T.B Arthur, who would perform at "Modular Sunday" on 8 Oct has cancelled his performance due to his urgent illness.
He wanted to come and play until the last moment, but the doctor didin't allow his flight.
We are really sorry about that for those who were looking forward to seeing him.
The event, however, will be held with the same concept and slight change.
Changes:
1. Every attendance except students will be provided a drink ticket with the same fee.
2. The event will open at 5pm and performances will start from 6pm. From 5pm to 6pm we have a demo modular system so that everyone can get their hands on it, and can have a brief lesson about how it works if they want.
3. In the interval time, K.U.R.O+Takagi will create some patch that changes automatically and sounds nice, with description of what they're doing.
*We can accept a refund for those who have bought advance tickets but doesn't attend due to the cancelling. Please contact ticket@kagurane.com for refund.
Numb, who has been influential for a long time in Japanese electronic music scene especially with his well-known label Revirth, will join. Also talented modular artists like tinClocks and K.U.R.O+Takagi, and the owner of the shop Rintaro will have performance. From 5pm to 6pm we have a demo modular system so that everyone can get their hands on it, and can have a brief lesson about how it works if they want.
In addition to those who are interested in modular synths whoever likes to enjoy dance music performed with modular synth are very welcome, and it's gonna be a fun Sunday evening.
tinClocks
1972年生。小学生の時、喜多郎の「絲綢之路」を聴きシンセサイザーの存在を知る。
中学生時代、バブル景気の真っ最中に「YAMAHA DX7」に憧れながらも「KORG POLY-800II」を購入。
高校卒業後、音楽とは離れていたが2014年の「Tokyo Festival of Modular」でモジュラーシンセに触れて、その魅力の虜になる。
普段は経理会計業務を行う事務員だが、夜な夜な理想のセットを求めてModularGridを彷徨う。
そうでもありません。まずBraidsとCloudsが人気になったのは、似たものがユーロラックのマーケットになかったからです。もしCloudsがメインのグラニュラーモードだけしか持っていなかったとしてもユーザーは気に入っていくれたと思います。むしろ、使い方を学ぶのにもっと時間を割いて、もっと気に入ってくれていたかもしれません。Braidsも同じです。電源を入れてエンコーダーを触らなかったとしてもなかなかのオシレーターですよ。私は、電源を入れると1つのモードがランダムに選ばれ、次に電源を入れるまでそのモードにロックされてしまうような”Model of the day”機能をつけようか本当に考えたことがあります。
First of all, could you explain how Mutable Instruments started?
What did you do before you started your company?
Before starting Mutable Instruments, my two main interests were signal processing (especially automatic analysis of songs - to extract the tempo, recognize the genre, etc) and machine learning. I worked on these kinds of things in large tech companies: Google, Last.fm, and a rather obscure French startup. My job was mostly research, and turning research into software.
I started playing with Arduino boards in 2009 to teach myself electronics and embedded systems. My first serious electronics project was a hybrid monosynth. I talked about it on a couple of forums, and since other people wanted to build one for themselves too I started selling it as a DIY kit. This DIY kit (the Shruthi-1) became quite popular, and after having sold several batches of them I had to create a company for tax reasons, and this company gradually became my main activity and main source of income.
Mutable Instruments was originally selling desktop synths in the form of DIY kits: the Shruthi (a hybrid mono), the Ambika (a hybrid poly), and the Anrushi (an analog mono). What drove me away from the DIY world? The increasing frustration with support issues and the need to do more powerful and beautiful things...
When did you come across modular synthesizers (especially Eurorack)? Did you decide to become a Eurorack manufacturer yourself soon after this first encounter? What made you go in that direction?
People had been asking me for a Shruthi oscillator module for a while but Eurorack was really something strange and foreign to me. In 2012 I bought a 6U Doepfer system, primarily because I needed LFOs, clocks, raw waveforms etc to test the circuits I was designing, like the Shruthi filter boards. I really thought of it as a purchase of test equipment! But I instantly got hooked and decided to make modules in this format. It solved nicely a problem I was facing at the time; I had designed a big polysynth (a higher-end version of the Ambika) and I was hesitant as to whether I should take the risk to launch it via mass-production. The money I had to invest was very big, and this was my first serious industrialized project. The Eurorack modules looked like an easier way to get started, with a more progressive curve and production costs I could afford.
If I remember correctly, your products have been open-source and open-hardware from the start. Why did you make that decision?
(related question follows)
It's part of my scientific/academic background in which sharing is a habit. It's because I'm really appalled by the way some hardware or plug-in companies make people believe there's a "magic ingredient" in their product: being transparent about how your product works is a remedy against that. It's also because I know how frustrating it can be when we hit firmware or software limitations when using a hardware product - I wanted to give my customers the ability to customize their modules so they could bypass these limitations.
It seems your open source strategy has been a great success, because many third-party alternative firmwares have emerged like Parasites, and your codes are recycled in other open-source modules like Ornament & Crime. Did you imagine your strategy would have such great influence on other designers?
I did not really anticipate what happened. I did not expect something like Parasites, which is very deep, becoming the "official unofficial firmware". I thought there would be ten or twenty alternative firmwares, with minor changes or improvements suiting personal needs.
There's a bit of a mismatch between the things I expected other designers to "copy" from my modules, and what has actually happened. Somehow I expected more of a dialogue - people looking at my schematics or code and finding flaws, giving me suggestions about things I could do better. But I'm really glad to see something like the Ornament & Crime.
So making your code public did not help you debug/improve your code? That's what I would have expected to be the chief merit of making the code public in the first place!
I’m very meticulous with coding and there have been very few occurrences of bugs getting into the modules once they are released. One thing that sets me apart from other developers in the world of music gear is that a large section of each module’s code is written in a cross-platform way - which means that I can test and run the core functionality of the module on my development computer, not on the actual hardware. This allows me to conduct “monkey tests” in which I feed random values to all knobs/CVs for hours and check that nothing crashes, and more generally to check what would happen in strange situations that would take minutes to reproduce with the actual hardware.
Overall I think there are more people interested in adding to the code than just reading it and trying to figure out how it works and how it could be improved.
Could you explain how you run your business at Mutable HQ? Do
other people help you there?
I have a partnership with a contract manufacturer in Normandy who handles all the manufacturing, testing, packaging - they ship me palettes of finished boxes, the same boxes you buy. At times there are up to 15 people working simultaneously on the modules in their factory. As a result, I don't have any employees and do everything else by myself. My day is split 50/50 between running the business (answering customers' questions, shipping orders, repairing modules, administrative duties), and designing new products. The only thing in a Mutable Instruments product that I do not create myself is the graphic design and panel layout - this is handled by Hannes Pasqualini, who now designs for other brands too.
Do you often research new techniques/algorithms for synthesis? Do
you think there are still many new frontiers in the field of synthesis
that have not implemented yet in the world of Eurorack?
I try to stay up-to-date with the latest research, reading the proceedings of conferences like DAFX or ICMC plus whatever is going on in machine learning. I have a collection of small code snippets implementing ideas I encounter in papers, enough to make 20 modules or so. But to be fair, there are a lot of exciting things that are not ready for Eurorack, either due to issues of computational power or latency, or because they would be deemed too "unmodular" or would not handle fast modulations. And the future is not the only frontier, we can also look at the present. I think there are still many things to be discovered on boring, old-fashioned, small things like generating families of interesting LFO waveforms or musically useful random data. Just questioning things like "What knobs should there be on a filter module?", "Which waveforms should be available in an oscillator?", "What's in the space between an envelope generator and a sequencer?" is enough to enable interesting discoveries.
Do you have your own Eurorack set-up for music creation? If so, what other manufacturers/modules do you have in it?
I had a small system with Doepfer, Intellijel and MakeNoise modules; not my own modules because every time I used them it felt like doing testing/debugging, and this gave me urges to tweak them. Last October I moved to a new apartment and decided that it would be a space for reading and listening to music, with as little as possible technical equipment, cables, clutter... so I did not bring any music/audio equipment in. I guess I'm like Dieter Doepfer now, with no modular at home. At work I have a small setup with 4 or 5 modules - everything new I'm developing; but it's more testing and playing around than a true musical project.
France has been famous for having long history of electronic
music/musique concrète like INA/G.R.M. Are you influenced at all from that kind of history/research?
Not directly, but I can't help thinking that this stuff has been around all the time - for example there was a chapter about it in my junior high school music textbook and I remember being impressed by the studio photos. Just knowing that this thing exists, that it's happening in a legitimate and serious institution is enough to turn it into a career goal. There's also a good tradition of teaching signal processing and mathematics in France that I benefited from, and that accounts for the existence of institutes like the GRM or IRCAM.
Sometimes digital modules get too complex because of menu-diving,
multi-functions per knob, many firmware updates, and so on. Do you have
any specific design policy on module complexity? Will we see modules from you in the future that have big OLED screens and encoders?
Well, I made lots of mistakes on that front! My current set of guidelines would be:
- Under any circumstance, the label printed on the panel should match the knob's function. This prohibits modules that are collections of unrelated functions like Peaks (with knobs labelled simply 1, 2, 3, 4), hidden settings like Clouds, or easter eggs, and releasing "official" alternative firmwares. Variations (like Rings' various modes) are OK.
- The module should try to infer as many settings as possible from the way the module is patched, instead of asking the musician to press buttons.
The way Rings switches to an internal/external exciter depending on whether the signal input is patched is a key idea (an innovation few noticed!).
- OLED displays and encoders might be OK for something requiring many "set and forget" settings, like a MIDI interface. But I don't see myself designing something like the Orthogonal Devices ER-301.
The notion that stays a lot in my head at the moment is that of "convexity". A good module should feel "convex" in the sense that if you can get result A from it and another result B from it, you should also be able to get anything inbetween. Or the things it can do should not push you towards a direction where you'll notice the things it cannot do. As a design principle, that rules out a lot of things, like collections of unrelated functions, or modules with "bonus" features that are not fully CV-controllable.
Tides and Rings are my favorite modules, and they are serving as templates for new designs at the moment. Braids is not my favourite module, and I consider Clouds a mistake.
Could you elaborate more on "convexity"? "Getting any result between A and B" sounds like continuity, not convexity. Do you mean that you need to fine-tune the convexity of the continuous virtual curve linking A and B, to make the curve have as many sweet spots as possible?
It’s not just continuity (or path-connectedness: that would be the more accurate notion) - you can have a continuous path between two settings that still does not get you where you want it to go. A silly example would be a VCO whose PW control behaves this way: turn it CCW and you get a pulse with a 1% ratio, turn it CW and you get a pulse with a 99% ratio, and inbetween you just get a crossfade between these two settings. That’s a continuous path, but it still leaves a gap, there’s a type of sound (the “hollow” square with a 50% duty cycle) that this would not cover. So having all continuous settings (all knobs, no switch) doesn’t solve the problem.
But you’re right about the sweet spots - that’s the key notion… Make sure that when turning a knob, we visit the sweet spots.
People seem to love the "collection of random features" found on Braids and Clouds, as opposed to your like/dislike. Do you worry about this mismatch?
Not much. First, because what made Braids and Clouds popular was that there was nothing like them before on the Eurorack market. If Clouds only had its main granular mode I’m pretty sure that people would have still loved it - and maybe they would have taken even more time to learn how to use it and loved it more. Same for Braids - even if you power it on with one model and don’t touch the encoder (I really thought about this “model of the day feature” - the module powers on in one randomly chosen model and stays locked there until you power it on again), it’s a fine oscillator.
And well, even if people prefer the “old”, feature-loaded module instead of the more streamlined things that now occupy my mind - at least I will have the happiness of making things I’m more happy with.
Mutable Instruments in 2017 has been pretty quiet so far. What are your plans for 2017?
New modules completing the existing collection, but also reworking the fundamentals - not in the sense of MkII versions, but through this kind of approach: "Can we do what modules A, B, C do when they are patched together with new modules X, Y, Z - with X, Y, Z being more 'convex' than A, B, C?"
That type of reworking sounds interesting. So the new modules (serving in a more convex framework) won't have unrelated random functions, but will have more coherent collections of functions like in Rings and Tides?
Yes. This doesn’t mean I will exclude multi-function modules, but if they are multi-function, it should be either from a same underlying principle, or at least with uniformity about what their knobs/jacks do. For example, even if Tides can work as an LFO, VCO, envelope generator, I don’t see it as an “evil” multi-function module, because if you look inside the code of the module, you see the same code managing a voltage going up and down - and the various functions are just obtained by changing if this up/down movement is done once (envelope), or many times at low frequencies (LFO), or many times at high frequencies (VCO). The Serge DSG is of this same kind of multi-functionality flavour - where there’s one underlying principle that can be used and abused in different ways.
Can we expect modules in your new framework that will answer questions like, "What's in the space between an envelope generator and a sequencer" (ref answer to Q6, above)?
Yes, but don’t nag me about it if it’s not released in the next six months, or is not released at all.
What will the world of Eurorack look like in ten years' time? Do you think there will be a more interesting tool/framework than Eurorack at
that point?
I'm pretty sure half of the people will have moved on to something else, but they'll be replaced by new people: old people getting nostalgic, young people wanting to get retro, etc.
How was the world of synths in 2007? Lots of plug-ins and desktop VAs, not much analog stuff, and modular was confidential. There's no reason 2027 will be less different from 2017 than 2017 is from 2007.
Could there be a better framework? Maybe a modular format better than Eurorack, and not geared towards CV control. One trend that has grown in parallel with Eurorack is what I call "tabletop orchestras" - boxes like Volcas, Pocket Operators, Meeblips, guitar pedals... all patched together on the table. Maybe there would be an opportunity for merging this with Eurorack so that desktop units and modules could all have standardized sizes, power connectors, I/O ports and live happily together in the same case. I would be wary of some extremely integrated tool - there's a kind of "wonky" feel to connecting unrelated things together in a not-always-reliable way. This wonkiness is inspiring, and is not a defect that should be fixed.
