Few Eurorack manufacturers can claim to be carrying the torch of the pioneering synthesizer designers into the modern world through a lineage more direct than one rooted purely in inspiration. Mark Verbos's path took him from beginnings as an audio engineer and musician to an apprenticeship with Grant Richter of Wiard Synthesizers, and eventually to inheriting Richter's role as the go-to repairman for vintage synthesizers—most notably those designed by Don Buchla. In 2014 he founded his own brand, Verbos Electronics, in New York, later relocating it to Berlin.

Mark is full of stories that could keep any synth nerd transfixed for hours. Ahead of the release of three new modules announced at Superbooth earlier this year—the Haas Zone Processor, the Filter Resonator, and the Randoms—we visited him at Verbos' headquarters in the vibrant Kreuzberg district to talk about the new modules, the history of sound synthesis, design philosophy, and much more, starting with the creative attitude that runs through both his music-making and his instrument design: improvisation.

Toward a Blank Slate

Eldar Tagi: I wanted to start by asking about your improvisational approach to music. Over the years you seem to have moved from a more pre-composed way of performing toward a more spontaneous process. I'm curious how you arrived there, and particularly how you think about it in the context of techno and dance music.

Mark Verbos: It isn't that I started out with a pre-composed philosophy. At the very beginning, as a five-year-old, I started playing the violin, and through school I played various instruments. By the time I was a teenager it was clear to me that what I wanted to do artistically wasn't to spend a lifetime developing the skill to play some of this music—it was more important to me to write the music, or to produce a recording.

So as a fifteen-year-old I knew I wanted to be a music producer when I grew up. I'm not sure I understood what a producer actually was, but I'd notice that a lot of the records I liked were produced by Trevor Horn, or Flood. You'd see a Seal record produced by Trevor Horn, and also The Art of Noise produced by Trevor Horn—they didn't necessarily sound the same, but whatever he was doing must be the important thing that unified them. I'd been playing instruments and starting to record on a four-track, in a band where I played guitar but was also programming drums and playing keyboard parts. Eventually that evolved away—the friends I did the band with didn't want to work on music every single day, and I wanted to work on it all day, every day. The move into building synthesizers grew out of making electronic music, then collecting old synths, fixing them, and learning more about them. And I went to school for recording engineering. So the real path was to be a producer, which I did, professionally—synthesizer design and repair was more the hobby off to the side.

But from around fifteen or sixteen, the beginnings of the rave scene were starting, and I was getting interested in that music. At that point I didn't even really understand where you could buy it—the music available to me wasn't what I was hearing at a rave in a warehouse. That music didn't have any noticeable hooks or melodies, which was still kind of off in the fringes to me. But friends who came over to my house, when I played them what I was working on—just turning parts on, playing the sequencer, muting tracks—they said: "you should do this at our party." And I said, "do what?" And they said, "just this!" And I said, "I'm just showing you what I've been working on." "Yeah, but just do that."

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At that point, in '92, we didn't even know what to call it, because the whole concept was so young. My concern as a sixteen-year-old was: how do I convince people to give me a shot to do this, when we can't even describe it? Because at that point my thinking was that there are only two kinds of live performance in a rave or techno club: the ones that are faked, where they dance around pretending to play music that's prerecorded, and the ones that are just terrible, where they haven't gotten it together. So if I told you it was improvised, you'd immediately expect a disaster.

So my thinking was: first I have to convince the promoter to give me a shot, which only happens if the promoter has heard me play somewhere else. But the bigger issue over the longer term was that I had to fool the audience—they couldn't know a live performance had started, because I'd watched the room clear out the moment a live performer began. What I needed was to make the performance improvised enough that the audience thought they were just listening to a DJ. It wasn't improvised the way I do it now, completely from a blank slate—it was more that I'd prepared a bunch of pieces and would assemble and mix them in the moment.

It took me until around 2012 to completely change my thinking on that—away from needing to compete with the DJ. A DJ only has these finished pieces of music. In those days you'd select a hundred records to take with you, and if the moment was completely different than you expected, you were stuck with what you brought. So there are actually more possibilities in an improvised live performance than in a DJ set, and coming to understand that was a breakthrough. Instead of cueing up the next idea and cross-fading like a DJ mix, you can evolve the ideas however you like—one element at a time, or break it all down and rebuild, or if one motif is working really well, keep it and change the drums but not the lead. And it's limitless in another sense too: if I think tomorrow night is going to be aggressive and dark, and then I get there and it's the complete opposite, I don't have the panic of "now what do I do?" Starting completely from a blank slate and letting the circumstance dictate every choice is the most liberated, the most empowered, I could ever be.

ET: Was there a particular moment you remember when you started doing it entirely from scratch, or was it a more gradual transition?

MV: More gradual. But hidden in there is the evolution of the technique, because over the years I experimented with different gear. At one point I was even using a sampler where I'd prepared a lot of individual hits—a key split with a different sound on every key—and then programmed twenty-five or thirty sequences using those sounds in a MIDI sequencer. All of that I was improvising, but that's still quite a lot of latitude.

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ET: How did this tie to the instruments you were using? Did changing your setup correlate with moving toward improvising everything?

MV: That's what I mean: I was always trying to change what I used to evolve more toward improvising everything, having everything free in the moment. So it's not unrelated to the idea of designing my own instrument. I'd been building synthesizers all along since the '90s, but I toyed with the idea of making what I'd call a "live act machine"—a closed system that could generate parts with nothing pre-planned at all. And that informs how I came to be a synthesizer designer.

There's nothing about a given synthesizer that says you have to make a certain kind of music on it. The exception is when the interface pushes presets or patches onto you. With a Rompler-type workstation, the ability to make sounds is there, but you inevitably get trapped in punching through a whole bunch of presets to see if any are interesting. That can happen in a modular environment too—some heavily digital modules have a lot of functionality, but it's behind a menu system and saved presets. Mutable Instruments, for example, demo extremely well—really polished, amazing sounds—but then it's hard for the user to get something different from those sounds, because it's so curated behind the scenes.

My philosophy is to be more stripped down—nothing hiding, everything on the table. Rather than tweak best-case scenarios for you and hand you presets, I try to make the interface for addressing the algorithm more intuitive, so I know exactly how to reach out and change it toward the idea I have. That's necessary once you get into improvisational music making, but it also means anybody can develop a relationship with the control set in a logical way. What you see is what you get—not shrouded in a haze like FM synthesis, where you love the sound but have no idea how you got there. If you've ever tried to program FM, you know the feeling of having a preset that's almost what you want, moving one parameter a single click, and it's completely off. So the connection between the imagination of the sound design and its execution is direct.

Beyond the Coasts: Micros and Macros

ET: What you're describing is developing a relationship with an instrument—something every instrumentalist goes through. But most instruments are fixed, and even a synthesizer can be a fixed architecture. Modular systems are different in that they're open-ended: you often end up continuously reconfiguring the instrument. How does that shape the relationship you develop with it?

MV: Over thirty-five years of using synthesizers you develop some intuition about how it all works. I think it's a misconception that electronic instruments make the music for you. Traditional musicians are quick to say it's not real music because it has a keyboard, or a sequencer, or a drum machine, or because you didn't touch a string or hit a skin—but if you take away all of that bias, anything could be real music. The joke in the modular world is that there's nothing modular users love more than something that's not modular—you see companies that made their name in modular put out a standalone box and everyone goes crazy for it, even though the only reason they paid attention in the first place was the modular.

At some point every synthesizer designer has the realization that we start with the fascination that you could do anything, and then we notice there are certain places we always go. Moog modular, or the Minimoog, is a good example: Bob Moog promoted the idea that you can create any instrument, any signal path—and then everyone who uses a modular realizes what you actually do is patch up a Minimoog. So you start to think, maybe we could macro these things—take the whole module and turn it into a "mini" version, the greatest hits of it: the fast low-pass filter with resonance, the discrete VCA that distorts in a certain way. Some people even say the VCA in the Minimoog is the real secret to the fat sound, not the filter.

But in the modular world, as we go deeper—we're now sixty-plus years on from the invention of the modular synthesizer—we get to macros of all kinds. As a nerd, I can show you something on modular that's really complex and deep in the theory of how electronic sounds are made, but that you'd never do in a recording session, let alone an improvised performance, because it takes too many modules, too many patch cords, too much balancing to get into the zone. So a lot of what I now do as a designer isn't inventing modules in the traditional sense—there are very few core modules that have been invented since the '60s. What I've learned is how to chain these very basic building blocks together in ways that become more musically useful.

22hp

Polyphonic Envelope Quad Envelope Generator

$678.00

In stock

An example is the Polyphonic Envelope. I'd had the idea for ages of what I originally called a "strum envelope"—a group of envelope generators that play in succession, like strumming a guitar. First I laid out four of our Multi-Envelope modules and made all the connections I'd imagined: the beginning of the second stage of one triggering the next, cables between them, trimming all the times to match, mixing the outputs, routing and balancing. Then the idea of a control that makes them progressively longer—leave the first attack alone, make the second a little longer, the next even longer. In the Polyphonic Envelope that's just turning a knob, but doing it with the hardware requires voltage processing and twelve patch cables. If I had to do it from only the simplest pieces, it would be so overwhelming I'd never do it—that process would just never enter my music. But packaged so I don't have to overthink it, I'll use it. When you dig deeper, you find that almost everything we make here is like that: a fairly involved patch behind the scenes, already there, so you can get to the musical concept directly—not a preset you call up, but a conceptual macro inside a patch you're building.

ET: Oh yeah—I've heard you describe the way you think about synth design not as East Coast versus West Coast, but as micro versus macro, with macro being less about the modules themselves than about interface design, more in line with what Buchla was really after.

MV: Yeah. Buchla wasn't born perfect. The Buchla 100 is just as bare-bones, just as not-musician-friendly, as a Moog modular from the '60s. But his realization as they iterated was that it needed to be very powerful—every parameter under voltage control—while being addressed from the perspective of a musician or user, not an engineer.

It's common to hear people who aren't deep in this proclaim, "I have to introduce you to my friend, he's crazy, he has all these modular synths." What's crazy about that? To me that's not crazy. A lot of us like the perception that you have to be a mad scientist to use a synthesizer—we like to impress people with how smart we are because they have no idea what's going on. But just like in DJing, when it evolved from records on turntables into the digital world, there were people who said that's not even really DJing because you don't have to beatmatch. Well, what was the important part? Were we listening to prove you could lock two records together, or to hear the creative ideas of putting them together? My job as a designer is to make interfaces that inspire creativity, not ones that intimidate you and say you haven't earned the right to get results yet. That doesn't make any sense.

ET: With that comparison to DJing—as a company and a designer you've stayed committed to the modular format. Do you see closed-architecture synthesizers on that same line, where people just get a bigger macro of a lot of things?

MV: It's possible, but I'd never be involved in something I'd never use myself. I don't see myself making a workstation keyboard—though I say that with many workstations behind me. The evolution of this creative pursuit is what I believe in, and I don't draw those dividing lines. So the answer is maybe just: yes, of course. There's nothing sacred about modular exactly; it's just the best way I know to create that open flexibility.

Like I said, I have no interest in patch memories. But we do inevitably use the original patch memory—our own. When you're improvising you're not creating it all from thin air; you're interpreting the situation, deciding what would be really good now, and bringing back something you experimented with before. You store it in your memory rather than the synthesizer's memory. People sometimes say after a set, "I can't believe you were live patching." But how else would I get to a new idea? The impressive thing isn't the live patching—it's having already created paradigms that let me have an idea, go to it, and know that what I'm getting is what I think I'm getting.

This improvisational ideology is the opposite of what you used to hear a lot in the modular world: "I don't even know what's going on, I just mess with it until something crazy happens and then I sample or record it." That's the idea of not learning how to do something. It's like David Bowie saying the first thing you should do with a synthesizer is throw away the manual—though I'm not sure any of the synths he was using in the '70s had manuals. By not knowing, I think you just struggle longer to get to something usable, and then you're stuck running tape while you make a bunch of chaos, hoping there's something in it you can pull out. People have said, "can I borrow your Music Easel to make material I can sample?" If I borrowed a Music Easel, I'd have to use it to make music—I'd never go back through a recording looking for things. I just don't think that way. I have a creative idea, and I do it.

ET: It's reminiscent of the Zen notion of a beginner's mind—is that something you bring to the work consciously, or does it just emerge from how you work?

MV: I think it's all somehow connected to the same idea of presence, of living in the moment, of being the process rather than the result. It came over a long time, but I'm not sure my technique is better than anyone else's. I've just never been able to connect with the idea of producing music by sampling. I don't have a moral objection to it, but I can't imagine working as a collage of samples. Everything we do artistically is a tweak or adaptation of something we've heard before, but rather than hearing something and thinking "I want to sample that and apply it," I think "I see something special there, I want to do something like that." I don't know that it makes it better. It just works better for me.

On the Shoulders of Giants

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ET: Your unique experience as a musician, repairman, and engineer exposed you to a wide range of gear across different decades, and you often reference it in your designs—not directly, but as inspirations or vectors. When you encounter a piece of equipment, do you have a particular way of working out what the maker did that might be useful to you?

MV: We stand on the shoulders of giants. There's really no function in electronics I can invent—that macro mentality is, in a way, already pushed to a greater extreme down in the electronics. If you want to make an oscillator you need a current source, an integrator, and a comparator, set together the right way, and then wave shapers to make the waves. So even at the first stage of the modular synthesizer, there was a patch of building blocks going on inside; I've just taken that a step further.

My design process is built on "I've seen or used this function on something, but I think it would be better if it worked this way." I didn't study electronics—I studied recording. I learned the basics of electronics in recording school: reading schematics, repairing gear. When I approach making a synthesizer, the idea that we need oscillators and filters already exists. But I do have the experience to know which ones were really great for certain things—on a basic level there are saw-core oscillators and triangle-core oscillators, so why do I like each one, and how could I make those in a way that's seamlessly integrated into making music? So you're right, all the unique features are probably a riff on something someone did somewhere, but recontextualized and interpreted in a way that makes it more practical and satisfying to use.

32hp

Harmonic Oscillator

$1,011.00

In stock

Not everything that was a "classic" is the same kind of classic. There are the classics from the musician's perspective—used on the most hit records, has the best piano sound—and then there are the ones in the cult of the electronics people, where there are certain holy-grail concepts. A lot of times those holy-grail concepts didn't make an impact in the musician space, because the way they were presented didn't hit right.

The immediate example for me is the Harmonic Oscillator. Before it there was no harmonic oscillator—but all the way back in the Buchla 100, Don Buchla made the 148 Harmonic Generator, an oscillator with ten harmonic outputs. But all it has is ten harmonic outputs; there's no way to put them together. So you'd have to patch ten cables to a mixer, and then you'd just have a preset mix—and anyone who's used a drawbar organ will tell you that mixing the ten harmonics together statically just sounds like an organ. So you realize you'd need dynamic blending, multiple mixes you can move between, ways to control the levels—maybe VCAs on all of them, maybe envelopes, some kind of CV processing. It's just not possible to do anything great with that original concept. So what I invented was an interface for using those outputs—to dynamically blend between them and make sounds that are actually useful in your music. Again, all the concepts are already out there somehow, but what it takes to contextualize them so musicians can be inspired by them—that's something different.

The Haas Zone Processor

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ET: Your new module—the Haas Zone Processor is, as you've said, inspired by the Marshall Time Modulator. For people who don't know that vintage piece—what's so special about it, and why did it inspire this module?

MV: I have a unique relationship with the Marshall Time Modulator. Let me back up. Having been a recording engineer in a multi-million-dollar studio in Chicago, I had experience with a lot of high-end pro outboard gear in the '90s—when we were still using tape machines, working on an SSL, using AMS reverbs and delays. Part of my heart is still invested in old-school outboard, and I have a deep affinity for reverb and delay units from the pre-microprocessor era. I have a fairly substantial collection of Ursa Major units and AMS reverbs.

Back then there was very little in the way of analog delay units. Eventide did the first digital delay right around that time, the DDL 1745, which could do longer delays but doesn't do much for modulation or routing. BBDs were brand new; early guitar pedals using them were famously, horrifically noisy and low-bandwidth. The effect where you change the clock frequency of a BBD and sweep it is how you make chorus, flange, and modulated-delay effects—and you can modulate those old-school delays at audio rate in a way you can't really do with the microprocessor-based ones. The limitation of the time was covering a wide range of delays as a continuous sweep.

So in 1978 a guy named Stephen St. Croix made a bet with a friend that he could make a delay that outperformed everything that existed—and he delivered. His friends convinced him to show it at the AES show in New York. What he showed was a prototype that was basically spaghetti wire, but he got enough interest to propel it into being a celebrated product. Famously, Stevie Wonder was so impressed he ordered the first ten units and used them on The Secret Life of Plants and Songs in the Key of Life. Martin Hannett had six of them. What was going on inside was always shrouded in mystery—the designer gave vague explanations, and the delay units were sealed, soaked in epoxy into blocks so you couldn't see them.

Effectively it's an analog delay with two delay blocks, each switchable from short to long—"long" used very loosely, since it's about 25 milliseconds—in series, with some mixing and modulation. The selling point was that the delay time could change in a ratio of 100 to one: from one sweep of the knob, or one sweep of voltage from an LFO, it goes from 25 milliseconds down to below one millisecond without any switching. So in theory it should do the best flanges in the world, and with the DBX-derived noise reduction it got the noise floor down to something like 90-plus dB signal-to-noise—better than 16-bit quality.

In 2007 St. Croix died, and his widow sold the estate of all the Marshall stuff to Studio Electronics in LA—not the synthesizer company, but the outboard-gear repair shop that specializes in all these things I love. They sold the non-working prototype modules on eBay, presumably the ones Stevie Wonder used, warning people not to buy them thinking they'd ever work. So I bought all of them—five originals and the prototype he showed at AES in 1978—and reverse-engineered it completely, including the delay modules, and got them to work. The magic was that it was so quiet and could sweep such a wide range. There was nothing so spectacular in the delay modules themselves, but he was using Reticon BBDs, which sweep a really wide range of clock frequencies—more than a megahertz, where the Panasonic ones only go up to about 600 kHz. So he could get much shorter delays across an enormous continuous range.

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Based on that concept—25 milliseconds is the top of the range, and there's an auxiliary delay after it, so you can get about 50 milliseconds at maximum. That's what we call the Haas zone. Helmut Haas, a German physicist, wrote a paper in 1962 about the effects of short delays—concepts like phasing, chorusing, and flanging are all built on short delays. Since we already had the framework of the Multi-Delay we make, we put a much smaller memory into one and started layering these and working out how the spacing of the delays behaves. We also made the mixer differently: here you need true dry, because so much of what's used is based on feedback and on blending the dry and wet.

There's filtering on the feedback loop. In the original there's fixed phase-shift filtering; we have a full bandpass filter instead, and it's a unique design. Generally when someone says "bandpass filter" they mean a state-variable filter using the bandpass output, and the ability to control bandwidth there is a little suspicious—all it really has is a Q control, so you're tweaking resonance, not bandwidth in a true sense. This is made of a two-pole low-pass and a two-pole high-pass, and the bandwidth control literally moves them apart or down to sharing the same 3 dB-down point. When you get it all the way narrow you even hear the volume drop a little.

The oscillator is the same as the one on the left side of the Complex Oscillator, so it can go down to about a minute per cycle and up into the audio range. You can modulate the delays at audio rate, which is really important—most digital things in guitar effects use an FV-1 chip and can't modulate at audio rate. Some of the most powerful effects here are totally dependent on that. With delays around three milliseconds you're dealing more in phase cancellation and resonance effects, and when all these things work together you can create quite unique resonance sounds. Famously, the voice of Darth Vader was done with a Marshall Time Modulator. And I have a book about Martin Hannett, the producer of Joy Division and New Order, with a whole section on his Marshall Time Modulators and his go-to patches. I've adapted all of those to what you'd do on this—simple things like vibrato, but also what he called "cardboard tube echo."

ET: I imagine you could do some pseudo-modeling things with it.

MV: That was the next thing that occurred to me. If you have an audio oscillator, a filter, and VCAs, you can use the delays as part of the wave-shaping process and actually use it as a voice—patching the oscillator into the filter, the filter into the input, and controlling it that way. Physical modeling always suggests re-creation to me—creating acoustic sounds with synthesizers—but it doesn't have to be. In the early days of synthesizers, that's what they were thinking—an MS-20 had patch sheets telling you how to make a flute or a clarinet sound, because these were the first instruments with the ability to imitate. When the physical-modeling hype was happening twenty-odd years ago, the example they always used was that you could take the concept of a drum and make one that's enormous, or a horn much bigger or smaller than could physically exist.

The Filter Resonator

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ET: Let's move to the Filter Resonator. How did you arrive at that design—does it also carry a lineage, or is it more its own thing?

MV: People would say I'm not really a filters guy—"West Coast," whatever—but as I said, I don't buy into the East Coast / West Coast thing that much. And I have made filters: a dual four-pole, the Bark Filter, other things. There's some lineage here. Buchla's 200 had the 291, a bandpass filter with the bandwidth and cutoff frequency both voltage-controllable, so in a way this is doing that. You could also say it fits with the Buchla 291e, which was Don's attempt to take that old concept and do something new—three bandpass filters, with functions that let them be used together. But I don't really like the way that one works; the way you reach the functionality is pretty cryptic, through display menus, not friendly.

So those were in my mind, but I also drew from the resonators in the Korg PS-3100 and the filter section in the Synton Syrinx, which does interesting things by combining a few different filters. It's easy to keep adding features to a concept until the module becomes unwieldy—overloaded with controls, huge, costing a fortune. What's not so easy is my greater focus: doing something flexible that still works in high-stress environments. So the module can be used either as a bank or as a toolbox—three filters together, moving them around and controlling their levels, or broken up into three separate signal paths.

The filters in the Filter Resonator are the bandpass-filter-and-feedback-loop concept that was built up in the Haas Zone Processor, but with full CV control of all of it, and a VCA after each one—because we wanted to mix their levels, and once they're VCAs they can also be the back-ends of voices. Even though I'm "not a filter guy," I think we got some quite interesting filter sounds out of it.

ET: This filter is not self-oscillating by design, right?

MV: Yes. The first thing every person who walked up to the booth said was, "can you ping it?" The concept of pinging filters comes from twin-T oscillators—very simple single-stage bandpass filters used in a lot of primitive drum machines, the kind included in organs before the 808. Those filters sit at the edge of self-oscillating, so when you send a trigger through, they ring out as they decay. But these aren't bandpass filters in that way; they're not resonant. They're a non-resonant low-pass and high-pass in series that are manipulated. To ping them, you'd have to implement feedback around them to create the oscillation.

The switch at the top goes from three bandpass filters identical to each other to a low-pass, a bandpass, and a high-pass. Because a bandwidth control would be irrelevant for a low-pass and high-pass, it becomes a resonance control when those are selected. And I configured the bandwidth control so that narrow is up—the perception of bandwidth getting narrower and the perception of more resonance on a low-pass or high-pass are more similar sounds. So when you use the mix output from all three and spread them apart, as the bandpass in the middle gets narrower, the narrow blip at the end of the high- and low-pass happens too. You get quite nice resonator functions.

To Each Their Own Random

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ET: Let's also touch upon the new Randoms module. Its basic use is clear enough, but I wanted to talk about how it approaches randomness differently from something like Random Sampling.

MV: The genesis of this was that so many people told me they were doing patches where they wanted a lot of stored randoms. In Random Sampling they'd use the two stored-random outputs and then be desperate for more, so they'd start sending noise through the analog shift register just to get more stepped randoms. That was the beginning of a discussion a long time ago about making a module with a lot of stored randoms.

The Buchla Music Easel has four outputs from a stored random. So one concept was to do something like that, but eight instead of four. What I don't like about the Easel's version is that it uses a pseudo-random sequence generator—a string of shift-register stages set up to play through every combination of outputs. In their case it repeats after 127 steps, so if you clock through it rapidly you start to hear the pattern. So Randoms uses that pseudo-random-sequence concept, but because it's much bigger, it repeats after something like 42,000 steps.

It's digital, made out of CMOS—there's no microprocessor—but that means each output is at a much higher resolution, 16-bit. There's effectively no quantization of the levels; it's just between 0 and 10 volts, thousands of possible values, so it's a linear distribution all the way across the range, like white noise. There's a whole world you can get into about distribution. Buchla is the only one who ever went on a deep dive about this—in the 265, the original Source of Uncertainty, there's a control for correlation, which is how far the next step can be from the last, done using feedback. And the signal it's sampling isn't just noise—it's white noise hard-syncing a triangle oscillator, and it samples the triangle. A triangle has a totally linear distribution across its whole range; the noise is there to make it not have patterns, and the triangle is there to give equal distribution.

The bottom section is an analog sequencer that, instead of knobs or sliders, has the eight stored voltages. There's a reset input, so if you clock it with the right signal—say a sequencer you're making three steps long—you can use the same clock and reset here, and this becomes three steps long too. The important thing is you can get back to the same starting place and work with it in a controlled way. So you can hit the select input until you hear a sequence you like, and use it for as long as you want as long as you don't hit select again. Advance is a pulse—a step forward—and Reset goes back to the beginning; Select grabs a whole new set of eight. For the patches where people say "I need more stored randoms," it's really powerful, and I don't know of another way to get that many.

ET: What is your planned release schedule for the three new modules?

MV: The Haas Zone Processor is going to come out around the beginning of August, and then the others will be staggered, probably about two months between each. All three will be out before the end of the year, just staggered, because we manufacture here and can only do one thing at a time.

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Verbos Then And Now

ET: That brings me to a few closing questions. You've founded the company in New York twelve years ago, in 2014. Has it changed for you since then—and if so, how?

MV: I don't know that it really changed for me. When I started, I'd been doing repairs and custom work for the Buchla community for years, but I didn't make anything in quantity—the modules I made before were one at a time, by hand. Initially I designed everything in my apartment and sent it out to be manufactured—WMD in Colorado did it first. But it quickly became clear we'd have no ability to control how long something took, that it might be queuing behind whatever else was going on. So to get the first wave of orders done, I did some research into manufacturing and set up in New York, in a really small space at first—about 25 square meters, with a pick-and-place machine in the middle and four people at workbenches next to it.

Then it became clear—partly because my wife Sonya, who had worked in fashion, managing showrooms and distribution deals, knew the business side, while I know the designing and manufacturing side—that we could rethink the whole thing. So we decided to do everything we could ourselves. The perception by some people is that we're overpriced, but we barely scrape by—it's just expensive to do it that way. It was a question of "what if"—what if, instead of sending out all the manufacturing and keeping sales and distribution in-house, we did the opposite: did all the design, manufacturing, and testing here, and had a distributor handle that part of the business? I think that's allowed us to be what we are.

I heard someone recently say I pivoted away from doing clones—but I never did clones here. I think it just became clearer what my agenda is: to capture concepts that existed but interpret them in a way that's more inspiring and more usable, rather than recreate things that are hard to get. Recreating isn't interesting to me, because there's always a fresh way. The world is changing, the music people make is changing, so the instruments should change too. Remember, the Buchla 200 was designed in 1970, and none of the music we now directly associate with synthesizers existed then. There was no techno in 1970.

A lot of times there are things in electronics that are big achievements—the engineers and nerds are really excited that you can use an FPGA to make an oscillator with a clock, or whatever—but none of that matters for making music. The only thing that matters is how it feels to interact with the thing, and how the interface is. Morton Subotnick told me that when they were planning the first Buchla instrument, Don drew up front-panel designs for the modules he thought he'd make, and Morton listened to music for a year with those drawings, thinking about how he'd patch up the sounds he was hearing. If he heard something he couldn't imagine making with the modules in front of him, he'd call Don and say, "I think we need another module." The joke I made was, "and at no point in that year did you think you needed an attenuator?" But the point is that the thing we should be putting all our effort into is making something creative and inspiring—not something cheaper, or a remake of an old discontinued thing.

I think it's a myth that what's preventing you from making a hit is not having the exact instrument whoever made it had. And so many of the most expensive vintage synthesizers are expensive because they're rare, not because they're going to make you good music. You still have to be a creative person—so the more the thing empowers you to be that, the better off you are.

ET: Lastly, is there something you wish people knew about Verbos Electronics, or that they get wrong?

MV: That's an interesting question. It recently occurred to me that the message inherent to what we are—which came out in a really great way at the very beginning of the company, twelve or thirteen years ago—was: I'm this guy with a long history of making music as a producer, an engineer, and a performer, and I'm also known for working on these old instruments, and now I combine what I've learned from performing with what I've learned from these old instruments to make a new thing that brings those two concepts together. The mistake we've made in all the years since is coming out each year and saying "this is the new thing we have," and expecting everybody already knows the things we talked about before. New people come into this—maybe they're young, maybe they got interested only now—and if they walked into Schneidersladen and saw a thousand modules, why would they choose something I designed over something else?

So what I'd like people to know is that I'm not a businessman, and I'm not a synthesizer designer—I'm a musician and an engineer. Synthesizers were my hobby, my passion, and the dream was to combine my ideas about how those things could be evolved with what I'd done with music for all those years. If you don't know anything about me, you might think I'm someone with expertise in synthesizers who's using this as a platform to get noticed for my music. But the reality is that performing music is what I have thirty-five years of experience doing, and synthesizers are the thing I know less about, that I'm still learning. I want you to give my synthesizers a chance because of this incredible wealth of experience I have as a music producer, an engineer, and a performer—not the other way around.

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