In September I had the pleasure of sitting down with Joran van Gremberghe—the erudite designer behind Joranalogue—and German composer and electronic musician Stefan Paul Goetsch, known on YouTube as Hainbach. We discussed Joranalogue’s origins, their collaboration on the new Collide 4 module—which draws inspiration from vintage audio test equipment—and the unique blend of art and engineering that inspires their work.
Joran’s deep technical expertise and Stefan’s boundary-pushing creativity in sound design come together in this conversation to explore the process of bringing vintage-test-gear-inspired designs into the modern modular world. From the influence of early electronic music to the technical details of modular synthesis, our discussion digs into the inspirations and challenges behind crafting musical tools that achieve maximalist aims with elegant understated designs that resonate with musicians and sonologists alike.
What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.
An Interview with Joran van Gremberghe + Hainbach

Daniel Miller: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Joran and Hainbach. We're meeting to talk about, among other things, a new module you've developed in collaboration. So I definitely want to ask you about that. But first, I'd love to start with some background info about your creative process. I've seen in other interviews that you were both making music and electronics at a very young age. Joran, I think you've previously mentioned that you were building synthesizers as a teenager in school, and Hainbach, it seems like you had a very wide set of early influences, including classical music, game music, and psychedelic rock. So can you tell me more about those very early influences, what specific albums or instruments were you drawn to, and what was your path from there into the Eurorack world?
Joran van Gremberghe: Yeah, for me, well, I started listening to electronic music around age 11 or 12, I would say. This was, I think, the era of the music blogs, where you could download MP3s with dubious legality. And I would have a little MP3 player full of these dubiously-downloaded tracks. And from there, my music taste expanded a little bit from what was popular at that time into more classic electronic stuff, like older house and techno, like from the 90s and things like that. And from there on, it just went further and further, and I started to get really interested in the sound itself.
And also, I've always been quite technically minded. We had a computer in the family at quite an early age. So when I was four, I was programming little things on a Pentium II. And then it all sort of coalesced when I found out that there are these things called modular synthesizers which combine everything, these technical aspects I love, and also the music, the electronic sounds. So I started designing modules before I had even touched a module myself, years and years before I bought, like, two Doepfer modules or something, I was designing modules. And I was also doing other stuff. I was designing board games and video games and stuff like that. I had an interest in graphic design as well, and that all, kind of, came together in that way, in modular.
And then later I started doing repairs of vintage synths as a student, which was a great way to learn, to meet people. You get to see how polysynths were made in the '70s. And it was a very great learning experience. And then I released my first module as Joranalogue Audio Design, and then more modules and more modules, and now we're over 20.
Yeah, I'm very happy that we'll get into how the collaboration got to be. We'll get into that later. But I feel like for me, this is kind of a pinnacle for me, Collide 4, as a designer, I think, it's the best thing I ever designed. In a way, my interests come together even more because I love Stefan's [Hainbach’s] music. I like his approach to things. I like test gear a lot. Just as a user, but I also like the almost scientific sensibilities that exist around test gear. So to bring that into the musical use, it's like, it's a kind of perfect storm, in a way.

Hainbach: Yeah, well, I had piano lessons when I was a kid, so I had to do tennis, and I had to do piano lessons. I didn't have much fun with tennis. So, to make even the music lessons more interesting, I started to ask my piano teacher to transcribe me game music. Because I loved computer games, and that was a way for me to have fun while doing the piano.
And when I was 15, I was asked to play in a band, a school band, basically, just a brother, sister. It was just “Hey, we're starting a band. We're making a psychedelic rock thing, and you can play piano. So do you want to play organ?” I don't have an organ, but it's fine. We'll borrow one. We borrowed one from a friend. I was at the session. It was a whole mess because I didn't even know how to write chords.I had no idea. I'd always just played from notation, and I had no idea about the grammar rules. But when I was, for the first time with our music on stage, it hit me. I remember what played in the beginning. Then I lost all memory. I only knew this was the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my days. I wrote songs in that band, played with the band, did all the things you have to do as, basically, the band leader at that time. But it wasn't enough. I needed to make more music constantly. So I tried to discover as much music as I could, which at the time was radio. There was John Peel, that was something that I listened to. There was MTV, Alternative Nation, or, like, all the stuff that comes in late and you videotape it.
And because I didn't have money for a synthesizer, I just used the radio. So I used the radio as a synthesizer. And when you turn the dial to the left there used to be up until 1997 the Europa Signal [European Radio Message System (ERMES)], FM modulated pager signals, and those I sampled into a Casio SK-1, and that sounded cool. I liked that. It was gritty, and it worked well with the rock band. You could have that Casio and drums playing and cut through. And I really liked that. But the problem was you can't save the sounds. So I thought, let's get a synthesizer. And I got a synthesizer from an inheritance. [...] But I thought “there's something else,” and I didn't know back then what it was. It was texture. It’s very hard to get that texture of that SK-1 recorded in that mic from the radio on a synthesizer, but [...] I got a facsimile of what I would need to do. And that journey, like finding these textual sounds that I fell in love with, has been with me for all my life, and that has been at the core of one of the things that I do, is finding textures that inspire me, and that whole role, [...] in the end, led to this collaboration, especially after my my journey into the grandfathers of the analog synthesizers the test equipment from the 1940s and '50s and '60s.

DM: Hainbach, one thing that has always struck me about your work, and your creative practices, is just this boundless curiosity for sound and instruments and all these different influences. And I wonder if there is any part of that which is influenced by your work as a theater composer, because that's a very particular creative outlet, isn't it? How does your work as a theater composer relate to your approach to sound?
Hainbach: Oh, so one thing that theater taught me is to be very fast and effective with your sound. So I try to find sounds that have immediate impact. Because when you're sitting there and there's like 17 people there, actors, directors, light costume, set design, sound guys, and then you play your new track. [...] Everybody has to be like, “Ah, okay, I'm pumped about this.” People have to get hyped for it. So that's really important. So that's why you… why you tend, why I tend to go for a minimal maximalism. So with the fewest tones and the fewest inputs, create a maximum impact, and not something that… And I go for that, usually by texture and, like, complex processes, and then also have a unique structure. As in any work, there are people that like “just use Omnisphere.” Just use this. I just use this. Took me, like, five minutes, and there's a certain pride in that, that it only took five minutes. I was like, that's boring! I don't want to take just five minutes. I'm happy. And really, I mean, I'm happy to spend a week on one cool sound, if it's really, oh, and there's a story behind it and something that works for me, and I try to assemble an orchestra of weird gear that just creates these noises that are beautiful. [...] In theater, I could do so many things. I could do anything from, like, creating basically music robots that play music, to work with an orchestra, to do live foley, to simply write songs in all kinds of different genres. So that was just a good playground for a lot of things.
Joran: You know what's funny to me is that what you say about minimal maximalism… or is it maximal minimalism?
Hainbach: Maximal minimalism? It's exchangeable.
Joran: I also find that’s kind of the basic tenet of the Joranalogue series of modules. I'm always trying to get—with a minimal set of parameters and functions—to still get the maximum possibilities and voltage control over everything. It's about making an impact with as little as possible. And that's also how I work as a designer in general, or when designing a module, when designing a circuit, how can I get the most out of a limited number of components? Or how can I make this one module or this one circuit do a million things and have a big impact that way? So I think there are interesting parallels in there, where we have similar approaches in a different medium.
Hainbach: That was why I was so, like, hyped about Route 4. [...] I looked for ways to get the most out of Collide 4, which is a huge module. You can do so much. You could just get a giant mixer for it, and just to get all out of it. But I thought, “no, I need to be very minimal,” because this is going to be the very specific part of my live set. I'm going to use it in a very specific moment. And I had to find a way for me to then free myself—not overdo it. And with that route module, I was able to do that, because they could just put a lot of the outputs into the route module and then get things that I hadn't thought about. Like, suddenly it became a super cool base, like, clean sine base machine, and, because it has that test equipment kind of vibe, together with Step 8… That's a magical, magical little setup, very… you can do so much with just a little thinking. And it's not prescribed how you're doing it, you know. It's not like it says, “okay, to make a cool rhythm, you have to do it like this,” and it's like a plug beat in here. No, it's more like it's a function. What are we going to do with that function? It's up to your imagination.
Joran: Yeah, I'm always happy when people understand where the Joranalogue series comes from, or where the strengths lie. And me, as a designer, I'm not looking for… you know, if you want a filter with a big knob, there're a million of those and and they're all… they're amazing, great if you want that. But I feel like there's more to be explored. For me, the Joranalogue series of modules is for the explorers, for the people who are willing and who are looking for that edge.
DM: The modular community must be a really interesting community to design for, because, I think, the majority of manufacturers or designers care about building a system with a unified design language. But at the same time, the majority of users these days, especially in the Eurorack world, are going for a very eclectic approach, right? So how do you design modules that share a single design esthetic, while also designing for users who might use modules in a super eclectic system? Is there any tension between these two different principles when you're designing?
Joran: No, because what happens is that the modules are quite test gear inspired, not clones of circuits or anything, but just like the basic concepts, the open endedness in that sense. And what happens is that by designing each module as a fully functional building block with a great number of inputs and outputs and possibilities without any menu diving or mode switching—just basic, versatile functions—what happens is that they become very, very interoperable. Automatically, just out of this basic design concept, you automatically get modules that work well together, but also with other modules. So it's not something I have to be very conscious about, in a way, because it's automatic, just by following the approach I already have as a designer, and Collide 4 really fits into that category very well, I find, because it is an unconventional synth voice, but it also contains all these different sub circuits, these different functions that can be used within a bigger system on their own. So you get your filter, you get your ring modulators, you add all of these parts to an existing system, in addition to it being almost a self contained instrument on its own.
DM: This very naturally brings us to [Joranalogue’s latest module] Collide 4. I wonder if you could both talk a little bit more about what test equipment has meant to you, because this is a real commonality. Joran, I saw an interview where you mentioned that window comparators are a common circuit in test equipment, and that was possibly an inspiration for Compare 2. And Hainbach, of course, your artistic practice with test equipment is very well known and has inspired a lot of people. Could you both talk a bit more about how you first developed an interest in test equipment?
Hainbach: Sure. So for me, this came basically… I studied musicology in Hamburg, and of course, part of that, I learned about the electro acoustic music and the electronic… the early elektronische musik made at WDR [Westdeutscher Rundfunk: radio station West German Broadcasting Cologne, which hosted the influential Studio für elektronische Musik], or SWR [Südwestrundfunk: South West Broadcasting Corporation, home to the Experimental Studio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation] or all these studios, and I was always fascinated. I just thought, oh, how are they making these pieces with these big things? I’m never going to be working with something like this. I tried a Berna, a standalone synth emulating a studio of the time, and that was a good way to get a feel for how something like this works.
But of course, this was a plugin, and it's on the screen. It tries to encompass a huge thing on a small screen. So I thought, interesting! But I got a better idea about the routing of this, and I knew this stuff was basically behind everything. This stuff was basically the roots of everything. And I'm kind of arriving at the similar thing that a friend of mine—who then inspired me to basically get down this road—said, because his… that's Dennis Verschoor and Waveform Research Center. And he said, I mean, I asked him why he got into this. He said, “I've been into modular for 25 years. At some point you go to the roots.” And I said, yeah, that makes sense. And I'm very curious about, like, going to the roots of everything. That's why I've got the feeling, I want to, like, try all the electronic instruments that have ever been and work with them.

Here's an Ondioline just now that I'm just working on making a video, and that's from 1939. It's like the world that's there. I just want to know it. So when [Verschoor] made a “buyer's guide to test equipment” post on Facebook, full of unobtainium! Yeah okay, this is the best. This is interesting. I'm just gonna find hot test equipment in my area, and I… I looked into the classifieds, and I found a Rohde & Schwarz oscillator. I went there, basically, with my bicycle, because I had no idea… the thing is 25 kilograms [55 lbs]. And I also got the corresponding 20 kilogram oscilloscope. So I had to add a taxi fare on the way back. But I got it really cheaply, and the moment I turned it on, I was hooked, because the sound of this, when the vacuum tubes just warmed up… it didn't go in a “boop” like you turn on a sine. It goes [imitates the noise of noise analog electronics]. And the sine is, like, the best sine they could make at the time, plus 60 years on top. So even though it's well kept, it's like a lot of a lot of things happening with that sine.
And I was like, okay, this is cool. Maybe I'll do more of these things. And I found a lot of stuff cheaply. [...] And after finding a lot of random stuff cheaply, I started to find the crown jewels: the [Rohde & Schwarz] UBMs, the PBO bandpass filter, all those filters that look basically like WDR studio stuff. And every time I tried out one of these instruments, I felt more and more connected to the way elektronische musik got started. So when you hear UBMs, you're connecting yourself to Kontakte [an electroacoustic work from 1958 by Karlheinz Stockhausen]. When you hear one of those Wandel & Goltermann filters, you can hear their unique resonances around the tape cuts that they use. You can hear all of them. It's like, oh, wow!
And, of course, I don't recreate that music. I just like to talk about it and how it was made, because it's inspiring. But then I apply that to my own music, and I found that every time I make music with this, it becomes richer. Also because it's dumb. It's very dumb equipment, in the sense that it has no control voltage. It's just big knobs, and you dial in frequencies really tiny. So you discover, like, overtones. In a smooth, big dial, you can discover wonderful worlds. So my music became more aesthetic, more minimal, yet the sound became more powerful. So I avoided something that would happen to me with modular from time to time, which is that the patch became so complex that it would just be too much. It would just be huge, constantly modulating. And I don't do glitch. That doesn't really work for what I do, especially for the composer side. So the test equipment, it calmed me down. It made the music calmer. I got more brutal, but it was the endless gain available and the power. I mean, the UBM: 100 volts! I put like three pads behind it, just to run it into the mixer. And still, you can be shocked when you plug the banana cable. It's always a little buzz, but not bad. Just 100 volts. Yeah, so it's literally electricity at work, and that fascinated me.
And then I got into more complex units, the ones meant for nuclear research, which are compounds of many things. Again, fantastically built stuff—very hard to use musically. You require a lot of real estate, adapter cables, and a lot of… a lot of patience, because you basically make one sound. So you get one big thing that you set for one big sound.

[Above: Joran’s hand-drawn diagram showing a comparison of a lock-in amp signal path compared to the “frock-in shiftifier”, which would later be redubbed the “quadrature spectral computer.”]
Joran: I love to hear that, because for me as an engineer, test gear is in the first place a tool. So I love electronic music, but I also just love electronics. You use an oscilloscope to look at the signal, to diagnose problems. Is it working correctly? You use a signal generator to generate the test signal to send through your circuits you're developing.
But second to that, I also really like the technical aspects of the, let's say, the nerdiness of test gear, similar to how synthesizer people will love modules, and the technical aspects of modules, or stand-alone synths, or whatever, and they will discuss like, “oh, it has this kind of filter,” and “it uses that kind of VCO chip.” Test gear people are the same. And you can find forums dedicated to people who are not involved in music at all, but they are just going crazy over a multimeter that displays one extra digit, and a few PPM [parts per million: a unit used to express small tolerances in the accuracy of components] more accurate than the other one. They design these voltage references that give you the most precise 10 volts you can imagine over a temperature range. So it's like a different rabbit hole. And there are little corridors in between. And Stefan lives in one of these corridors, but it's—and I guess I do as well—but it's fascinating to to me, to see how similar it is and how similarly excited people get about about a number that's a little bit lower or a little bit higher than it was a couple of years ago.
And then I also love when we talk about vintage test gear. We here in the office, we use a combination of new and old test gear. So for example, I have a very modern digital oscilloscope with all the bells and whistles, and it runs some embedded version of Windows. If you want to develop something, it's perfect, too. But I also love vintage test gear. For example, I much prefer vintage signal generators, exactly because of… Some of the reasons Stefan mentions is directness. You have a big dial you can turn, and for testing something quickly, you can dial things in very quickly. While on the digital signal generator, I have a few of those, they're much more capable technically, but you have to type in the number, and it's not as direct. Of course, for making music that becomes, I don't want to say impossible, but it takes a special form of masochism, I think, to use those in music. And also, if you look at the vintage lock-in amplifier, you have these big dials. You have everything clearly labeled. You have these parameters which have a very specific function, and it's all right in front of you. That philosophy, that's something I always try from the beginning. I've always wanted to translate that into modular, into musical gear, because I really appreciate and love that about vintage test gear especially.
DM: This might be a good time to ask about lock-in amplifiers. What is a lock-in amplifier, and what is the scientific and musical significance of lock-in amplifiers?
Joran: I like to think of a lock-in amplifier as a type of very selective bandpass filter. This allows it to detect very weak signals that are buried in noise. The way it achieves this is by first pre-conditioning the input signal (preamp, filter and post-filter gain). This gets rid of most of the noise already. Then it's multiplied with a reference oscillator, which determines the detection frequency (and phase). The way the mathematics work out is that a DC offset is created. Any AC left in the output signal is filtered out by the time constant output lowpass filter. The final DC value represents the amplitude of the input signal at exactly the reference frequency and phase; any other spectral components are rejected. This DC value is usually read out using a needle meter or numeric display.
One example application is absorption spectroscopy: shining light through a sample and measuring the amount of absorption using a light sensor. You can modulate the light source using the lock-in's reference oscillator, and then feed the sensor output back into the lock-in to detect the (very weak) response. If you were to just put a lot of gain on the sensor, all you'd get is useless broadband noise. Most applications are found within physics research; it's one of those pieces of specialized test gear that you're highly unlikely to find within a general electronics lab. But luckily for us, these specialized beasts happen to have a lot in common with analogue music synthesizers. One major difference in Collide 4 is its two-phase topology. Instead of one multiplication path, there are two: sine and cosine. This results in the X' and Y' outputs, from which the other outputs are derived, and makes it stereo. Other changes compared to vintage units include the addition of voltage control to every parameter, tailoring of all control ranges towards musical use and the Hilbert transform network aka Dome filter, which enables frequency shifting.

[Above: Joran’s breadboard prototype for Collide 4.]
DM: I think this is the first collaboration of its kind that Joranalogue has done, right? I would love to know how this came about, and on a technical level, how did you work together?
Joran: So, it was at Superbooth 2022 that Stefan invited me and my colleague into his studio. As far as I can remember, we didn't go and visit with anything specific in mind. We were just going to check out some cool test gear. But this idea already existed for quite a while in my head, to make a lock-in amplifier, bring it to Eurorack. Because I saw what Stefan does with it. Dennis [Verschoor] also, you already mentioned earlier… And it just seemed to fit the brand perfectly, being test-gear inspired, looking at non-conventional analog synthesis. It seemed exactly down my alleyway.
So we met again at Superbooth 2023, and that's where it really got started. That's where we found that we had this shared vision, let's say, of bringing this concept to a wider audience. Because these vintage things, they’re fun, but they have a couple of problems. So, one is the weight. You're not moving them on a bicycle. And of course, they're vintage, so you need to be lucky finding one. You need to have it repaired, probably, or be able to repair it yourself. The interface is beautiful, you know, it's very big. But also it's not designed for musical use. The ranges are sometimes too big, the frequency ranges. There's no voltage control and so on.
Hainbach: I've been making basically two kinds of music: I've been making very ambient music with the tape loops and very soft stuff, and I’ve been making these very hard test-equipment records that I could never really take out, because that stuff is impossible to carry around for me, because the logistics doesn't work. Like, I’ve had one show where I used to set up test equipment, and that required, like, a roadie, we got a car rental. So, the cost of this per show shot up to where I would basically lose money on shows if I really planned it. Plus it was the height of the pandemic. I thought “if I ever want to tour again, it needs to be, like, carry on. I need to have my gear with me.” So Collide 4, basically, was my hope that I could take that part of my music I've been making for… I think I started this all in 2018—with the test equipment—or 2019. I couldn't show live, and I'm a live musician, so I thought, “Oh, this thing is where I can do it.” And when I played these, like it was in Stavanger, and then Oslo last week, and I played the setup, and it was like, there was.. this is finally… There's a missing part—a missing part of my art that's finally there. So that made me incredibly happy.
Joran: Yeah, and that's, for me as a designer, that's the highest compliment you can get, a musician, being able to tell you, “I can do something now, I can express myself creatively now, in a way I couldn't before.” That's the whole point, I think, of designing new musical instruments and Collide 4 is new in the sense that it's not a clone of an existing lock-in amplifier. So, it's inspired. But the whole circuit is something new. So it's a new addition to the, let's say, long, previously-long-deceased family of analog lock-in amplifiers, because lock-in amps are still used in physics research and so on. But these days, they're digital devices with a lot more capabilities, but they lost the big hands-on dials and knobs.
So Collide 4 is an addition to this family of analog lock-in amplifiers, with the difference of it using the technology that we have today. So the analog audio technology that we have today, that we've been employing in the rest of the Joranalogue series since day one, which gives it a really pristine signal path that's very pleasant to use. But also you add the voltage control to it, so it integrates perfectly into the modular environment. And it's so much smaller. If you look at the module and you compare it to [antique test gear] the weight is 100x less. But, at least for musical applications, it covers so much of the territory, if actually not more than the territory, because there are some additions in this that you won’t find in vintage gear. So I think for me, that's important to realize: that it's not a clone of anything vintage. It's not designed to replace anything vintage exactly. But, it is, for musical use, the ultimate lock-in amplifier. [...] There is some learning curve. But what I've found is that most people who get to play with it, after a short while, they realize that it's really the functions they already know from analog synthesizers, but in a different package—in a different topology. So it's a synth voice, but not one with the VCO, VCF, VCA, but it has ring modulators. It has a filter, it has a quadrature oscillator. It has things that anyone who knows synthesizers, and definitely modular synthesizers, things you already know, but in a form that you don't know yet. And I think that can be very creatively inspiring I think.
Hainbach: In terms of the collaboration, there were some points where… especially, one thing that I was adamant it had to be in, that was the big red overload LED. When you keep [the module] in the red, that's where, it's where you get the oomf! And that it needs to have a lot of gain. So that was like, “why so much?” Yes, because it's powerful and fun! And funnily enough, oftentimes I've had myself now after going completely… like when I first got… everything in the red… all like, all gain open… and the noise of it and the glory… I, now—especially when I play live—I do the thing that I basically also do with your old school ones, which is really just dancing around, where it just kisses the red. There's a really sweet spot just before it goes…
So, that was something; we talked a lot about that. And then, when I played with it for the first time, I was blown away by the stereo. So, because… that's something that you don't get on the original. And this thing is like a stereo shifting, beautiful, beautiful thing. It opens up so many different applications that are not possible with an original lock-in amplifier. And of course, you don't have the one problem that I always had with these things: that I use one per sound. [Note: Hainbach is referring to the limitation of vintage lock-in amplifiers that typically only produce one sound at a time, requiring multiple amplifiers to perform]. So now, thanks to all the CV, you can do many, many sounds with one. I still need at least two, because that's how I’m built. And that works very beautifully.
Joran: Yeah for me, also, it's been a real privilege working with Stefan and his experience with test gear and lock-in amplifier music really helped to shape the module’s design to what it is now.
Hainbach: There's one thing you said to me. I was very impressed. You said you wanted to make it so good that you could make science with it.
Joran: It's a real lock-in amplifier. It only works at audio frequencies. So it's limited in that way compared to the scientific thing… functionally, it's a real lock-in amplifier, so you can actually do measurements with them. We don't recommend anyone basing their PhD around it, but it actually does more than any of the vintage ones, because it has this two-phase topology, which also opens up all of the stereo applications. That's something that's only found in digital, in apps. But I really wanted to have that in the in the Collide 4, because I saw the stereo possibilities of having this topology, even if it it adds complexity, because it basically adds a second signal path, which is in 90 degree quadrature, and that's why you have the quadrature oscillator and the X’ and Y’ outputs. These are things you don't see in vintage lock-ins.
Also what I found interesting during the development, and it's, one of the first thing I realized, and this comes back to how you have all these parallels between different different adjacent areas, that a frequency shifter and a two-phase lock-in amplifier actually have a lot of commonalities, so there were only a few additions required for Collide 4 to turn it into a frequency shifter. So then that's something I pitched to Stephen, and he was on board right away. [...] And a frequency shifter is also one of those things I've been yearning to make for over a decade. So when I saw that, you know, I could turn this one lock-in idea, and the frequency-shifter idea, into one super, super module. That was really exciting for me as a designer, because I, you know, I have all these boxes I want to tick, and it just makes it more than than the sum of its parts, that way that you have all these, these possibilities in there.

DM: In my experience, Collide 4 is a module that’s very easy to get into quickly. There is such an over abundance of sweet spots to explore. You can make some terrific sounds with it straight out of the box. But it’s also a module that has almost unprecedented technical depth. So how do you suggest that the user approach this, and how important do you think it is to to understand some of that technical depth to get the most out of this module.
Joran: Collide 4 has over 600 components inside, so—as far as analog modules go—it's one of the more complex or advanced on the market. But in essence, like I mentioned before, it has all these building blocks that most people are going to know already, just in a form they don't know already. So for some people, it's a challenge to get into, because they are looking for a subtractive synthesis context which does not really exist here. But there is this context of, “Oh, I know what an oscillator is.” And you know, a quadrature oscillator just has those as the sine and the cosine output; and I know what a filter is, and I know what a band-pass filter is; and this module has a band-pass filter which has a variable width as well as variable resonance. There are precedents to all of those ideas in synthesizers before. Historically, there have been modules in Eurorack and other formats with all of these ideas. And the gain, very high gain preamp. People know what gain is. If you have a lot of gain, it’s going to clip. Collide 4 just happens to clip really beautifully and predictably and voltage controllably.
So the real innovation here is—there's technical analog innovation—and a lot of that is based on ideas and circuit techniques from the rest of the Joranalogue series. Also new things, but the biggest innovation here, musically, I think, is the fact that you get a new kind of analog synthesis in a way which has been pioneered by people like Stefan and people decades in the past, who made electronic music using test gear and using those tools that are designed for a different purpose—using those musically.
And now we have geared that even more towards music, something that was never designed for music in the first place. We've made it as musical as possible. And I also hope that Collide 4 will help people to understand some technical aspects better about analog synthesis, because it really helps to express one more creatively if you have more mastery over your tools. And I found that already with people who have tried the module. I see that it has helped people who come from a more subtractive context, or even modular context. It has helped people to understand, a little bit more, the technical side of making electronic music. And I think that's also a very beautiful thing to see, and a beautiful thing that Collide 4 can offer people.
Hainbach: So, for the first gigs that I played [Collide 4], I think that was in May, I basically had just a tiny 4MS Pod with just a [function generator], which I would use to modulate and trigger it… And that was already like… I can do so much with this—this little portable lab. It was so cool. Power it over a USB power bank and do so much. Just put a contact mic in, put another mic in, process that mic directly. Or just these absolutely face-melting baselines. That's the thing. If you're doing dance music or something, you can just use it to make your extreme, powerful bass lines. If you want some really glassy resonances, that's your thing, too. If you want to process your contact mics into beautiful frequencies, that's another application. So I think it will find applications for everything.
The thing is, how much are you going to use it in your whole setup, because this is so immensely powerful. It loves all the CV that you feed it. You can spend forever just exploring it, because there's always another application, because this is not just a synth voice. This is an effect processor. This is an amplifier. Originally, these things were designed to sniff out the tiniest fluctuations. And now you can sniff out the tiny fluctuations of, like, just a contact mic on the table, and then you hone in on those little frequencies—make them beautiful. So whether you're doing a noise show at Cafe OTO or if you find, like, a big Sónar gig, this rests happily in both these worlds.
Joran: It's almost a disservice to call it a lock-in amplifier, and that's also why we call it a “quadrature spectral computer,” because it does so much more than the vintage lock-in amplifiers.
Hainbach: Yeah, that was also a thing, because usually your names, you have a naming convention. [...] So I think [Joran] came up with “Collide.” And I was like, “Oh, that's it.” Because that's where it comes from. That's where it actually comes from. It comes from particle colliders where these were used. I have one [lock-in amplifier] that comes from the 160-inch cyclotron that was made in 1943 finished in 1946. So it's like a very early cyclotron. So this is where these things come from. That's why there's also this beautiful art on the back [of the module].
Joran: Well, it's not just the particle accelerator, you know, the collisions in there. But for me, the name also comes from this collision, this coming together of these different niches of test gear and music and physics. And in a way, it's also a collision or a coming together of my or the Joranalogue worlds and Stefan's worlds.

[Above: The size of the Collide 4 circuit board compared to the size of a vintage lock-in amplifier.]
DM: Last question: This isn’t the only new module that Joranalogue has announced this year. Earlier this year you announced the upcoming release of Cycle 5, which is a small-format oscillator. I’ve noticed a trend recently of manufacturers releasing smaller analog modules with more precision feature sets. What was your motivation for releasing a 6hp oscillator, and what are you excited for people to discover with the Cycle 5?
Joran: The biggest draw is its size, of course, and we found that it was very much a missing part in this series, because we've had Generate 3 and now also Collide 4—and Filter 8 also works as a as an oscillator—but often there's a need for for utility oscillator, and that's how I would class Cycle 5. It fulfills the utility role where you need something to modulate something else in a compact form factor. So it really fulfills a role within the system very well [...] and of course, it also delivers the classic waveforms, which is, especially for modulation, which is sometimes needed, while Generate 3 takes a much more spectral approach. [...] And in a way, it's also a bit more accessible to people, because it's closer to what they might know from their standard or semi-modular synth. But on top of that, you have the “vari-wave” feature, which is really, really quite fun. It makes Cycle 5 stand out on its own as a module.
What I do as a designer—and that's also true for Collide 4 and the rest of the series—is I don't use dedicated oscillator chips or dedicated filter chips, because we are a little bit spoiled right now, with the whole Eurorack modular resurgence, that people are actually building these dedicated application-specific chips again, that you would also find in vintage synths, and that made it possible for analog synths to become a lot cheaper before the digital age arrived. That allowed polysynths with less than two thousand components. We see those [oscillator chips] coming back again. The upside is that it's easier as a designer to make things, but the downside is that you see a lot of very similar module designs coming out, because they all use the same chips, and it becomes a little bit boring, and that really doesn't fit my approach. So I like to roll my own stuff, using op amps and VCAs and all those things. Because I find that's the way to get unique results. That's the way to get something which no one else has.
So to come back to Collide 4, that approach made it possible to design something which got that sound very quickly. And it was a surprise to me, even, the first time I heard it on the breadboard, that it was so close already to how some of these vintage lock-in [amps] sound without copying any of the circuitry, just completely new circuitry. Yeah, it's the topology, it's the philosophy, the design philosophy, the discreteness, let's call it, that you also find in these vintage things that gave that sound very quickly, without even having to look for it specifically, just by designing in a way that I know where I want to go. So I'm going to design towards that goal. But even then, it was funny to me that I didn't need to clone any old circuitry to get into that sonic territory that's really satisfying, and that, for me as an analog designer, just confirmed that I have the right approach to designing instruments. So yeah, Collide 4 and Cycle 5 are coming soon, and please buy them.
[Ed.: Collide 4 is available to order now; Cycle 5 is expected to be released in mid-November.]