us set up a temporary engineering station inside their record store so we could finish the hardware project to get it ordered in time because we had, that deadline was still fast approaching and the rest of the world isn't going to wait for you just because there's a hurricane rolling through your town. Everything's still on track in the rest of the world, so we still had to make that same deadline. And I was just really happy to see that the folks at Make Noise were willing to come over and work with me in a record store and a makeshift engineering table to get prototypes proved and debugged, so we could do some beta testing and get that order made. So just kudos to the whole team over there for just keeping it going despite all these crazy roadblocks that keep coming up, we keep coming up against.

WS
Wow, yeah. Well, what laudable determination and community and resilience and it's really a pleasure to hear about to be honest. You know, it feels like people are really well, in this, I was going to say that people are really coming together in this particular moment, crisis moment, but also more long term it just feels like, you know, there's been some difficult decisions made recently for you and that things have really come together in a really beautiful way and it's a real pleasure to hear about.

TR
Yeah, yeah it is, it's fun. It's been a big change for me but you know I'm here for it. Nothing ever stays the same, you know, you want it to, there's things you love. I mean unfortunately the things that you don't want to stay the same oftentimes do. The things you love tend to change, you tend to lose them or they just tend to disintegrate and go away and you've got to keep living.

WS
Yeah, amen to that. Tony it's been an absolute pleasure to have you. Thank-you so much for joining me and I can't wait to see what you do with these modules.

TR
Oh yeah yeah, that'll be fun, turn you on your ear hopefully.

WS
Yeah. Well yeah obviously it goes without saying that I'm going to have my eyes peeled for upcoming designs with all of that, now I know the story behind this next chapter of the company a little bit, I'm dead excited to see what, to see what comes out and it seems like you are too, which is just wonderful.

TR
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, keep your eyes peeled.

WS
Thank-you so much Tony and I'm so excited to hear what you do with this selection. Take it away.

TR
Oh, thank-you for having me. 

WS
Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts web page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels as well. My name's William Stokes and this has been a production for Sound On Sound magazine.