Talking Serge, cybernetics & techno with Chris Miller (Gunnar Haslam/La Synthese Humaine)

Tom and Luke are joined by a special guest for this episode of Signal Flow: Chris Miller, aka Gunnar Haslam, La Synthese Humaine (and many, many other aliases). Chris was a leading light in the early 2010s New York techno scene and has gone on to use the Serge modular synthesiser to explore analogue computing, cybernetics, and experimental sound design through his revered YouTube channel, La Synthese Humaine. He has also worked at Moog, where he produced and presented a superb series on the basics of synthesis, is one half of the excellent Base Camp Beta podcast with Shawn O’Sullivan, and is an all-round good egg with a wealth of knowledge on everything from experimental music to science, philosophy and economics. Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Check out Chris’s YouTube channel, La Synthese Humaine:
https://www.youtube.com/@lasynthesehumaine6932

And his podcast, Base Camp Beta:
https://www.youtube.com/@basecampbeta 

And his label, Critique of Everyday Life:
https://critiqueofeverydaylife.bandcamp.com/ 

And his Synthesizing With Moog video series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfRv-D7DpUfHCDeDl4oVM9n6GAcF1jdiJ

Get in touch with questions, feedback and suggestions via signalflow@signalsounds.com

Find out more about the gear discussed at signalsounds.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Signal Flow. I am one of your hosts, Tom Churchill, and I am joined as ever by Luke Hammer. And we are both joined today by a special guest all the way from Barcelona. It's Chris Miller. Hello. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. You may know Chris under various other names. You're possibly best known in the music world as Gunnar Haslam. Yeah. Techno producer, releases on Lies and Delton and lots of labels over the years. You're probably best known in YouTube world as Latin Fez Humane. Yeah. Which is a very cool channel that we're both really into that talks about surge and the intersection of neurophysics and politics and all that kind of stuff. Which is very cool. And you're also probably best known in the podcast world as on half of Base Account Beta. Yeah, yeah. And you have a record label and you have many other aliases. Yes. And you have also worked at Moog and made videos for them. Man of many hats. A lot of hats. You must have a big hat covered.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

And a lot of names as well, different aliases as well to go.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

I love having different aliases. It was like the big thing, like when you're 18 or something, you find a record. I think it would have been from someone like Adam T M or Wolfgang Vogt or something like where you just like you make the connection between, oh, this is also that person, and then you go to the Discogs page and it's like 30 aliases. And I always just found that so cool and a nice way to, I don't know, keep on reinventing yourself all the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

So yeah. I should say another alias is Carbonari Pizza Guy on the surge on the Discord. Yeah. For any any of the surge heads watching, there might be a few on this one. Um so yeah, yeah, aliases are fun. It's funny, I I'm the opposite. I've never had aliases for anything I've done. Oh, yeah. It's always just my own name. And I don't know why that is, it's maybe just because I always felt a little bit, I think when I was younger, I just I couldn't couldn't settle on one that I liked, the sound of, and I didn't want to, you know, pick something that I would then regret later.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

It's probably best because I I definitely feel like I'm constantly shooting myself in the foot a little bit because you're just like constantly coming out with new things under new names that no one knows. And were I to stick to one name, I would probably be able to sort of corral all of that into I I had a really bad idea once back when I started making music, um, some of the original Gunnar Haslam records. I wanted to continually misspell it on every subsequent release so that there would never be one coherent spelling to kind of make the project ungoogleable.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Yeah, yeah. Um all those variations on Discogs. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

And that would have been a really bad idea.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Um, from a sort of, hey, I'm trying to like actually be an artist who uh does stuff and is searchable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yeah. Well that's the thing, is like every time you start a new alias, you're basically starting from scratch again, really. Because it like obviously you may have other pages that you can link to and point to, but especially especially to like misspell the same alias multiple times, that that's that feels like a a real cruel. You know, a little full self self-sabotage.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah. So um what's your where did you grow up and like how did you get into music? Can we get like a brief resume of your kind of career music or your music pathway?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in New York, I grew up, you know, in suburbs outside New York, and uh I don't know. I mean, as far as music goes, I don't really remember how it happened. You know, as a kid, I was into you know, uh like New Order and Depeche Mode and all that when I was in you know high school, and then that just kind of led to dance music and techno somehow. Um and then at the time, you know, around like when I was like 18 or 19, I started meeting um uh people in New York, uh, including people like um DJ Juss Ed and Levon Vincent and some of those and DJQ people in New York who were um doing stuff because around that time, this is the sort of mid to late 2000s, um dance music and techno was quite dead. Um it was kind of the whole minimal thing, and especially in New York, like it was just not something that you were into. It was it was just not you were a total outcast if you liked, if you liked dance music. It was seen as either like I don't know, it was just not at all the cool thing to do.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Um so this is the era, I guess, around like after L C D sound system and the rapture and those kind of bands were getting really big.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah, I mean I think a lot of that was a kind of uh it was around that time. I mean, dance music was on the decline in the late 90s in New York. Um, obviously the mid-90s dance music is you know king in New York. The late 90s was on the decline, 9-11 killed it. Um I do think that like L C D sound system and and and the rapture and all that was kind of an attempt to dance music in New York had always been seen as kind of like black and gay. Yeah, and it was kind of an attempt by like kind of I felt that those kinds of things were a bit of an attempt to like take dance music but make it like okay for what for white for white, for white, like kind of like rocker guys to like be into. Um, you know, and uh yes, my my podcast mate, uh Sean O'Sullivan um has made this point many times, so I I I will have to credit it to him, but it is kind of like the era of like you would play like uh you know a house track, but you would never play the vocal. You know, um that was kind of like this thing is if you're playing the vocal, that was like a little too much for this kind of like more kind of like straight-laced um crowd. But anyway, and then by the like two by the late 2000s, more interesting things and all and also just people it was minimal had kind of taken over by the mid-2000s, and it was just this kind of like I don't know, um there wasn't much in it, but then by the late 2000s it was it was really people were kind of like pushing a new form, but uh, but but one that felt connected to the 90s uh form of dance music. Um, and then also um, you know, knowing people like Ron Morelli from A1, um, you know, just buying records. I was involved with a website at the time called Little White Earbuds. Some people made it. I don't remember that. Yeah, yeah. Um and so through that, just like meeting a lot of people, going out, and and and by that point, then um, you know, I was I would just play records with friends in our apartments, and we'd just go to the record store, buy records, play records, you know, early 20s or whatever, and uh at some point just decided to start making music and then gave some tracks to Ron. And that's kind of it. That's how it started. And Ron runs the label Lies, um, and that was kind of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Yeah. And at what point were you were you working at control at this point, or did that come like that?

SPEAKER_01 7:22

No, no, this is this was still like I was I was still in college more or less. Right. Um no, that was that was later. I I was in college, I worked for a bit, and then I um did a master's degree in signal processing and and like math and stuff. And I remember um I did I I lived in Paris for a semester to do research, and I remember just every weekend, by that point it I had been putting out records for maybe two years, and so like I've been slowly getting more bookings, and for that whole time I was living in Paris, every weekend I was away playing a couple gigs. Um, and I remember someone in my research department, I was talking to them and they're like, wait, so is like research your job or is music your job? And I had always seen music as not my job, right? And but then I was like, well, hold on, like research doesn't pay me any money, you know? Like and and the music kind of is, and um and at that point when I finished when I finished my degree, I I had just had enough uh consistent bookings that I that I uh started just playing music full time, but then also uh you know, friends ran the shop control in Brooklyn. Um, and so that was kind of where a lot of us, me, my my friend Sean, Max Rabbitz, uh Matt Morandi, who does music as Jahelia Fields, uh Robert A. Lowe, um, we all kind of worked there, and it's nice because we're all touring musicians and the schedule was you know it was plastic enough that uh just work there a couple days a week, whichever days worked for you.

SPEAKER_02 8:54

Yeah, and still tour, and uh yeah, it was it was uh Yeah, it's good having a little bit of stability from a day job, but having it flexible enough that you can work your music stuff around it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, nice. And so when did you I mean, we can talk we we weren't super deep on all the gear. Yeah, yeah. But I guess part of the reason we wanted to talk to you today is because we've been teasing a bit on the pod that we're gonna cover some more surge stuff. Yeah. Because we've both, over the last couple of years, I think, become a a bit bitten by that particular bug. And your videos have been quite a big part of that as well. Where you know, we've been kind of consuming your content um around surge. I love making content. I'm a content factor. Your content machine, content provider for the people.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

It's something so something about the word content just feels so wrong. It's horrible, isn't it? It's just it feels so deep.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

It's such an embarrassing thing to tell people. I know.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

It's like there's there was I saw something about about some like new uh like thing in Apple music or whatever, just referring to like music or or movies as content, and it's just it feels like a you know dagger to the heart or something. It's just like yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Um but yeah, I don't really know how else to refer to it. Yeah, of course, of course, of course, of course. Um but yeah, so um um maybe before we get into the surge very briefly, what were your early records made on? And then at what point did you kind of get into modular and or you know, did you get were you into Euroract before Surge?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um uh I mean early records were mostly made. I I guess I kind of like felt um that I needed one piece of like real gear to like make music. So I got a TR606, um, which hey it was good enough for Otica, was good enough for me, you know. Um but in general the early records were made, like I'd record little 606 snippets, but then kind of cut them up in Ableton. I mean, my my first records were made more or less completely in Ableton. I also had a I had a Zox box at the time. Um so I had a little acid. I mean, I just wanted to make acid tracks, you know. Um and uh I think if you listen to my early records, you will notice that I more or less failed at that. Um but you know, in a in a way that I that I like. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

Um I think a lot of I mean a lot of music I've made that I'm quite pleased with is actually a failed attempt to copy something else. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

You know, I mean everyone's music is more or less you're you're trying to copy something and then and then and then you screw up, but yeah, something interesting. You might go somewhere interesting, yeah. Yeah. Um so that was kind of for a for a while, that was just kind of how it was. And then at some point, you know, after a year or two of putting out records and getting a few gigs, I was like, okay, like I can get like whatever money comes in from get. I was I think at the time I was working a job, or maybe I was still in call, I don't remember. But um, you know, it's just like any gig money, you're like, that's cool, it's found money, more or less, you know. Um and so slowly started buying a little more gear. I bought a um a Korg MS20 mini. They had just put out the mini, um, which was quite nice because I think it was like 350 bucks or something. Um, but you know, I'd always been really intrigued by modular since I was a huge fan of um of uh the music uh anything that Max Loderbauer was involved in. Um he was involved in a in a project called NSI with Tobias Freund, which those records I I like still to this day swear by. And he was also involved in the Moritz von Oswald trio, and just you know, like seeing him with this like Dupfer thing, I was like, what the hell is that? I don't I don't know what that is. Um, but so then as I was getting into music, I had always wanted to get into modular synths because it looked cool, yeah, you know. Um and the MS-20 was like, okay, cool, like this is like a semi-modular thing, I can wrap my head around it, it's quite approachable. It's also like my first real synth, and I and I do believe um later when I would work at control, I you know, people would want a starter synth. I'd be like, yeah, I think the MS-20 is kind of like the perfect starter synth. Um A, because it sounds great out of the box. You can play it, you have all the knobs there, it's structured like a mini mogue or something very approachable, but it's patch bane, especially with the external signal processor. It can get really weird, and it's a synth that like I will never get rid of because it's just it still kind of blows my mind, all like, and the sound of it is so great and and all these things. Um and then eventually did get a couple, I got a Renee um to sequence it, which doesn't work.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

You're a Renee fan, okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah, I had one that was like my my go-to is like I had an OCOast as like the the sort of like first semi, or technically actually my first semi-modular was an MS20 mini, but that was like when I was like quite a lot younger. I think I was like maybe 16, 17, and I kind of like sold a few bits and kind of went away, but got an OCOast, and then I was like, okay, like the the next logical thing to start my Euroract thing will be a Renee sequencer in and and the Ocoast. Um there was just something I've always like I loved the idea of just having like 16 notes and just different pathways through those notes. It just it really ticked a box in my head at the time of like I was really new to the idea of like composition in a very unstructured way that you can do in Euroract. And it seemed so novel to me at the time. I was like, this this seems like the greatest idea that anyone has ever had, and I can't wait to do it. Yeah, yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

I mean, that was a big thing for Euroract for me, is was these alternative types of sequencer, which are just not the linear way that you're used to working in a door where you're putting notes into a grid and the piano roll, yeah, and you can actually just, yeah, whether it's moving in different directions or rotary things or you know, like um different different ways to kind of I've always been into like making complex results from simple initial elements, you know, having having a small set of tools and just being able to kind of like push them into weird directions. Totally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Yeah, I mean I I got the Rene and I had known enough by that point that and I had hated MIDI enough by that point that I knew that what I could do, I had a Motu um interface and um that has DC coupled outputs, and so I knew that I could basically um record like click tracks and put them in Ableton so that everything so that I'm in my Ableton session, but just use uh voltage spikes out of an Ableton channel into an audio output like a normal output and use that to drive the Rene. Um the Renee, however, the well, it's really more the MS20's fault being this hertz per volt kind of thing. Um so it's all kind of people would tell me like ah it's not really gonna work because you know if you quantize the Renee, it's it's not well proactive, it's Hertz per volt. You know, luckily I didn't really care too much because I was making kind of techno and I I wasn't so interested in tonal. Yeah. Um so it did kind of make it didn't, I mean it works, you know, it doesn't give you that it feels weird when you're using a sequencer and it's in a wrong scaling to the synth, but uh wait wait's good sometimes. Yeah, and I just like I mean I'm my whole thing is turning the knobs until it sounds cool and my ears perk up, and I'm like, oh yeah, I like that. Um so so yeah, that was fun. And then and then was so then I had the Renee, and then slowly got some more modular things, mostly like make noise and verbos. I was also I worked for Verbos very briefly, just doing assembly. Um I had known Mark just from techno and and all that, um, and I learned a lot from him. Um and so yeah, and then at some point um, you know, after a couple of years, I was like, okay, I want to play live, and I had made myself uh, you know, a system that was like competent for that I could show up to a club with and play like you know 45 minutes of of techno, just like if I have like an 808 and that modular system, then I can like you know do something pretty good in a live setting. Um that was kind of my goal for a while. So for a long time I was quite Eurorack centric, yeah. I would say, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

And were those live sets fully improvised? Then would you turn up with no plan and just well with nothing pre-patched even, or would you have yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

My earliest live set, I mean, the first time I ever played live was I was booked for MuTech in Montreal, and I was like, oh, I've never played live, like I could DJ. And they were like, Yeah, well, we kind of only do live sets. And I was like, Okay, I guess I'm playing live. Um, and I was like nothing like a deadline support. Exactly. So I was like, all right, I guess I gotta figure this out. And at the time I didn't I didn't have much experience like playing. I mean, at the at that point, my music was still more or less like made in Ableton. So the idea of playing live, it didn't translate so much to how I made music. So I tried to like do stuff bringing the computer and then having like live elements and which which worked. I mean, I I think those live sets were fine, but but at but soon after um I realized that like, yeah, I I I can't be bothered with trying to recreate stuff. I mean, people come, they don't come to hear me play like Wonder Wolf. You know, like it's like it's not, yeah. So just like who, you know, it's it's more like if I can create my kind of music and and and do something um that makes it a lot easier for me, and also it opens it up to being more of a live conversation with wherever you are and and all that. Um so soon, very quickly, the live sets were just yeah, like and then that reinformed how I made music at home, too.

SPEAKER_02 18:27

Yeah, I was gonna say it's like a it's like a different discipline almost when you when you because it's a a very focused thing with one particular setup, but then you can maybe there'll be I'm sure there were moments where you were playing live and you're like, oh that that works really well. Yeah. And you maybe file that one away to revisit when you get home, totally make a proper track from that. But yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Yeah, and then and then at home it was just kind of like I all of a sudden after a few years it was at home, I was just like, okay, just gonna like play, turn on all the stuff, jam, record the jam, and then like edit it very minimally after the fact, just to like put a stop and end to the thing. Yeah, and that was kind of like that, that was it. So um, yeah, for for a while, this is all like the late 2010s, I would say. Um yeah, that that's that's that's how that all went.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

And yeah, it was good. Nice. And when did Surge enter the picture then?

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Yeah, so Surge entered the picture. So at control, we had gotten in um well. My first exposure with with the Surge, I think, was um a good friend of mine, Peter, uh who runs a repair shop in New York, Patchwork. Uh if you need to synth repair, go see Peter. Um, he his shop uh for a long time was just right next to us at control. And um he would sometimes like get stuff in, fix stuff up, and bring it to the shop for like used sale. And he got in one of those best of CGS systems, the three CGS panels. So we got that in the shop, and I was like, okay, there's a search system, like you know, benefit of the shop. I'm sure you both can can attest, is uh you just get to play with sense all day and figure out what it is you like and what what it is you don't. Um and first dibs on the pre-owned stuff. Yeah, yeah. So that's how my that's how I got my SH101. Um but uh but yeah, so then I I just spent some time, A, because as my job, I just had to like test the thing and and and all that. Um, but I spent some time with it and I was like, wow, I really don't like this. Um and I think a lot of that comes down to just uh you know, I don't want to talk shit, but you know, the the best of CGS panels don't uh in retrospect, I realize that it doesn't have a lot of what I like about Surge in those in those panels. They're they're kind of like their own thing. And I don't I don't they they're not all that surgy to me. Um but that was my first so I kind of like filed away as like, oh okay, Surge is kind of not for me. I'd played with bucklas before I studied under Mord Sabotnik at NYU, so I knew the Bucla quite well. Um and I knew you know Euroract at the time quite well, and I was just kind of like, okay, I guess Surge is just kind of not my not my cup of tea. Um but then we got in um we got in the uh random source. Well, at the time, pretty much all the random source stuff was DIY, and uh Darren Wiener would make kits um with all the parts you needed. Um and so we sold those kits. There's buy a baggie with the panel, a PCB, and then all the caps, resistors, knobs, everything you need to make it. Um and I was quite interested in, you know, uh I had done assembly with Verbos, but I was, you know, was always like looking for little things to build here and there. And I was just interested enough, and kind of like at that point, I think a couple years had elapsed since that that first surge experience. So I was kind of like, okay, let's see what's up. And I think just playing with a friend's rese queue, I was like, yeah, this thing sounds fucking sick. Like I'm gonna and so I um built a resiq. And then just kind of like from there, ended up just because you know, you could get the kit so. For one of the, you know, it's one of the Eurorack uh, you know, an SSG or DUSG or PCFQ and stuff. All the usual, all the usual suspects. Um just started building them kind of for myself because they were cheap enough. And I was like, this is all actually really, really good. I love how this sounds. And I and it it kind of also I realized that, yeah, I think it was just quite different, like it just all made sense to me. Like using a DU, okay, the SSG maybe didn't all make sense to me at first. Um I won't pretend that. Still doesn't all make sense to me. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But something like the DUSG, I was kind of like, oh, okay, like, you know, I'd used mats for so long that it made a lot of sense and I and I really loved um loved it and I loved the sound of the filters, I loved the sound of um of the reseq. And so I just build stuff and I would also like just build some of the kits for sale at control, you know, just to sell the assembled modules. Um and then by that point I just reached a I and then I just reached a point where it was like, okay, either my either I kind of like slowly turn the whole Eurorack system that I have into surge, or I can just jump to the for you stuff. Um and it was just, yeah, I I was just like, okay, I think if I don't do that, I'll probably regret it. Because I at that point I had been pretty, pretty clear that I I would really like a full dedicated surge system. Um so I I I sold a bunch of stuff and uh and just started building.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

Yeah. I think at this point we should maybe, for anyone that isn't super familiar with all of the stuff we've just been talking about, maybe maybe outline what we're talking about when we talk about surge. Because it's one of those things that's a bit of a mixture of um, you know, there are various brands involved in the ecosystem. It's a mess. There's a four, you know, there are there are different formats. There's the the person who it's named after who is still around, and and um it's also a patching philosophy, I guess, as well. And it's you know, um it's it's a fairly big umbrella term for quite a lot of things. Yeah. Um, so you're talking about, for example, the random source German company making the licensed URAC versions of the original circuits, but the brand itself, well the original Surge brand kind of dates back to the early 70s.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Yeah, 73 is when the first Surge stuff comes out, and you know, you have to remember back then you would have had MOG and ARP um available, Bukla would have been available too. Um, those were all very expensive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:29

Um and Serge's idea was kind of like, yeah, so this is Serge Cherupin was teaching at CalArts at the time. Yeah, and he was attempting to, I guess, make a lower cost alternative to the Bookla stuff that was kind of the West Coast um synth company at the time.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

I've long wanted to talk to Serge about because his stuff is was, I believe, very much designed with sort of low cost in mind. But those early so also the Surge design Surge runs his company from 73 until the early 80s, and there is like a general uh progression in the Surge system. Uh over that time, people divide it into a couple different periods uh into about four different periods, but generally those first uh what is called a paper face uh period because um again as a as a cost-saving measure, instead of uh printing panels or whatever, you just have a drilled aluminum panel that you would print paper on and and and draw the diagrams on, more or less.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

And you can still do that with um yeah, Prism Circuits, for example, do the pre-drilled panels and they provide the artwork files that you can the authentic original designs, or you can make your own and print them on coloured paper and you see all sorts of messes of surge systems from that time with people putting all sorts of crazy designs on it.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

And yeah, yeah. I mean, I will say I always like, you know, I'm a big um, I'm a big dopfer fanboy, um, and the real clean lab equipment lab equipment thing. Because I worked in physics labs um and I was always attracted to that kind of like, yeah, just like really clean, like clinical look of things. Um and anyway, but so a lot of those early surge circuits are so simple, um, just like an op amp and a couple resistors, yeah, you know, and part of that is like it that that kind of like uh works well with the low-cost idea, but that I always wonder how much that um initial impulse to make low-cost uh synthesizer circuits, how much of that fed into the result, which is what people like myself and I think a lot of people like about the surge, which is that the the um the circuits are very low level. Um there's not much going on in them. Um there's and that means they're extremely flexible.

SPEAKER_02 26:50

Yeah, super open-ended, and yes, this is where the patch programmable kind of term comes from. It's like you're actually getting these very fundamental building blocks rather than a thing which is this is an envelope generator. Yes. This is a slope generator which can move at different speeds and it can it can oscillate and it can be a modulation source, it can, you know, it can it can loop or you can trigger it.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

In one of your videos, I think you describe it as like ingredients for cooking. Yes, yeah, yeah. And that that's always like I think a very good way to think about it because there are some modules that sort of feel like a pre-packaged meal when you buy them. And it's like, cool, I've bought a hamburger here, and it's like it it tastes this way. Yeah. But it's very much more like I have bought the requisite ingredients for a meal, but these same ingredients could be used to make a few different meals depending on how I look at them. Yeah. And that really stuck with me as an analogy.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

Yeah, I mean, I I really love cooking, and you know, it was always kind of like, well, you could like learn how to make a dish, or you could just learn how to cook. And that means, you know, adapt you, you know, at the end of the day, you just have like a couple pans and a knife and you know, like ingredients, and you're just like, okay, what am I gonna do here? Like, how do I turn this into something that that that that's good? And and it's kind of the same thing with the surge where yeah, it's just you know, it's something you learn by experience, but just doing it for years. Um and but you kind of build this fluency with with um with what you've got. And you know, at the end of the day, with with the surge stuff, it it's just it's so low level that it's like, okay, a voltage can go up or down. That's kind of like that's basically it. That's basically it. And like, okay, so like here are a couple tools to like help how that to shape how that up or down motion happens. Um, and just that's really, really appealing to me. Um, you know, like I have, you know, you can have in your system a bunch of dual slope generators, and it's like, okay, to today that's gonna be eight oscillators, because that's what I feel like doing. Tomorrow that's gonna be eight function generators or you know, one oscillator with you know six LFOs going crazy. You know, it's just that flexibility allows it to be whatever you want in the moment. Um, and also the fact that um what I really, really love, and start of what what brings kind of the ideas that I try to explore in my in my YouTube channel, um, is the idea that those circuits are also at any given time recontextualized based on how based on their conversations with the other elements in the system. Um, you know, a slope generator is an oscillator right now, but given the inputs and how it's patched and how it's in dialogue with all the other parts in the system, in 20 seconds it's gonna be kind of functioning more like an envelope generator. And just that plasticity of everything kind of moving in conversation with each other is is what really, really attracts me to the surge.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

And um yeah, what I mean that's one of the things we've talked about before is the one of the really beautiful things about Surge is this kind of um the boundary between audio rate and modulation rate stuff and how elastic that is and how fluid that is and how not like you're just saying, an oscillator can start off as a modulation source, and then the faster that gets, it suddenly adds its you know, new sonic dimension and stuff. And that that's the really one of the really fun things about it.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

Yeah, like I said, you know, I had I had used a bucla for a while when I was in in school, and the delineation, because on the bucla, there's a strict delineation physically between the banana jacks used for modulation and well, they're they're the tiny jack. The tiny jacks, they're not 3.5 millimeter, they are like they're just like a third of a millimeter bigger or something.

SPEAKER_02 30:39

But um, I would just say when I built my Buchla 100, I refuse to use tiny jacks. As well as you should. It's like what why would why would I introduce another slightly different formula?

SPEAKER_01 30:48

It's really immense. I mean, the amount of times that I like felt I was gonna break the booklet because I was like trying to shove a or break something because I was trying to shove a tiny jack into a normal which you can do, but it's obviously not recommended. Um but uh but yeah, that delineation was always kind of like frustrating. Um whereas in the surge, yeah, it's just you know, like everything, like I said, you know, just the voltage goes up or down, and you know, everything kind of plays its part in determining what's going to happen for the next few milliseconds or how the next you know bit is gonna is gonna play out. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

I think one of the things that differentiates Surge from a you like, for example, a Eurorack setup is that Surge really does work best as a self-contained all surge system. Yeah, like a whether it's you know partly because it was originally built in that kind of panel format where you'd have 16, 17 columns worth of um 16 columns originally, wasn't it, of one inch kind of space stuff. Yeah. Um and Eurack obviously allowed you to, you know, the random source Eurack modules allowed you to kind of mix and match stuff. Uh, but partly because of the voltage range thing, you know, they they do use slightly different voltage ranges from standard Eurack, and partly just because of the philosophical stuff we've just been talking about. I think for me it always works much better as a self-contained thing. I've I've never really got the surge modules to play that nicely with the other stuff. Yeah. I mean, they they they kind of I think ideologically work quite well with Duranalogue and Dopefur stuff. Sure, yeah, yeah, of course. You know, other other kind of analog tools, but in in practice, I just kind of feel that I get the best out of them when I'm just in all Surge world.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

And I think you'll probably I think that's kind of the only way I've I've really explored it because I was key, I was between getting essentially like a Duranologue Euroract setup or a I I was pretty I was pretty certain that I wanted a synth that was modular and patch programmable.

SPEAKER_02 32:38

You were also thinking about mannequin's skiff at one point, weren't you?

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Yeah, that was sort of like I was thinking either like well, I was thinking a normal mannequin skiff would be quite good because I really like his designs. I think Trent's like, you know, a genius in the check out the Atrium. I think I'll do plugs for all my on still now. Um but uh his stuff has a little bit of a a thing of like, for example, the Just Friends has multiple different like firmware things and and and it's almost in some ways like the antithesis of like a Duranologue setup in in that sense of like there's the Duranologue stuff is just all analog. The the whimsical rap stuff has like the just friends element of like it can be different things and different firmware modes and stuff. So I wasn't 100% sure whether or not that would work for me uh in a sort of like for what I was looking to do. Um but then when you were like, oh I could just build you a I could just build you a surge, and you kept whispering that in my ear for every day for about two weeks.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

Well I built one for Alex already, hadn't I? I think. So I I was like bringing in panels, you know, to the shop quite regularly with like for, you know, which Alex still hasn't really used yet, isn't he?

SPEAKER_00 33:44

But but to sort of answer your question, I've I've only actually really experienced Surge in in isolation of itself, and I've used the circuit happy, um uh which is uh basically a the Missing Link Junior, which is basically just like an Ableton Link device. So Ableton Link allows you to, without wires, seamlessly and perfectly sync up between um your Ableton session, and then it gives you the Missing Link Junior, gives you MIDI and also like clock outputs. So the closest I've got to integrating Surge in anything else is literally just clocking it via Ableton Link. But everything else I've done is just entirely self-contained, and I'll maybe play other instruments to accompany the what's happening with the Surge, but I'm never really bothered about like I've never tried to make it part of anything else. I don't have a URX setup in the house, it's it's just this for you, Surge. And to sort of go back to what you were saying about, you know, like you were talking about the the sort of we had the analogy of ingredients. Um and the the bigger the system is, it's almost like if you think of like one module can do four or five different things, that the the number of possibilities keeps multiplying the the bigger the system gets because everything can be. Everything can do five or six things. So when you add another panel, you've added like five or six things, five or six things, five or six things, and all of those things then interact in the whole, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger to the point where I'm like, it feels like every time I sit down at the surge, I feel like a more so than with most other synths or instruments I've played. I'm very aware that in a year or two years' time, there'll be quite a lot interesting for me here because there's the number of possibilities feels quite exponential because of the patch programmable nature of it. I think that's what appealed, that was the the cementing thing for me of like I want to go down this road was like um I like the idea of a synth that always asks me to look closer at it rather than be like, I'm gonna just change it out for the new shiny thing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:45

What do I need to add next to make this better? You know, it's like uh that's a big thing for me as well. Like the committing to a panel thing when I first kind of decided to do because I'd been a bit like you actually. I'd the first thing, my first surge exposure was building the kits um because Thonk was selling them for a while in the UK. Yeah, so I bought the Resi Q and the VCF Q and built them, and then um I was like, yeah, this is pretty good. And then I went and then the next the natural next step when I wanted to get more into it was um building a for you panel. So I couldn't really afford to buy a random source for you panel. Um because they are you know as as as nice as they are, they're they're they're pretty expensive. Yeah, and I was quite into DIY and I kind of was looking for another project at that point. Um so I started with Prism Circuits, paperface stuff and kind of just you know designed what I you know very naively thought, I'll just do a kind of voice panel to start and then I'll maybe sketch out an idea for a second panel, but that'll be about six months down the line. Of course, I was just like straight away, right? I need another panel right now, and um, and then what's the third panel gonna be? Yeah, yeah, you know. So I now have three panels of Prism, paperface plus uh TKB, which is on the on the bench at the moment, yeah. And then I've got a panel of low gain um stuff, which is the slightly newer era circuits, yeah, and then another kind of um loudest warning format rack with individual modules in it, yeah, which I'm using as kind of a testing bed for various things, which might then end up in the next panel, whatever that might be. But I'm actually contradicting myself a bit because what I what I did quite like was the idea of like fixing on a single panel, which I wasn't then going to add to and change too much.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

Of course, of course.

SPEAKER_02 37:09

But I think I mean yours, you you've got two in your videos, you have two four-panel things side by side. So that's kind of what I'm ending, that's my end goal, I think.

SPEAKER_04 37:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

I don't want any more than that. I don't want one of these. You see it. You know those cases where they kind of like they go up over your head. Yeah, once it once once the angle starts tipping this way, you're in you're in a dangerous territory. Yeah, I don't I don't want any risk of it toppling on top of me. Yeah, exactly. Um, or I don't want to have to put a patch cable in from that angle.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um kind of like back to what Luke you were saying about um about the surge, you know, um, when I was using the Eurorack um and playing these kind of dance music live sets, my synthesizer was very much constructed around like having multiple voices going on. Like I wanted to have, you know, drums, uh, a couple synth lines, things like that. And at some point I had uh, you know, kind of started to, well, I don't know if I was getting tired of dance music, but a little bit, and also dance music was going in directions that I wasn't super excited about, and I was far more interested in I was pushing more in an experimental direction. And I realized that while this very powerful synthesizer I have is like oriented around like giving me a handful of things to make like a competent uh you know techno set, but I I I would love something to like harness all that power into making one sound rather than having like a bunch of, and this is something that I would find a control working control is people would always come in wanting you know something with many voices that they could have like you know a self-contained like music box with lots of and I and I when I started really going down the surge rabbit hole, I was like, no, like what I want is like you know, this thing to make one sound that I like wrestle all of these ingredients, so you know, 12 slope generators and all these things, you know, not that you really need all that much at the end of the day, but all these things into that one convincing sound. And that one sound is like very complex and multi-layered rather than well and also when it's a sound that like if you wanted to, you know, so a lot of the the sounds I make are focused on feedback, cybernetic systems, all these things. You know, if you wanted to talk about that, you could say that the sound has multiple voices going on that are all kind of shifting and moving and things like that, but it's not so delineated as like I have a multi-track sequencer that's you know, sequencing all these. Yeah, exactly. It's like this thing that's just kind of maybe has a lot of elements going on, maybe has a lot of yeah, things that kind of, but at the end of the day, you're just taking like an audio output. You know, it's like you're not even like mixing a bunch of things together. It's like one audio output that has this whole world, this whole like weird ecosystem going on within it. Um, and that was something that really kind of like pushed me over the edge towards Surge, because at the time I, you know, this is like uh 2019, 2018. I I was I was not really listening to techno at all anymore. I was only listening to like GRM records, I was only listening to like experimental stuff, and that was really what I was far more interested in. I was just listening to a lot of like Maurizio Bianchi and you know, weird like noise stuff. And I that's what I wanted. I wanted to make these like really strange, evolving ecosystems of sound. Um, and then of course I found the music of Roland Kane, which which kind of put me well over the edge um into that. But yeah, it was that idea of you know yeah, something yeah, just kind of like pulling all of this stuff into one sound that can be really interesting. Um I was I was quite happy with you know the the the panel I had started with and made um a first batch of YouTube videos around 2020. Um with a with I made a lot of them with a single panel, which I which I found to be um for my purposes the most expressive uh configuration of surge modules. Um and you know, I that you could get a lot out of a single panel, but of course, you know, at some point you get the itch. And uh a couple more slopes would be handy.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

Yeah, a couple more slopes.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

Maybe if I had a second sequencer, I could do some polymetric stuff. Need a comparator to like do some weird uh whatever. I have an idea for some weird thing. Let's get a comparator in there, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 41:37

So a couple of minutes ago, you dropped the C bomb, and I was wondering how long it's gonna be before the word cybernetics came up. Um can we talk about cybernetics for a bit? Yeah, of course, yeah. Probably first by defining it as well, because I think there's because it's because it's a big theme in your video work for sure, and in and in your music, I guess. Um do you want to give a like a very like a top-level primary on what the term refers to and what it means in a musical context?

SPEAKER_01 42:02

Yeah, I mean cybernetics is, you know, I think part of my fascination with cybernetics is that it's this kind of lost discipline. Um, cybernetics really emerges out of the during the war, immediate post-war um time. Um, a lot of it uh from the um mathematician Norbert Wiener. Um, but he's building off the work of people like Claude Shannon and and and all these people at the time who are like computers are around the corner. Um, but you know, during the war, so like Norbert Wiener, he writes kind of his his books on cybernetics, and it's really about this idea of looking at everything as this kind of system and uh and what can you do to make a system that reacts to its environment. Um Norbert Wiener talks a lot about that in the context of things because at the time of the war, as we all know, war tends to uh push a lot of money towards making weapons. Um and so he was trying to make anti-aircraft missile defense systems basically. And he was like, okay, so how do you make a system that like tracks a missile, like reacts and things like this? Um and that becomes and through that um you know he basically kind of founds this field of cybernetics, which over the subsequent, like it's basically like the the in French it's called the Tranclorieuse, like the the 30-year period from 1945 to 1975, where like generally in Western Europe and in the US, uh inequality was quite low. Uh things were generally it's kind of like this golden period, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:45

Academic funding was quite high.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

Academic funding was quite high. Generally, there was kind of this feeling of optimism um right after the war. People like quality of life just kind of kept going up for people, unions were quite strong. Um, it was just this kind of golden period. Was a more utopian vision of what technology could bring. Yes, absolutely. And you know, I find that period really, really interesting. And during that period is really kind of when cybernetics is a thing. Computers are starting to really become part of, you know, to the point where by the mid-60s computers exist and people will have maybe seen one or you know interacted with one in some in some way. Um, but obviously still punch cards and things like that. Um but yeah, cybernetics was just this kind of thing that also what I like about it at the time is that it, yes, it was very utopian and it was also very like interdisciplinary. It would bring in all these kinds of things. So people studying biological systems, people studying weather systems, people studying electronics, people studying all these kinds of things, people studying society and like economics. Um everyone was kind of interested in like looking at things as systems that can react, and that like this kind of like systems theory, this this way of zooming out and looking at things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

Am I right in thinking that like a really simple example for someone you know new to this as a discipline might be something like a thermostat, which would adjust itself based on what it's detecting the temperature to be. Yeah, it's basically like if it's too hot it turns itself down, if it's too cold, it turns itself up, and it's that kind of feedback loop thing. Yes. Which to create an equilibrium or to create a stable state or desired state.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, that's that's key to cybernetics is the idea of like measuring and reacting to the external world, um, measuring and reacting to other parts of itself, uh, things like that. You asked about a musical context, you know, um, I found the work of Roland Kane who was explicit about his interest in cybernetics. And so that was kind of like this new thread in this cybernetics thing. Like I said, you had like people from all these disciplines, and now musicians also engaging with this with these ideas. Um and uh yeah, that's kind of where my interest came in. And you know, his interest was seeing synthesizer. Uh the synthesizer has this kind of giant uh cybernetic system, just in the way that all these other people were looking to cybernetics as a way to kind of frame how they think about these things. Um and yeah, and so I I suppose like uh my interest comes mainly through looking at the synthesizer, the modular synthesizer as this system to be understood cybernetically, and then draw the lines between the other ways in which other disciplines interact with cybernetics to say that okay, here's uh some biological, someone's uh you know, exploring I I made a I made a video on the logistic map, which you know in its early stages comes from uh understanding population dynamics, um, a kind of rudimentary way of modeling the the the growth of a population. Um and okay, so like using that on the synthesizer, what does that mean? Then the artist, the artistic part of you steps in, what does this mean? You know, like what you know, what a what am I hearing? How does this draw, how does this make me feel about the the lens through which I'm making this sound? Um you know, I'm I'm you know, making a uh a sound based on like Lorentz attractors, which are you know emerge from study of weather patterns. Okay, like cool, like the sound. What what is that link? Then the artistic part of you steps in to try and frame that into something and and make some kind of music out of this.

SPEAKER_02 47:42

I mean, that's the really interesting bit for me is that like turning that conceptual framework or that kind of jumping off point into something that's musically compelling. Yeah. And I think that that's the real kind of magic when you kind of hit on something that actually actually this this this concept is now producing the sound, which is like nothing I've ever heard before. Yeah. Um, and yeah, that's that's kind of a cool way to approach synthesis.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

Yeah, I mean it's like, you know, again, it's like I make the videos that I that are are kind of like presenting these sounds, and I like recording those sounds and seeing what the sounds are, then I'm also a musician. And that is a separate thing where I take those sounds and then try to make to compose something out of that.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

Because that that yeah, that's an interesting distinction between the kind of that kind of raw building block sound process or the or the conceptual level of like making making a sound from this idea and then turning that into finished actual music.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Yeah, I mean, some of the sounds that you know I make and present on the channel, like I could happily listen to. Hit recording, yeah. And you know, maybe that's maybe that's all it needs, and if that's all it needs, and you know, that's something that I could find uh compelling as a musical statement, then then that that's what it is. But in general, you know, um I like to have the sounds there, and then the musician part steps in to kind of wrangle them and and rustle them and and kind of sculpt something and juxtapose them with other sounds and yeah, yeah, see what happens. And I mean that's kind of how you approach the surge, I think, as well.

SPEAKER_02 49:14

You've talked about before about you kind of use it as as a bit of your you know, your sonic clay almost that you kind of add stuff to, and yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

It's very much the the exploration of the circuit is the activity for the day. And then afterwards I have like recorded that output, there is always a music, it's like it's always like driven by my musical brain. Like I will start by being like, oh cool, that that patch in your video was cool. I'll try and do something similar with the setup that I have and inevitably fail or go in a slightly different direction, or like all of a sudden, like something happens in my ears, like, oh, this is actually really interesting. And I just follow, follow in that direction, sort of a bit like a child at playtime. Like, I'm not I'm not ever really thinking about like it there'll there'll come a point sometimes where it starts to turn into music, uh, but there's like this really fun part where it's not, and I'm not I'm not thinking about music because unilaterally the worst music I've ever made in my life is always when I'm like, I'm gonna sit down and write music today. It's just recipe for disaster for me, it just doesn't work. So I have to just explore and be like playful with a with an idea or with a synthesizer or whatever it may be, um, and record that in long form. And then afterwards I can on a different day sit down with more of a music-making brain and kind of be like, okay, well, like what else does this idea need? Like sometimes, as you say, sometimes it just needs a fade in and a fade out, and maybe some effects and a bit of EQ and it's done. And then other times it needs a few other instruments, or like, oh, I if I had this other sound happening.

SPEAKER_02 50:52

These chords might work nicely with that, or yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:54

Yeah. Um and and sometimes it is for me a bit more about capturing like a moment in time. So it will be one of the things that I I love about the surge and is kind of like a little bit tricky about the surge, is like I could not touch a single dial, not move a single patch cord, and come back the next day and turn the same patch on, and everything sounds quite different. Like if I'm using, especially if I'm using like like envelope slopes as oscillators, like the warming up and the the sort of like letting everything. If you're relying on anything being in tune with each other, it's um yeah, so so I kind of have got to the point where I try to like if I if I do think there's a musical idea there, I I will literally record a rudimentary version of it. And what I'm starting to increasingly believe and think is musically interesting is keeping the idea at the rudimentary level and not overdoing it. Like, I I feel like the thing that I feel quite important like is quite important in my music making at the moment is this idea of the further away I get from the moment of making the idea, the like less clear and less true I am to that original vision. If I make a surge patch and play some chords underneath it, and in that moment it felt great, and then two weeks later I come back and I open up the session, and I'm like, oh, actually, like maybe I'll just delete those chords because it was another, it was a multi-track, and maybe I'll do something else, and maybe I'll add this other thing. All of that starts to get further and further away from this original idea that felt really real in the moment, and I'm getting increasingly wary of my fallibility to just get bored with an idea because I've heard it a few times and it and I'm like, oh cool, I'll just do something new because it's boring to me now. But to the people who've never heard this idea before, this could be the greatest piece of music of all time. It probably isn't, but it could be, but I've ruined it because it's boring to me because I've heard it a few times, and like I and so I'm trying to just be very committal. It's done. And it might it might be rough, but all of my favorite music is often truly imperfect with squeaky noises.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

When you can hear the mistakes, or you can hear someone putting a fader down a bit late, or yeah, that kind of stuff. It's always that's what makes it not AI slop, you know.

SPEAKER_00 53:10

In in a world of both simultaneously AI slop and also just like overly polished, pristine pop music, I'm solely interested in stuff that is in in some ways technically bad, technically ugly or imperfect in some way.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

And not just overly polished pop music, but overly polished like experimental music, you know? I mean, um uh I people have there's a level of knowledge now that people have in terms of how to make music that was not there when I started making music. Um, which means that I think people there's a lot of musicians now that like already can like set up a signal chain and get everything sounding great before they have an idea to make music.

SPEAKER_02 53:54

Well the tools are so good now as well, and like out of the box. I mean, if you open up Ableton, for example, and you load some of the stock presets, yeah, you know, stock plug-in, stock presets, it will sound great, it'll sound like a finished track pretty quickly. Yeah. If you load, you know, a the you know, a spiced loop in or something like that. It's so easy to make something that sounds like finished music, yeah, or that sounds like professional quality music, and and it's it's actually harder to break out of that in a way, sometimes with with with modern gear, because yeah, it's just so everything out of the box sounds so pristine and it's been over-engineered. And yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 54:24

I think in a way, like we also like our brains have just become very infected with this kind of like AI uh thing where you know we think like, okay, like if I want to make music, I'll go watch like a YouTube tutorial on how to like set this up. And it leads to everyone kind of doing the same thing. Um, you know, when I was starting to make music, I heard a quote from Terry Temlitz talking about how she doesn't use compression. So, like for my first records, I was like very adamant that I wasn't gonna use compression, and they sound terrible, but they sound really cool as well. Like, I like how they sound, they never worked in a club, they don't work in a lot of ways, but there's a kind of like amateurness, but they sound unique as well, that's true. Yeah, to them that makes it kind of unique. Whereas I I feel like a lot of you know, it's great that there I don't want to like sound any kind of like I don't know, gatekeepery or whatever. Um it's great that there's a lot of access, but there's also a lot of access to like what the right thing to do is. And um, you know, in my job for MOG, in many of the jobs I've done is is to try and kind of like push a bit against the idea that there being any right way to do things, any right way to patch a synthesizer, any right way to create a sound. Um, because yeah, just I I I sense that like, you know, people thought that the internet was going to kind of liberate everyone and and you know, in the late 90s or something, it was this idea that the internet would ever culture would kind of fragment into billions of different subcultures, um, which happened in some way, but also there was just kind of like a monoculture that arose. And I think if you look at LLMs and all these kinds of things that that just kind of synthesize everything into one kind of homogeneous thing, uh, you know, anything to push against that um is a bit is a bit uh is is something that I that I think is is worthwhile. And I I do bring that into like my videos. I think people get a little frustrated with me because they'll try to recreate the patches that I present. And they'll be like, is this right to do this thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, ah and I think I I will kind of frustrate people sometimes when I'm just kind of like it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 56:34

It's not it's not about doing it exactly the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 56:37

I'm not actually trying to shoot a missile down. Yeah, like this is not actually doing anything important, this is making a sound. And so, like, you know, I like these ideas as framing devices for exploration. Um, and sometimes it's interesting to like be like, okay, today it's gonna be like very purist. Like, how do how do I present this in a very like scientifically accurate way? But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. You know, you're making music, it sounds cool to you or it doesn't, and that's you know, that's uh the only thing that it that that's important really. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

So in line with the idea of like there not being like one right way to make music or put you know, patch a synthesizer. We've spoken a lot about surge, but it's probably worth highlighting that none of these things are like truly unique to like the surge system itself. And I know that that's something you talk about in your channel about it, it's not being prescriptive, like you have to use the surge.

SPEAKER_01 57:31

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I really don't want to like sell people things, you know. I I I like I want to present ideas that people can uh engage with right now with whatever they have, whether that's you know, VCV rack, a Eurorack system, Dopper system, uh I mean, even I mean you could even do it with like a mini Korg, maybe, you know, like a micro Korg, you know, like you could, I mean, just uh different ways of thinking about things um that are that are yeah, like a bit tool agnostic, even though the surge is you know very nice in all the ways that we've talked about very well suited to this kind of thing. So if you were going, if you're super interested in the ideas, then maybe it's you know something to consider. But in general, these these are ideas, um, they're not uh things to buy.

SPEAKER_02 58:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you did want to get into Surge, though, as it's also worth pointing out, there are various different routes in. I mean, we touched on the DIY thing, DIY is a really big part of that community as well. So if you're interested in building your own stuff, there's there's numerous people that will sell you PCBs, um, login electronics, Prism circuits we've mentioned. Um, if you want to buy a finished system, there are various options for that as well. Those companies will build them for you, random source will get sell you the surge branded stuff. You can do it in Eurorack, you can do it in yeah, there's there's there's lots of different routes into that particular ecosystem.

SPEAKER_00 58:55

Yeah. And there's also lots of other brands that have a similar ethos of being patch programmable, like uh Juranalog and Dope for, you know, there's lots of open-ended modular systems that don't require like a specific Surge ecosystem.

SPEAKER_01 59:09

Yeah, but definitely, yeah, DIY is also just, I mean, a lot of surge surge is very confusing to get into for a lot of people because it's not immediately obvious how you do this. It's not immediately obvious, like, you know, with Eurorack, you're like, okay, I I I know I need to buy a case that has power. In Surge, you're like, okay, I needed a case, I guess, but does that have the power? Like, not really.

SPEAKER_02 59:33

Is it a loudest warning format or is it uh random source format? It's all a bit and and the resources online are not as well as stabbed. Well, there just aren't as many of them as there are for Eurorack. Yeah. And they're they're they're generally a bit more what I think was our old internet, you know, they're kind of they're they're very web 1.0. Which is kind of nice in the internet. Which is cool, yeah. Yeah, but it's not you won't find, and there's not that much on YouTube, yeah. Um compared to, you know, we don't have equivalents of you know, like some of the big synth tubers for surge stuff. I guess you are probably the the the the premier surge stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

Yeah. Um but yeah, I I I do think that I mean a lot of the surge stuff is also very DIY and I know that um, you know, just in my experience with friends and things who are very into very interested in getting into surge and stuff, but a bit intimidated by the DIY thing, you know, I would also just say like learning to solder is pretty you you can learn how to solder in an afternoon. Um, and it's really just kind of fun. I mean, at this point, I've you know, my studio has more or less, you know, aside from like my laptop, turned into pretty much exclusively stuff that I've built myself. Um kits of varying, you know, various, you know, anything from basic EuroC modules to like, you know, uh the RE808, RE909 uh type things. Um and yeah, at the end of the day, it's just really fun. Um and so I would recommend people to just kind of yeah, play around with DIY because it's it's a really the project itself becomes really, really fun. Um and it's a nice I'd say it's just a it's a nice thing to do, and you can also get gear for cheaper.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:16

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a cheaper way of getting into that stuff for sure. Yeah, and it's um there is something also like intrinsic for me anyway, because I'm same as you, I've got you know a lot of self-built stuff now. You know, I'd say maybe I've got a lot of other Euroract stuff, but there is a big chunk of Euroact stuff I built and my surge stuff is all hand-built, you know, yeah, um, and the Booker 100 system I built as well. But um, there is something very satisfying about making music with something that you've assembled yourself as well. Yeah um, I mean the tier up from that is designing a circuit and building it yourself.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:44

Yeah, you then get into the mess of yeah, you know, at some point you get there, and then you know, I don't know where this ends for me. At some point, or maybe I'll design a chip. Design a chip, you know, I'll be you know, like building, I'll be, you know, building the resistors at home or something like that. Yeah, but um, but yeah, the DIYs. Exactly, yeah. But it's yeah, it is a it is a fun thing. Um, and I I I do um just to like kind of like yeah, dispel like DIY requires very little actual like skill or knowledge. Um it's just kind of like, you know, what once you just make the hurdle, I I was I was telling Luke the other day, just like buy a malt. Like spend an afternoon making a couple of your rack malts, and you'll basically have the the basics of soldering down and and then and then from there it's you know um you know, even the surge uh kits surge circuits are generally not that difficult. They're through hole, you know, a lot of space on the board.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:42

It's you know, yeah, very relatively relatively easy to find components most of the time. And if they're not, there are you know that there are ways to get stuff in the right.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:50

I remember you telling me that I was sort of like, well, how hard is the sort of for you Prism stuff, for example, to make versus like Eurorack? And you were like, well, it's actually easier. It's a lot easier, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:01

Yeah. And there's also just a lot of uh, you know, we're lucky that people are quite nice and and yeah, free with their time. And you know, generally um, you know, there will be resources to help you because people are are just very kind.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:14

Yeah, I mean the search discord is great for that, you know. There and there's there's a search DOI thread on there which is you know full of incredibly knowledgeable and very patient people that will help diagnose problems and give you pointers on which components to get and that kind of thing, it's really invaluable. And there are threads on Mod Wiggler in the DOI, you know. Yeah, it's like a 20-page thread on building the Prism Circuit stuff, and there's so much great advice in there.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:35

Um it's a bit overwhelming at first, but you know, if you just kind of like accept that there's a lot of overwhelming stuff, but but kind of jump in.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:43

Yeah. Um you also have to maybe just get comfortable with knowing that you might mess up something and you might lose a little bit of money because you have to do something again, and yeah, you have to make peace with that sometimes, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:53

But unlikely to be anything, you know, like at the end of the day, like the components are so cheap that if you screw up a component, who cares? Ten cents. If you screw up a a circuit board, you know, it's but I it also the chances of that are quite unlikely. No, it's it's pretty hard to make something irreparable. Yeah. Um if at the end of the day you need to go in and put a jumper wire to to fix some trace on a circuit board, it'll it'll, you know, it'll work a okay. And yeah, yeah. Um so we'll leave it there, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:22

I mean, Chris, thanks so much for coming in. I know you've you've been, you know, just luckily for us, happened to be in Glasgow for a few days. Yeah. So it's great that you drop by. Um, we've done a lot more chatting off camera as well, which has been really nice to catch up because we first kind of bumped into you at Super Booth after being sort of long time fans. Um, so yeah, thanks very much for your time. Thanks for having us. Um, thanks everyone for watching. Hope you've enjoyed this slightly nerdier than usual deep dive into the world research. Uh, you can get in touch with um questions and feedback via signalflow at signal sounds.com. Um, your usual reminder that if you're watching this, there is also an audio version if you want to listen in the car. If you're listening to it in the car, then there's also a YouTube version if you want us in your living room. I'm not sure why you'd want that, but it's available. Uh we'll be back soon with a regular episode in about three weeks' time. Um