Cart
Quantity :
Loading...
We love getting to know the folks who build the instruments we all enjoy, and it's particularly interesting to meet new arrivals to the scene with their own stories and perspectives on music technology. Ferry Island Modular is exactly that kind of case. A power trio from a small Finnish island town, they first came to our attention with their debut four-dimensional wavetable oscillator, Four Seas. Since then, we caught up with them at Superbooth, where they unveiled updates to the oscillator alongside new modules in the series.
We wanted to hear about the company, the people behind it, and how they think about instrument design.
Perfect Circuit: Hey, since this is our first interview — can you tell us a bit about yourselves and your backgrounds? How did you end up joining forces for a modular synth company?
Aurélie: Hey, sure! There are three of us at Ferry Island Modular: Justin, who's the engineer and original founder; Jukka, who’s the designer; and me (Aurélie), I handle everything else, specifically everything involved in turning a prototype into a ready module you can play (press, distribution, manufacturing, production) We all live in Helsinki. Between the three of us, we represent five different nationalities so we’re a pretty international little team. Justin and I are also partners in life so FIM is very much a family project in the most literal sense. We all three work in the digital / software field.
We're named after our neighborhood. Lauttasaari means "Ferry Island" in Finnish — it's a small island district in Helsinki that used to be accessible from the mainland via a ferry only. Now there’s a bridge and even the metro. Years ago Justin made a few DIY modules for himself and some friends, and needed a name. He came up with Ferry Island Modular almost as a joke, and it stuck.
The company started because Justin had a very specific wavetable oscillator in his head that didn't exist, so he built it (naturally). That became Four Seas, and Four Seas became a company. I think what drew all three of us together was the same thing: wanting to make something serious and beautiful and honest. We don’t have a lot of free time between jobs and young children so whatever we commit to, we’re not going to half-ass it.
PC: Finland has a remarkably deep history with electronic and electroacoustic music — from early instrument inventors like Erkki Kurenniemi to singular experimental acts like Pan Sonic. Do you feel any connection to that lineage in the way you approach your work?
Jukka: That lineage means a lot to us. The rigor, curiosity of Kurenniemi, and his refusal to separate the technical from the expressive has inspired whole subcultures here and internationally. Pan Sonic and especially Mika Vainio have touched so many and acted as a vanguard of strong expression through experimentation and minimalism in the often maximalist field of electronic music. That spirit of thinking seriously about what an instrument can be, and how it can act as an extension for an artist’s body, is very much alive in Finland, along with a strong music culture, and we're genuinely proud to be making things here.
PC: The name Ferry Island Modular is rooted in Lauttasaari, where you've been based for 15 years. How much does the place actually inform your work, and in which way?
Aurélie: It’s a source of inspiration for us. Lauttasaari is a small island so you're never far from the sea. The light, the motion, the weather, it's all very present and intense. The sea freezes in winter, there's fog, and when seagulls come back, you know that spring is around the corner. Not exactly a tropical beach situation, but beautiful in its own way and in summer it can be downright glorious. We find it centering and very inspiring.
×
PC: Let's talk about the Four Seas. The module lands in a pretty busy wavetable oscillator space in the Eurorack, but it does something genuinely different: treating wavetables as a three-dimensional cube, with spread per axis as a fourth dimension. Where did that spatial way of thinking about wavetables come from? Was it a conceptual starting point, or did it emerge from working through a more practical problem with how wavetable navigation usually feels?
Justin: I wanted a wavetable oscillator that felt less like a little computer and more like an instrument. I couldn't find one that really “ticked the right boxes”, so I decided to try to build my own based on things that I liked. I really liked the Erica Synths Black Wavetable oscillator for example; even though it's digital, it still feels very direct and tactile. I was also inspired by Just Friends, which was practically unobtainium at the time. I loved the idea of taking that kind of multidimensional, harmonic thinking and applying it to wavetables instead of basic waveforms. That was the jumping-off point.
I honestly can’t take credit for the cube structure, both Piston Honda and E350 Morphing Terrarium both did the X, Y, Z long before I came along. The real “lightbulb moment” for me was thinking in terms of exploring that space via wavetable spread. That, and the interplay of four related outputs.
PC: You've been explicit about wanting interaction with the module to feel less "computer-like" — no menus, no presets. What sort of constraints did that impose on you as a designer, and which decisions along the way were the most consequential?
Jukka: We’re devout believers in playing by ear rather than by eye. This means our instruments have to feel right and be intuitive as expressive interfaces to sound. We wanted to steer away from complex modalities, hard-to-remember button combos, and menu diving. The design principles and constraints that stem from all of this are actually nothing complicated. Every control should stick to its single purpose if possible, and a screen shouldn’t be needed to understand what’s happening under your fingers. Also, nothing kills inspiration like having to hunt for a manual when you’re about to jam after the kids are asleep.
PC: Four Seas offers several distinct waveshaping options: thru-zero phase modulation, and phase-distortion, as well as fixed-point scalar underflow (bitwise XOR). The latter is a rather unique addition. Can you talk about how you arrived at that and what it actually does to the signal?
Justin: Sure! Basically, I was trying to think of a cool third mod mode (3 is a magic number, after all), and I was having a hard time getting excited by any of the “usual suspects” (AM, ring mod, bitcrusher). I’m a big believer that anything that’s somewhat trivial to do in analog should be done in that domain and vice versa, so I started thinking about an “unapologetically digital” mode. Pure bitwise-XOR is actually kinda like ring mod’s digital cousin, so I took that as a starting point and just started playing around with bitwise ops; I landed on something that’s kinda a half-adder, kinda XOR. It sounded cool, but it was a bit quiet, so I jacked up the amplitude into slight clipping. Voilà, you have FSU mode.
PC: Let's talk about the most recent updates to the module—what did you add, and how do you see these new features deepening the instrument?
Justin: The flagship feature on the new firmware is enabling i2c compatibility. I always thought the Just Friends integration with Monome Teletype (“Just Type”) was clever and fun, so having something similar for Four Seas was in my design since the very beginning. I’m glad to bring it to life; it’s a bit of a niche feature, but I think users who are already into i2c control will really appreciate it. Plus, it’s always important to keep your promises….I want our users to feel like if we say something is going to happen, it really will.
Aside from the i2c, we’re also bringing selectable (slower) LFO speeds as well as a soft octave switch. The former came from me not being really happy with the LFO speeds in the factory firmware; they were just too fast! As for the latter, it was a suggestion from DivKid that we thought really made sense and didn’t go too much against our no “weird button combos” policy. It’s just handy to be able to switch up into more like a lead sound from a bass sound without needing to stop and retune.
Finally, we’re also releasing Harbor, a wavetable editor that allows you both to create your own custom wavetables for Four Seas, as well as to convert Serum-compatible wavetables to be Four Seas compatible. It’s a lot of fun to create new banks from “found sound”, and we think our users are going to enjoy having even more sonic terrain to explore.
×
PC: Four Seas runs on the Electrosmith Daisy Seed. What was your experience of working with Daisy as a platform, both as a design tool, and as the foundation for a commercial product?
Justin: Daisy definitely saved us an enormous amount of development time. As I was pretty new to embedded development and DSP when I started on Four Seas, it definitely helped by abstracting away a lot of “necessary evil” boilerplate, and also by providing convenience classes which allowed me to focus more on my own ideas and less on reinventing the wheel. On the hardware side, it makes a lot of sensible design choices, and takes away the pain of needing to route, manufacture, and test BGA. As an engineer who generally likes to work “top down”, I really appreciated that.
Finally, the Electrosmith folks we worked with were very kind and helpful, with a special shout-out to the infinitely patient Takumi over on the Daisy Discord server.
PC: The firmware is fully open source and you've explicitly invited people to hack it—not the most common stance for a commercial hardware release. What does that decision mean to you? And have any forks from the community already caught your attention?
Justin: It means a lot, honestly. When I first got into synths, I had a bad case of Eurorack fever, but an even worse case of “empty wallet syndrome”. So I went the DIY route, and as an added bonus to building a nice rack for myself and saving a lot of money, learning to debug non-functioning modules was the crash course in small-signal electronics, embedded programming, and DSP that I never knew I needed. I learned so much from open source designs (schematics and firmware both), in particular Mutable Instruments.
There’s a long and rich history of DIY ethos in synthesizers; it’s very punk in attitude, which strongly resonates with our little team. We wouldn't be here without that culture, and being able to pay that forward by open sourcing Four Seas overwhelmingly felt like the right thing to do.
No one’s forked the code yet, but if someone does, we’ll be super excited to see what they do with it. I often say that seeing what our users do with Four Seas is one of the most satisfying parts of this whole experience, and that extends to the code as well.
×
PC: Beyond its role as an oscillator, Four Seas can also function as a complex modulation source, and a waveshaper. What are some of your own favorite uses of the module? And what do you wish more people would try with it?
Justin: Oh man, favorite uses…. Well, in general, I really like exploring the audio inputs, especially the TZPM stuff. It sounds super rich, and it doesn’t have to sound clangorous if it’s well tuned. It’s also fun to self-patch, taking (or mult’ing) some of the outputs back into the inputs, and then using the frequency spread to set up frequency ratios. This is especially nice because it still tracks the same v/oct signal, so it won’t fall out of tune. I’m also always telling folks to experiment with the waveshaper; it’s fun, and can be useful even just for turning interesting mono signals into stereo.
As for complex modulation, I would like to flag that our mod modes work well in LFO mode as well. I had a pretty good glitch patch going the other day that had Four Seas in LFO mode (both sides) with the new firmware (slower LFOs), and both sides in FSU mode. It got quite steppy and glitched out, but I was also able to make it cyclical by syncing both sides with triggers from Pam’s on every 16th bar or something.
Jukka: One recent favorite thing for me is to use it as a four voice percussion synth with a harmonically rich wavetable bank, switching off smooth, sending some radio scanning to the inputs and playing with the osc mod modes, then sending each input into a VCA with a snappy envelope and sequencing those with Pams. Then patch synced LFOs to the position and spread inputs and dance. Another favorite is a lush chord pad with some classic breaks in the inputs to modulate it.
PC: Can you tell us about the new modules in your lineup, that you've presented at the Superbooth earlier this year?
Aurélie: Sure! We brought two new modules with us to Berlin. The first is Undertow, we call it a Morphing Modulation Matrix. I think you guys called it the “big daddy of modulation”, that works too. It’s a two-dimensional wavetable VCO and LFO matrix in 16HP. Two independent wavetable oscillators sit at its core, feeding a 5×3 grid of bipolar outputs. Each oscillator has its own clock input, wave and frequency control, and five banks of wavetables. Across the horizontal axis, waveform and frequency interpolate between the two oscillators; the vertical axis shapes the character of the modulation from clean to turbulent. Add a clock and those relationships become rhythmically organized. At audio rate, with v/oct tracking on both sides, it becomes a dense two-oscillator voice with 15 interpolated outputs spread across the grid.
Beacon is a 4HP stereo VCA and low-pass gate with a ping input and physically modeled vactrol responses. The analog signal path is straightforward — stereo in, stereo out — but the behavior on the control side is where it gets interesting. Rather than a single fixed response, Justin measured a large collection of real vactrols and modeled their individual characters, giving you selectable responses that behave the way optical circuits actually do. A character knob introduces saturation and harmonic color drawn from a Bob Moog technique originally used in the Lab Series L5 amp.
PC: With more than one module now out in the world, how do you think about the relationship between them? Are you intentionally building toward a coherent ecosystem, or do you approach each module on its own terms?
Justin: It's both, and honestly some of the ecosystem stuff happens whether we plan it or not. Eddie and Alex are always going to sound like Eddie and Alex after all, and modules made by the same small team with similar tastes are going to share a sensibility for the same reason. That's the free part. The intentional part is making sure each module also works on its own. It sounds obvious, but it is modular after all; you need to play nice with others in order to earn your HP. And then there's a third layer where we're actively thinking about how the modules might talk to each other, possible expanders, that kind of thing. Ideally they work together to form something that’s fun, useful, and more than the sum of its parts.
PC: Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers? And where can people follow your work and stay up to date with Ferry Island Modular?
Aurélie: We just want to thank every single person who has engaged with us and our products with curiosity and kindness, has expressed support, encouragement, and offered feedback. Everyone who has shared patches, shared time with us at Superbooth, stocked Four Seas on your store shelves or adopted one for your own rack: thank you, it means the world to us. The best place to follow our work is through our Instagram @FerryIslandModular.
The information below is required for social login
Sign In
Create New Account