Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Meet the Maker - Modular Synths panel with 6 Eurorack Manufacturers



At this year's Winter NAMM show, Vintage King Audio presented the TEC Tracks panel: "Meet the Maker -- Modular Synths".
This short (35 minutes) panel discussion, distributed by Sound On Sound, brought together 5 well-known modular synth makers to talk about the booming Eurorack format.

Panelists included: Dieter Doepfer (Doepfer), Dan Green (4MS), William Matthewson (WMD), Ryan McGuire (Vintage King moderator), Tony Rolando (Make Noise), Brandon Ryan (Roland) and Gene Stopp (Moog Music)

They talked a bit about the history of the Eurorack standard (with it's US-based Inch-metrics... lol), and the influence of live-Eurorack performers on new modules.
William Matthewson from WMD offered an interesting insight of what to expect in the future with new controls, like tactile things, body movement, gloves, the integration of virtual reality and other new futuristic techniques that can convert all kinds of signals into control voltages.

Interesting to hear was also the process behind the whole module-design and where Dieter shared his point of view about the pros and cons of the community-input, mentioning the importance of the Yahoo A-100 Usergroup (and his annoyance about it sometimes) and the creative input from live musicians like the icelandic band GusGus when it comes to developing new modules.
It reminded me of his work with the guys from Kraftwerk in the past, with the development of the Schaltwerk, the vocoder and other projects...

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