DivKid's Month Of Modular Issue #5 February 2016 | Page 11

Hi Jim, first of all let's pretend we've never met. Who are you and what do you do?

I was born in Canada, but the majority of my school and youth was in

Oxfordshire, U.K. that is where I became interested in synthesizers when our music class visited EMS on a field trip and they gave us a loaner synthi.

After coming back to Canada I worked with a few more local bands, and have had many different jobs from bicycle mechanic to 3d rendering admin.

The first product I'm aware of from you is the Duofonik Dual SSM2044 Filter. Was that the first module you designed?

I had built other musical electronics, but not in modular format. it was mostly one off audio things. I also had a few DSP synthesizers that were mildly popular in the small sonic core scope community.

So how did the Orgone Accumulator

come to life? It seems to blend multiple

ideas over wavetables, crossfading,

digital FM and AM, unison oscillator

swarms etc.

I had made an arduino synth called

"scarab" but it was a bit too complicated

to make a DIY project for others to build,

and I stopped working on it and went on

to something else. then the teensy 3 was released. it is an ARM based 32 bit processor, miles ahead of the 8 bit arduino i had been working with, but i could still program it in the same environment, and even use much of my old code.

I prototyped the new version, and kept pushing it to do more. I added some ideas from my old scope synths as well I was quite happy with it at this stage and that was when thought it would make a nice DIY and started designing the panel. I went through a lot of iterations showing each design on the muffwiggler forums some of them were pretty wild! In the end knob spacing for fingers and

practicality won out and (greyscale real name) helped me a lot with the 1.x DIY panel design.

1.0 boards and panels were produced and sold much better than I expected