Creating The Stepper Acid Sequencer

Hello and welcome to the Sound on Sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this episode we're talking to Zoe Blade and then we're joined by Nina Richards. Zoe is a musician, composer and programmer who likes to use modular gear as well as retro digital gear such as an Atari ST. We then bring in Nina to talk about their stepper acid A homemade, digitally controlled step sequencer that integrates well with a modular setup. Here's a taste of Zoe's music to get her started. In this piece, she's used an Atari ST with an Akai S1000, with the drum sounds created in a clone Korg MS 20. Lovely to speak to you Zoe Blade. Welcome to the sound on sound podcast. Hello. Thank you for having me. Yeah, really excited to talk to you today. So I really enjoyed listening to your Atari ST jungle track this morning as I was preparing for this. So I'm looking forward to unpacking a few different aspects of your work. Really. I wonder if you could start with kind of Defining yourself and where you're at, at the moment, with your music. Mostly making music for YouTubers at the moment, and also for my Patreons. I try to make a track every month for them, so that's going quite nicely. And with YouTubers it's kind of a bit more sporadic, but when they have a new episode of Concha Points or Hbomberguy, they usually use some of my music in that. So things might be really hectic or really slow depending on the month. And with the Patreon, do you just deliver a track, or do you also have the kind of making of and a video and unpack it a bit how that was made? With my Patreons, they get the secret demo version of each track, and then everybody in the world can see the finished version. But, you know, if you are my Patreon, then that helps me to actually have the time off work to go ahead and make more music. Uh, the demo version is probably kind of the more interesting thing because I tend to split my process up, so I'll compose it as more or less a chiptune first so that, um, I'm not thinking too much about having the perfect, uh, Kick drum and the perfect, you know, baseline and everything. As long as the, uh, the music sounds good, then I, I know that when I later on work on the Tumbas, it's already got a solid foundation of music to build upon. And, uh, as a result, I think that the demos are kind of an interesting insight into the kind of behind the scenes process as to what the music sounds like without the actual sounds, as it were. Yeah. So can you just unpack what Chip tunes means for those of us who. might not be totally aware. Oh yeah, that's um, basically that video game music from the 80s and 90s, uh, was kind of, it was much simpler. Before you had cartridges that were like that big or CD ROMs, you'd have very, very basic, uh, music that just consisted of like, say, sine waves and square waves and sawtooth. And I think the C64 was the only one that had like a filter, all the rest were very, very basic kind of machines. So, you take the really kind of basic building block sounds without doing anything terribly fancy with them, and if a piece of music sounds good, you know, with those kind of very basic sounds, then you know it's going to sound even better once you play the same melodies, the same tunes, uh, with, uh, Fantasy Autonomous. You kind of get the best of both worlds. You know, you're not going to be hiding a weak melody behind really nice sounds, so once you've got it, got that, uh, to build upon the, you make the nice sounds and elevates it to where both parts are pulling their weight instead of just one. Yeah. Yeah. That's really nice. It's almost like you're focusing on structure and arrangement and yeah, the actual musical building blocks before you get caught up in the sound quality, if you like. Very much. So I do them on separate days. I have like a day where I'm just. Working on the composing and arrangement, and then say the next day I'll just kind of finesse it a bit, and then I'll leave it for a while, and come back another day and take the MIDI file, because I always compose in Reason, and then I take the MIDI file and export that across to Reaper on another computer, and then I've got that with the hardware synthesizers and the modulers, and actually perform and patch and record it on that, so it's a completely separate process for me, so I never get bogged down too much with the sound design at the beginning. Wow, interesting. Yeah, I've never thought of doing it that way. It's almost more the left and then get carried away with the right side of the brain and do all the kind of must be fun like dressing up and realizing what you can do with those sounds kind of all those parts rather. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to kind of have an idea in your head of for this bit is going to have this build up over here. And I'll tell you, put in, say, the mod wheel in the actual composing stage, but I only have very rough kind of vague approximations of the sounds, because I know so many people get bogged down with like, okay, I'm going to sit down and write a song today, and then they realize it's four hours later and they've just been going through kick drum samples and haven't found the one they want yet, and haven't got that quite right, and In that amount of time, when I've probably written a bad piece of music and decided to not use it, and then written a better piece of music, you know, kind of like exercising a muscle here, I find it helps to write a bad one and then write a good one. With kind of no pressure, and you get to experiment, but at the end of the day, I think, um, it's a kind of safety in numbers. Mm. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, um, what kind of people do you think are most interested in? Who are your, do you know who your Patreon supporters are? Are they listeners of music? Are they makers of music? Um, I think it's a pretty even split of people who, uh, like the music and want to listen to it, and people who want to use it in their own videos. But the people who want to use it in their own videos are paying me a bit more, so I probably need to start leaning more towards making more kind of background music. Although occasionally I can't help myself, I do get inspired and write a song. But the problem with that is then it starts to get so good, I kind of build it up in my mind and need to like make it absolutely perfect. Whereas the background music, I find it's a be relaxed, not, not worry too much and just kind of, kind of bang out quite a few of them very quickly. And you can get weird and experimental and not have too much pressure. Whereas as soon as I write a kind of pop song, I'm like, Oh, this really needs to be quite good now. I want to do right by it and make it as good as it can be. And then, you know, try and actually get around to finishing it. Whereas the others, I'm worried about finishing it because, you know, it's like a day of composing, day of recording, day of mixing, done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite different processes. Yeah. Wow, cool. And in terms of like, um, I understand you're interested in re invigorating old machines and using those and going back to older methods. Can you tell me why you've? You've gone down this path. Well, there's quite a few reasons. I mean, first and foremost, I think as much as I'm trying to make music for the end result to sound good, I like the process itself to be fun if it can be, and I think it can. I mean, I enjoy the process of making music, and it's just more fun using the tangible hardware. Let's see, I think it started off when I got a modular synthesizer, and at that point I was a bit skeptical it was going to make Much different in terms of how it sounds. I know there's a whole analog vs digital debate, but then once I got it, it really did kind of shape my sound to the point where it kind of gave me my voice, and if you listen to the music I made before it and the music I made after I got it, it is radically different. And I think it kind of forced me to have a completely different sound. Because it only does one voice at a time, and only one sound at a time, and you have to tear apart the patch to make the next one. So if something isn't that good, and you decide you want to redo it, you've got to redo the whole sound from scratch, and it's going to sound quite different the next time. There's no memory or anything. So that kind of introduced me to have this whole completely different workflow that I hadn't had before. Because before then, I was using Reason, like a lot of other people, and making kind of ambient music that sounded like probably quite a few other people's, whereas with this process, it sounded completely different to what anyone else is doing at the moment. So I think it really did help give you my voice and I kind of leaned into that direction more. Yeah, I can imagine a sort of a more, it's got to be more personal, hasn't it? Because it's like your palette, every single gradient of color of, if you like, of your palette is, is all, you're, you're building all that as you go along. And it's very intuitive. Um, Suzanne Chiani describes her, her relationship with the booklet as an organic relationship. Yeah, I mean, I'd say kind of the weaknesses and the positive points of the modular synth are the same things. Like, on the down side, it's got no memory, and you have to make the same patch again from scratch each time you want to use it. But on the plus side, it's got no memory, you have to make the patch again each time. If you keep on practicing doing that, you're going to make better variations of it, you're going to board and experiment, it's going to sound better for it. And because it's monophonic, I record one part at a time. If there's a monophonic part, I'm literally recording, say, two or three different passes. Um, often I'll record two or three passes anyway, just to kind of thicken it up a bit, you know, doubling the tracks like a guitarist would and just, you know, getting bored, taking the, the, the length of time that the song lasts multiplied by the number of instruments in it, that's a lot of time you're just sitting around waiting for it to kind of like render out in real time as it were. So I just start kind of twiddling the knobs just to keep myself interested and that allows me to focus on each and every part individually, kind of like musicians traditionally did with the tangible instruments and that allows it to have these dynamic timbres that kind of change throughout the song which kind of adds a lot of interest to it I think. Yeah and it must do quite a lot of the weaving before you get to the mixing stage as well then. I was working on my album last year and obviously because of the increased isolation, it literally felt like I was getting into weaving all these sounds together, weaving all the parts, weaving, you know, I'm talking more as in all the layers and the right sort of to create the sound world. But it almost sounds like you're doing that during that process. It's not like a, you know, It's not so much of a separate mixing process, because surely that's happening while you're putting all these parts together, if you like. Well, yeah, I kind of have to be a bit careful putting it together, because you are, I mean, music is basically like a conversation between the different instruments, and they'll have to have like little pauses for the other ones to kind of, you know, comment and spin it their way and everything. Um, And then, you've got the issue that, well, there's some parts where you can change the sounds quite drastically with this instrument. With that instrument, maybe you can't. Say you've got some 808 or 909 sounds for a change, or you've got a vocoder part. You know it's going to sound a certain way, so you usually have to record those first, so that the other ones can kind of work around it, because you're not going to change the sound of that too much to make room for the others, so you need to do it the other way around. So there's a certain kind of ordering and process to it. Mm, yeah. And can you tell us about some of the, um, sort of older machines that you've been working with? Well, yeah, after the kind of analog modular kind of drastically changed my sound, I started kind of wondering, well, you know, what are the other instruments like? So I've kind of, um, ended up getting, in the case of analog ones, I've got because it turns out they're very expensive. Who knew? Uh, and in the case of the digital ones, I think they're really kind of undervalued right now because I guess technically the, the software will sound the same as the, um, the hardware, but it's not really the same in terms of things like interface and, you know, the, the tactile, uh, muscle memory being able to kick in, stuff like that, and how you can route it all together and make it work with the analog gear. So, uh, in terms of things like, um, the Akai S1000 sampler, uh, which Sound On Sound called the new standard in their interview back in the day. Um, you know, every studio had one of those, and it's the kind of thing where I think, uh, a lot of people at the time would have wanted one but couldn't afford one. And these days, you can afford one. I mean, at least you could last year when I bought one. Apparently they've kind of gone up since then. But I got one for, uh, think about 250 and that is not bad considering how much they cost brand new originally. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So you're working with those hardware samplers and then there's also synths and, um, and yeah, the Atari ST as well. Well, again, that was kind of, uh, ubiquitous in the studios of the day. I think because I like music from the 80s and 90s, especially kind of the 92, 93 era, kind of like, rave music and everything, and, uh, you know, everyone from, like, say, Fatboy Slim to Future Sounds of London, that kind of era, early Apex, Twin, Ortega, I like those kinds of sounds, and it kind of occurred to me that if you use certain equipment, it's going to affect how your music sounds. Um, I, I, Started off using trackers back in the 90s and my music sounded very very different using trackers to how it sounds Like say using reason which sounds quite different to the modular synthesizer and veeper And now i'm using samplers It's actually kind of gone full circle and sounds like the trackers of the game because I think what i'm doing doing again is, um, making the sounds first and then making the music based on the sounds. I do that with trackers and I do that with Creator and the S1000, whereas with the modular and the usual process I've been doing in the last few years is making the music first and then making the sounds. And that encourages Quite different kind of, um, you know, workflow and the music sounds very different as a result. It really surprised me how much using the S1000 and Creator sounded like my track and music. I was really quite taken aback by that. And really great how you stretch yourself. You're not stuck in one way where it's not. sounds first in the music or the music in the sounds. Is that important to you to play with that and keep that flexibility if you like? Well, I think it's with my patrons I've got, you know, enough money that I can get occasional synthesizers and I feel like, you know, that's something I kind of ought to spend the money on because they're paying me for the music. I should be investing in the music. That's what I tell myself anyway. I mean, I like synthesizers. I think most people who read sound on sound probably like synthesizers. You know, why wouldn't you buy this if you can? So. So which of the old sort of classic synths, have you gone for digital synths as well then? Uh, yeah, well I've mostly gone for synthesizers where I can ignore the presets and make weird and interesting sounds. So I'm trying to fairly much avoid redundancy. So I've got my analog modular which does sounds you can only really get through. I've now got a TX81Z for pad sounds. Again, kind of like, there's a lot of early Aphex Twin style music in my head that I want to make, so I think using an FM synthesizer to make your own pad sounds is, uh, part of that kind of sound. I know everyone's synthesis can get really complex and difficult and no one, you know, thinks like they can do it. But in terms of making pad sounds, it's actually a fairly low bar. I'm confident I can learn that fairly quickly. I mean, usually it's the case of just like two operators, one feeds into another and then another two, one feeds into the other. That's not too complicated. Making a piano one, it would be quite difficult, but making pad sounds I think is achievable. So I just think, you know, there's so many, uh, possible sounds out there. It's just a waste to use the same ones all the time. So I just like making my own sounds. It's how I've always done it. It probably goes back to my early tracking when, um, it turns out there's a sample pack that trackers came with and everyone was using the same sounds. I didn't know that. So I was making sounds with my mouth at first Then with household objects, like I make clangy sounds with knives and, you know, kicking a video recorder case, stuff like that. And, uh, then it was only when the plugins started coming out. As you know, I've got a synthesizer, the SH 101, that was a good one. And I'd sample single notes. And then I think I'd take it into Kool Edit 95 and put it in an effect. And then I'd put it in the tracker and make music with it. And Then going to like say Fruity Loops and Reason, that's the first time I started using the kind of same sounds as everyone else. And I think really my music suffered from it because even though my music was kind of technically worse beforehand, it was so bizarre and original that at least it was interesting. I don't think it's more important to make something unique than something that's like really polished and the best there is as long as it's kind of Weird and different if someone wants to hear music like that They have to listen to yours because there's no one else doing anything like it You've kind of got the monopoly in a very small niche. Yeah, I never really Computed dare I use that word just how much Yeah The tools you use in the process that that kind of not dictates but encourages or brings out of you how that then informs your sound You if you like. It just does, doesn't it? Of course it does. Yeah. It's not just what you can do in it, but you know, what's the easiest to do in it and what kind of encourages. And what you can't do. Yeah. So I've not heard of trackers. Tell me about trackers. Oh, right. Okay. So, um, you know about the, uh, the Fairlight CMI? Yes. So that's like, you know, Sampler of the 80s, uh, with, say, the Art of Noise, and Yellow, and people like that using it. Kate Bush, yeah. And it'd have PageR, where it's got this built in slip sequencer, kind of, you know, it's very kind of quantized sounding, so you have this combination of samples, so you can make your own sounds and put them in, anything can be an instrument, that's great. And it's got a built in sampler, so it's kind of like a mini studio in itself. But it was really expensive and no one could afford it. So, in the slightly later 80s, the Amiga comes out. And someone writes this bit of software for the Amiga called the Ultimate Soundtracker. And that's basically kind of like a Fairlight PageR in a piece of free software that, I think, was given away with, uh, at least it wasn't free at first, but eventually they kind of gave up trying to sell it. It was on, I think, magazines, you know, cover mounts, back in the day. And in Europe I don't think it was the same in America, but in Europe, there's this thriving demo scene where there are these people who started off kind of pirating software, and at the front of it, they kind of, graffiti style, made like a little scratch page saying, hey, this is the group that did it, and it played a little tune. And in the end, they were like, you know, the piracy is kind of boring, the intro is the best part. So they started making these demos, which is just showing off what you can do with the computer, and kind of pushing the state of the art of just Writing these programs and the music for those demos was always made in trackers and I had this tape This is going back. So I had a c64 at the time and I had this Compact cassette tape audio tape of Amiga mods. So I listened to that on the hi fi It'd be fully stereo separated like the Beatles tracks Which is you know, everything's either completely left or completely right and I listened to it on headphones Like it's a terrible idea, but that's you know, what I do and I did this Kind of, to me, that's the music I grew up with, was listening to rave music on the radio, being too young to ever having been to a rave, and listening to Amiga mods, and basically there's, I think, you know, why my music sounds the way it does, it's just a love of house music while never having left my house to actually go to a club and, and, you know, here in its proper context, never having done any of these drugs which give it its proper context. So I've got this kind of weird outsider's point of view of music that I love, which is inextricably wound up with this culture I'm not a part of. Yeah, yeah, but you're also very tuned into the tech behind it. And, yeah, part of it anyway, in your own kind of way. Yeah, I mean, I've read up about it. I mean, in a cerebral sense, I know all about, kind of, the context of it, but I never actually, you know, I was too young to have actually been involved in, in, you know, the scene at the time. Even when I was making mods and shared them with people, it's not like they sounded anything like anyone else's mods, because I was making them with household objects, not with samples of real instruments. So everyone else was using, like, samples of, like, the D 50 and, and, you know, DX7 and everything. And I was using, like, well, I've got a drumstick, so I'm gonna hit my pillow with it. That's the kick drum. I'm gonna hit the wardrobe door. That's the snare drum. And, you know, it was not sounding like anyone else's music. And so people, you know, had it in their head. Oh, you're one of those demo singers. Like, no, no one knew of my stuff. I was on the fringe. It was just weird outsider music. But, you know, that I kind of like about it in retrospect. It kind of makes it this weird, interesting thing. So were you sharing your mods? As was there some kind of community you were part of where you were able to, I'm guessing a mod is a bit like a sample pack. Uh, yeah, well, this is a nice thing about mods. It's. Basically, like having um, a MIDI file and the samples all wrapped up into one file. Right. So, yeah, you go onto the mod archive and share it with people, and you can download anyone's mods, but that's like downloading the source code or the sheet music. So if they had any neat tricks in it, you could see how they did it. So you learn little tricks, like I see, you get like this long sustained sound that changes slowly over time, and you can then, uh, do that. turn the volume between maximum and minimum, and that's gating. Or we realized that we could change the tempo with every single 16th, and that would swing. We didn't know what swing was at the time, because, you know, like, my friend Alex and I were teenagers, and we were just kind of mucking around, but we knew that if you changed the tempo, every other, you know, um, note, it would sound really kind of, uh, you know, funky. And, yeah. So we kind of in a really backwards way stumbled across all these musical concepts about knowing what they were. Yeah, and it's almost via application, isn't it? And, um, and so is there any kind of contemporary equivalent to mods now? Uh, I mean, they're kind of just about still going, but not much. There are a few musicians using Renoise, which is a modern tracker. But it uses plugins and, uh, and effects and at that point, I think it's kind of, it's more like a DAW with an awkward interface than a tracker as I remember it. Cause in my mind, a tracker is like, well, it's like PageR of a Fairlight. And if it can do anything else, it's kind of, it's evolved from a tracker, but I say it's evolved to the point where it's kind of so much more that it's not going to sound like tracker music. Cause I think an integral part of that was you couldn't add effects. If you wanted effects, you'd have to sample it with the effect on. So when, when you're playing the. the note, um, different, uh, notes for the same sample, the delay is going to change with it, or the reverb's going to change with it, and that's, you know, an integral part of its weird, bad, but quirky and fun sound. Excellent. Do you perform live? Not often. With all that kit? No, yeah. Very rarely with Nina, we'll team up and perform live as Bitloader. Like, Nina makes her own music, I make my own music. We keep meaning to make music together and don't, but live, we've only really performed together, which is a kind of odd way around to doing it, but that's kind of You know, how we've ended up doing it. Um, which usually involves, we take loops of her music, loops of my music, put them in Ableton Live, which I otherwise don't use. And, in addition to that, we've got, um, Step of Acid, which Nina designed and built. We'll get to that later. And, um, we'll be playing separate acid live and kind of noodling around to the, the cutoff point. It does like three or three type sounds. We'll be doing kind of live acid lines over the top of, uh, you know, queuing up and meeting and unmuting various loops of the music that we've made. 'cause you can't really do much with the modular live and have, it sounds that inspiring. If you're going for more kind of melodic music like we do, you can't really have much of a structure there. We tried it once or twice, just, you know, the modular stuff on its own with. And it's like one piece of acid house that lasts 40 minutes and slowly evolves. And that wasn't really too interesting to most people. It turns out, who knew? It worked out much better when we took our best music that we've written before and kind of worked out how to make, essentially, like a DJ set that happens to be our own music. That worked much better. But it's just finding the time, because, you know, that involves rehearsing, and then, actually, you You know, going out and setting it all up and, and doing the gig and coming back. That takes quite a few days, you know, including rehearsals. And we're so in demand, both of us, to make music for YouTubers and for our patrons. And we both still have day jobs, that doesn't help. We're quite busy these days. Plus, Nina's, you know, making and building stepper acids that, you know, people keep on buying. Well, I think this is a really nice point at which to bring Nina in. So, um, hello, Nina. Hello, thank you, and yeah, thanks for having me. So, yes, so he was just mentioning your stepper acid that you've both made together. And I wondered if you could tell us a bit about your creations. So that's quite a, it's quite an interesting sort of story how that started because it was sort of about, I guess it was about probably 10 years ago now when you It's a while back now, yeah. You were getting into modular synths and You were getting into electronics. Uh, yeah, it just so happens I was, like, sort of getting into, like, little Arduinos and all that sort of thing, which I did many years ago, but then sort of moved more into software, um, side of things. And, um, you got a modular synth, and I was a bit concerned that your music was just suddenly going to turn into this. modular sort of backstreams. Yeah, there's a lot of people, we've lost a lot of good musicians to modular synthesizers. You just don't hear from them again. They don't make music anymore. They just stay in their room. They won't come out. Yeah, exactly. So I was, I was a bit worried about that. But then, then when you got it on our head, I thought, this sounds really good. But you can make melodies with them. I want to, I want to use a sequencer with it. That's like, Some of the just normal 8 step sequences and the sort of acid sequencing was what appealed the most, I think. Because I was always making the music in the DAW, copying the MIDI file across and then outputting the MIDI. You want to do it all at once, don't you, I think? Yeah. You actually play the synthesizer like it's an instrument or something. Yeah, because I sort of have a very different approach to you, because you tend to take the melodies and things like that first and then apply it to the synthesizer later, where I I tend to start the other way around. I like to get a nice sound, and then I'll evolve that sound, work out which sounds go with it. So it's a very different approach. And so, for my, sort of, to be able to make use of a modular, I needed a sequencer on hand. That could work that way, and that's where it sort of, that's where it sort of came from. Plus, I wanted to make acid lines in my synthesizer, so, you know, I wanted to have, say, some notes accented, some notes not. I wanted to be able to slide, so I could do portamento on some notes and not others. And I remember asking you, Hey Nina, you're getting into electronics right now, so how difficult would it be to make a step sequencer like on the 303? That, that wouldn't be that difficult, would it? Surely, how long could that possibly take? I don't know. And how long did it take? A few years. Well, it was about, it was a really strange sort of timeline, actually, because we were messing about with it for, I would say, yeah, probably maybe a year or so. And then we had like this weird prototype that we knocked together. And it was the first set of PCBs I got made. I had to learn how to do, um, PCB CAD and all that sort of thing to get it together. I remember you etching circuit boards in the sink. You, you know, you put the thing on the box. Yeah, the very draw on the circuit. The very first one was done. With a, yeah, one of those UV exposure PCB things, drilled all the holes, did all of that sort of stuff. And then I realised that it was going to be just too complicated and I had to buy some very expensive software and learn how to design an actual PCB. At some point, I think, when you start etching circuitry, you realise you've gone a level too deep as a musician. You've kind of gone a bit far out of the original project's goal of write a song. Yeah, that's straight pot. I kind of, at the time, it was a very different thing, I guess, making the sequencer to making music. And it was only really when, I suppose, we had a bit more space, we moved, and I had a bit more space to work on that sort of thing, um, that it came together very quickly, actually. It went from, like, being a load of bits and pieces that were thrown together to, like, a polished product in, like, It was only a few months, wasn't it? Yeah, oh yeah, it wasn't that long. Once we had a bigger place, and we could actually have multiple things out at once. We didn't need to put the circuitry away in order to do our day jobs, for instance. That was slowing us down quite a lot in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of like the, Did you study other schematics or other kind of circuitry from other instruments in order to be able to build both of your machines, really, both the ACIDS sequencer and the drum machine? Not really, actually. I mean, we, we did, we have looked at them, but we didn't really, we didn't really base anything on them as they were, um, the only sort of. A classic thing that we wanted to keep was the slide from the 303, because it works in a slightly weird way that other things don't. And it turns out that Tell us how it works. Um, it's, it's a very very simple, um, uh, slew limiter, so it's just literally a a capacitor and a resistor. And on the original, um, 303, this was fixed. But I changed it so that we could, um, modify. Variable slew, right? Yeah, it's a variable slew on the, um, which is the slide. And the reason it's weird is because the state of it in one note affects the state of it in the next note, depending on how fast things are moving and all sorts of sort of variables. So, You can get sort of uniquely three or three slides in a way that you can't do with a normal portamento, if that makes sense. And it turns out that is half the battle when it comes to replicating that sound, is that particular slide, um, versus the actual sound itself, which it turns out you can use, most filters can sound very acidy. Hmm. If, um, sequenced in that way. By making the sequencer, we're able to kind of separate the two because it's modular. So it's got a CV and gate output. It's already doing the sliding, so you don't need another module for that. It's all self contained. So you send the CV and gate to any synthesizer with those inputs. You can now make acid lines on it. So we're trying out kind of MS 20 acid, 101 acid, that kind of thing. Yeah, and it turned out that was kind of interesting, wasn't it? Um, you could do some really sort of crazy, harmonically rich, like crunchiness using like the wasp filter on the docker, which is my favorite. Oh yeah, that's nice. I love the wasp filter. Um, I also love the base station and the, and the peak because it uses a very similar filter and uh, yeah, you could get some, all of these like weird harmonic areas where you could catch the filter with like loads of resonance and all of these weird sounds sort of creep out and then you apply a slide to it and then you get these like sort of raspy, oddities is, yeah, it's very nice. And so after making the Stepper Acid, what sort of inspired you to want to go into the realm of the drum machine? Yeah, the drum machine, we've not, we're not quite released it yet, but it's, it's 95 percent there. We've sort of had to pause on that for various reasons. But the reason for wanting to make the drum machine is because it's the sort of perfect companion to it. And in a modular rig, we found that When we were trying to use it live, we needed a source of drums. So we could do, say, a kick drum and maybe a snare on the modular, but then you start needing so much of a modular setup to do anything other than, say, two, two different sounds. I mean, you can modulate them, but, um, for variety, it'd be nice to have more sounds. So we, we, started mixing in some of the self contained drum modules, like the the tip top 808 set and the 909 drums. Um, but yeah, we wanted a self contained sequencer in the module, so it's, you could have a nice little system, maybe six u's, maybe, maybe nine, something like that, and you could actually have a really nice acid techno box or acid ambient box. Well, that reminds me of going way back to, you know, Peter Znovia when his VCF3 arriving with Delia Derbyshire and David Vorehouse with the bottle of champagne. You know, it's like the early days of actually that personal Do you enjoy that personal connection with the people that you're selling your instruments to? Yeah, I mean, it's been really lovely tonight. I mean, a lot of the people we've sold them to we've met, including like, you know, some quite famous people. Some of them we didn't recognise. Some of them we didn't recognise, we shall not. We should not name them. We should have done. We should have done, yes. I was talking to somebody for a good half an hour, not knowing who they were. I think on more than one occasion. Yeah, it's been really nice. I mean, because I'd literally have to hand assemble every single one of them. So it's not like they're quick to knock out, as it were. And the downside to that is, I get a little bit obsessed with making sure there is all this, you know, up to scratch before they go out. They all get tested, they all get tested in a full system to make sure everything's good. And, um, So every part, every LED, everything has been hand soldered on those things, even the surface mount parts. Wow. Um, which a lot of people, as soon as I say that, they're like, really? It's like, yeah, um, we use, um, uh, like a laser stencil and some solder paste and in the garage there are two reflow ovens for baking the boards. Um, And, uh, a little sort of semi DIY, uh, controller system for doing the reflow temperatures. Insane reflow oven. It's like a repurposed Sargos toaster oven. Yeah, it's the high quality model though, it's not your cheap one. I don't want it to seem like we're too lavish here. Yeah, but in a way that makes me think that's possibly one of the most ethically made synthesizers that there is, or sequences there are. Because one of the problems I have is knowing that, you know, out there somewhere there's You know, all those, usually women on production lines that are getting paid next to nothing for us to be able to make our music. And yet, hopefully, as long as you're getting more than a penny an hour or whatever, then hopefully it makes sense, you know, that, um, in that sense, it's quite ethical, isn't it? We're cutting out the middle man. Nina pays herself next to nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking that. Yeah. It's ethical for you, but it's ethical for the rest of us. It's, it's definitely a bit of a labor of love, I suppose, rather than, I don't think I'd be doing it if I didn't enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, I think Peter has said a similar thing. What if we weren't going to use them ourselves? Because, you know, we wouldn't know for ourselves, first and foremost. Because there's a whole other side, which obviously you don't see as well, like, sourcing the parts, maintaining the bills and materials and all that sort of thing. And it can be days of admin just to get Parts, um, and then you've got to catalogue them, make sure they're all in before, because you can't start a run with SMD parts unless you've got them all in it. So if you find out mid run that you were missing a part, yeah, kind of, kind of stuffed. Stuffed. That's the word for it. And that, that has happened, I think, once I ran out and I was, I was missing about ten parts, something like that. So I had to very carefully use like a cotton bud and wipe off that bit of, Those bits of solder paste from the board for that one part, reflow it, and then reflow the other part by hand later when I could get some. Um, but yeah. And this is all you I want to point out, because people think it's entirely us as a joint thing. Really my contribution is the firmware, and even then I think you helped me with the trickier parts. Like I wrote most of the firmware like a contractor might, and the rest is just you. Well, uh, yeah, it's definitely a joint effort, but yeah, having the, it's good in terms of firmware to have a joint effort because We're both familiar with how we want it to sound and the techniques and, you know, all the various timings and stuff that we had to use in the firmware. With that and you're super busy and because I'm also a programmer as well as you that's something I can actually contribute to whereas I don't know much about the electronics side of it at all so I can't really help you with that and people assume I know about the electronics but I really don't. Um, yeah and I suppose it kind of helps that we both knew a bit of. C programming language when we were first making it, so it was, it wasn't that much of a jump to start learning some of the intricacies of, like, registers and timing controllers and interrupts and things like that. I find it easier to do it at the lower level with, you know, complete control of the hardware over having to try and get libraries working, which for some reason never works for me. Is it exclusively the modular community that are interested in this, or have you found that it sort of expands beyond that? Um, it's mostly the modular community, although we do know people that have got systems that have, like, say, a stepper acid plus the Zoxhart or the M303, which is basically a self contained 303 voice, so that includes the, uh, oscillator, filter, envelopes, and all that sort of thing in one voice. So they, they're using stepper acid just as a better sequencer than the original TB 303, which is notoriously fiddly to program. So our module's just the sequencer, and the other ones you can get are everything but the sequencer. So they pair very nicely together, and they sound just like a DB 303, only they're easier to program, and they have swing, and the buttons don't stick because they're not, like, 30 years old. 40 years old now. Oh, I'm old. And there's also the, the nice thing when you do that is that you can add in, like, one or two modules, and then you've got another bit of modulation you can work into that voice, which is quite interesting. Yeah. So you've already started to touch upon it. My next question is going to be why, yeah. Why, why would people want to invest in what you've got? How is it better in your opinion than what's already out there, if you like, on, off the production lines? So one of the things that, and one of the reasons it took us long, so long to make in the first place is like, every time we made a new sort of prototype, I would test it out and I would want it to, like achieve some level of flow using it, so that you can just sort of get lost in the actual process. And one of the keys to doing that was to make it so that you could play the notes in live as it's running, which the original didn't do. So you could Uh, on, on, on arrows, you can, you can hold down a note and it'll fill up all 16 slots, which, it turns out when you're making an acid line, that's a good way to start an acid line, just have the same note playing over and over again. And then And send the feedback. Yeah, you get the feedback straight away. So you've got, say, 16th notes playing, and then on every, I don't know, every third note or something, you might want it to shift up an octave. So you could just tap the octave button. So instead of having to stop and think about, I want the third note to be this, you can just, like, So, tap it all in, tap the notes based on feel, and then, you know, within, I think my goal was to be able to make an acid line after about two or three loops around, and it's totally doable, so you can do an acid line in Maybe 10, 15 seconds, something like that. Yeah, I love the 303 but it's very much designed with the idea that you would know what the melody was before you turn it on and then it's a case of telling it what your melody is. Whereas with ours you can kind of organically discover and find, tweak and evolve your melody live in such a way that you can do it in front of an audience and it will sound good as you're building it up even. Yeah, so it's, that was the key, so that you could use it. In a live scenario, start from nothing, so you don't need to have anything pre programmed. Um, you can still have some pre programmed as a fallback, but I quite like starting with nothing, because at the time it's just, you know, the beat's going. Um, you might have a simple melody playing, it's like, okay, I know what to drop in there, and you can just sort of, you can just sort of enter it very, very quickly. Yeah. And then in terms of the drum machine? So that's kind of similar. So we've taken the same approach to the live programming on that. Um, so you can enter in notes, you can do like ratchet similar to, you know, repeating notes and having, you know, note go multiple times, different polymeters. Yeah. Um, that took a while to implement. Yeah. Polymeters on a per part basis, wasn't it? So yeah, so you can have like your kick drum and your snare drum and your hi hat can all have different pattern links and go in and out of phase with each other. Um, yeah. Which is kind of neat. Uh, and building up, um, individual patterns into a longer set of patterns. We wanted to make that super easy. So that's like Two button combo now on the stepper drum, rather than dialing in a song one pattern at a time. It's just super quick to do. Yeah, so it's mostly in the same vein. We wanted them to very much be of a family. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds fantastic. Cool. And do you have any burning new devices in your head that you'd love to realize if you can share them? Yeah. I mean, we have this. It's just that we're running out of time. Yeah. I mean, we're struggling to actually get the second one out there at the moment. So there's It's pretty much been finished for like a year. We've had quite a few ideas. We've like We've Wanted to make a nice oscillator for a while. The idea with that would be that instead of, instead of it being, um, like a fully analog one, my idea was always to try and make something that sounds analog but is reliable. Because that's the one thing that I found modulars that you have to be really careful of. It's like, you need 20 minutes for that thing to warm up before it's gonna hold. any note, you know, consistently. And even then, it may just slowly drift over half an hour. There have been several occasions where I've had to tune oscillators mid gig, which is not fun. And then, um, so one of the ideas I had was to make a a digital oscillator that sounds analog or can be analog by having analog sources of, uh, well, how do we put it, um, rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, to quote, um, Turquoise atoms. Turquoise atoms. So, You could get it to float away, but I think crucially from an analog signal source, so you could, you could be relying on, say, the, um, how a resistor changes slightly with temperature and all that sort of thing. But that would then nudge the oscillator out of tune by a very small amount, but organically rather than in any sort of algorithmic way. Yeah, what I didn't realize about analog oscillators is when they talk about them needing to warm up, that's not a metaphor. They literally need to warm up because they're sensitive to the temperature. And rather naively, when I made my first album with the modular synthesizer, Blast Off with Doggy Doxter, I wasn't aware at the time that you needed to tune it. So it turned out, um, I found out the hard way when I tried to add strings to one track, and I had these samples of strings I was getting in there. And it sounded out of tune. And then I realized that, um, the whole song was in the key of something like F sharp and a half. So I had to kind of offset, you know, the tuning of the samples to get it to match. Yeah, that's what analog oscillators are like on the older synthesizers. Brilliant. Oh, that's fantastic. It's really exciting to hear about your work, both creatively and technically. And yeah, all the best with your Creations, musical and machine wise. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information, as well as links and details of other episodes in the electronic music series. And just before you go, let me point you to. Sound on sound. com forward slash podcasts. So you can check out what's on our other channels. This has been a Karo C production for sound on sound.