On The Road: Superbooth 2017

I recently had the chance to journey to Berlin to check out Superbooth 2017 – a three-day gathering of modular synth folks and a wider group of players. This is increasingly looking like a go-to destination to check out interesting new things, and here’s a recap of some of what I saw.

This is only the second Superbooth (or Sooper boooth, as I kept seeing it spelled) to be held since it calved off of the Musikmesse in Frankfurt and relocated to Berlin. The event takes its name from the name of the Messe booth space that the Schneiders Buero folks had a few years back, which provided a place for lots of Eurorack folks to cooperatively show their wares in one place at one time. In 2016, the Superbooth went from being 100 square meters in Hall 5.1 to a standalone event, and that was such a hit that it happened again. As successful things go, each new one is a little different. This time out, the event has levitated from the 2016 Funkhaus site (the location of the former GDR state broadcasting facilities and also the home of the Ableton Loop events) downriver on the river Spree to the Freizeit- und Erholungszentrum (Leisure and Recreation Center) or FEZ. The former GDR recreation center has been repurposed more recently as a kid-friendly destination, and – for a few days, anyway – a free-range beard sanctuary and must-see destination for synth lovers that proved the 11th Doctor Who's claim that "Fezzes Are Cool."

This year’s Superbooth sprawled happily over several levels throughout the venue, and boasted something on the order of 170 or so exhibitors from all over - that change in scale makes it a bit different from your more informal synth meetup, but there’s something else in play, too.

When the Superbooth calved, it brought some interesting folks along for the ride. While some analog synth gatherings are often dominated by Eurorack solutions (occasionally alongside 5U, Modcan, Serge and Buchla offerings), the second Superbooth has expanded in some other interesting ways – the arrival of bigger players in the EMI business ( e.g Arturia, Behringer, Elektron, Korg, Moog, Novation, Presonus, Roland, Waldorf and Yamaha) and software worlds (e.g. Ableton, Bitwig, Native Instruments, Propellorheads, and U-He). Add some controllers, speakers, and DSP effects processor folks, and you’re starting to get a far less narrow mix - I even had people asking me where the Cycling ’74 booth was.

In addition to the Eurorack buzz, one also had the chance to check out the seriously buzzworthy new wavetable polysynth from Novation

...to take a run at U-He’s Repro 5 (now a polyphonic Prophet homage plug-in with tasty stompbox-style effects in the signal chain)

...and to do a little hands-on investigation of the recent Elektron, Waldorf, and Behringer synths.

I think that this particular constellation of possible futures (Eurorack and beyond, really) in a bite-sized location brought interesting changes to the proceedings.

One obvious difference had to do with the regular presence of vloggers and online publications, whose multilingual camera and audio crews relentlessly prowled the show. The good news is that you can “visit Superbooth” after the fact by doing a little web-surfing (I’ve embedded a good number of links in this piece that point directly to various media outlet interviews done at Superbooth to help you out).

That shift in focus is understandable, but one feature of that presence nudges the discourse a little bit away from having a chance to see and try out equipment, and toward an implicit emphasis on “the new.” In terms of that new stuff, it’s great to get the sense of the features a module or product’s designer built in that aren’t immediately obvious (watching Matthias Puerch demonstrate his Tapographic Delay, seeing the pride with which Eloy from Winter Modular demonstrates his Eloquencer, or getting a tour of the Arpitect arpeggiator/quantizer from the WMD boys all come to mind here).

I also value these events as ways to interact with more exotic features of a module that’s been around a while or has been updated. Thanks to Dan Green at 4MS, I now know how to tune the Spectral Multiband Resonator module’s resonators to non-western intervals, I’ve had Andrew Kilpatrick walk me through the Phenol, and I’ve got a pretty clear notion of precisely what Daniel van Tijn has added to his firmware update on the Shapeshifter).

But I’m sure you all really really want to know what’s new, don’t you? Trying to distill a giant, noisy three-day scrum into a few paragraphs is tough sledding, so perhaps I can talk about what I think were a few interesting features of this year’s show. I’ll also hand out a few informal awards for noteworthy trade show valor and general awesomeness.

Emergence

It’s tempting when doing summaries like these to talk about recent emerging trends or clusters of common solutions that appeared in numbers. In the recent past, we’d might have been discussing the appearance of the “integrated single voice Eurorack module, for example. We’d have put the Makenoise 0-Coast right next to the Moog Mother and the Pittsburgh Modular Lifeforms, and talked them alongside standalones and nifty outliers and common design challenges. And that does, indeed, continue to expand and morph. In fact, several new interesting standalone items combining that “single voice” with some UI and sequencing capabilities are popping up. I was particularly charmed by in the Bastl booth by Peter Edward’s softPop unit – a clocked arpeggiated synth that is steadfast in its ability to avoid devolving into random noise (unless you patch it to make it do your bidding), preferring instead to flirt with magnificent and inspiringly controlled chaos.

Like his Bitranger, it is an idiosyncratic and infectious box of joy. Along those lines, the Eowave Quadrantid Swarm combines a synth voice with a percussive element, a 2-pole analog filter, some waveforms for modulation, a built-in spring reverb(!), and touch keys that do multiple duty as a keyboard and step sequencer.

That expansion also applies to adding on-board functionality that extends an existing module without the need for several outboard Eurorack modules. In that regard, Noise Engineering has expanded their original Loquelic Iteritas to the Loquelic Iteritas Percido that pushes that single-solution voice to places farther afield. And finally, the folks at Digitana have cut the Synthi AKS umbilical cord and are producing their own standalone SX-1 synth .

But what about Superbooth 2017? For me, this particular edition of Superbooth was notable for three of those kinds of clusters as emergent properties: The stompbox-to-module path, mixers and sequencer modules.

Making the Transition

There are certainly products out there that seek to put Eurorack processing into the tabletops and under the feet of non-synth people (e.g. the Pittsburgh Modular Patch Box). But it goes the other way, too, and not just in the form of EMI firms migrating to Eurorack (Dave Smith Instruments' Eurorack modules, or the recent Oberheim SEM module), either. A couple of the most obvious recent examples of the pedal-to-Eurorack approach can be found in the migration of the Rebel Technologies Eurorack format version of their OWL pedal. That path has also attracted the interest of boutique stompbox folks such as Zachary Vez's merry band at zvex, and even Eventide. My personal favorite? The forthcoming ADDAC Systems’ EHX Mellotron module, which licensed the Electro-Harmonix Mel9 Mellotron pedal and added CV control to attack and decay articulation as well as limited polyphony (this may be due to the fact that I used to be a Mellotron owner, and I am now delighted by their non-physical descendants).

Mixing It Up

The interest in Eurorack mixing modules is a cocktail whose primary ingredients are a combination of worry about the mixing facilities available in the places you perform, the desire to add voltage control in one of many forms to mixing output in real time, and a dash or two of idiosyncratic desire.

The results? A plethora of interesting options from 4ms (who have a new 2 and 4-channel mixer in the works for 2017), ADDAC’s Summing Mixer, Befaco's Project HEXA, The Frap Tools CGM, WMD’s Performance Mixer, and – last but certainly not least – Bastl’s 5-channel Dude mixer. It’s not a Eurorack module, but if you’re someone trying to mix together a pile of those Korg boxes or Teenage Engineering modules, this little bad boy will seem like it’s descended from Olympus in a chariot driven by Apollo himself.

Note: while Superbooth is a great place to get hands-on experience with modules and their UIs and special features, it is most certainly not the place to be able to listen to them and see how quiet they are – the pumping kickdrums and high-frequency squealing in the booth next door makes that effectively impossible. Sorry, but I can’t weigh in on this one. If any of you have any specific recommendations, I’d be glad to see them in the comments.

One Step At A Time

The arrival of options for sequencing MIDI or control voltages and triggers this time out is interesting in terms of going in several different directions, each of which reflects the basic observation that everyone has an opinion about sequencing events. This year's Superbooth was chockablock with all kinds of varieties of ways to make those opinions visible - from the standalone units such as the Squarep's Pyramid sequencer, Kilpatrick Audio's Carbon, and the Polyend SEQ sequencer to some new Eurorack offerings from Twisted Electrons, Winter Modular, and Ginkosynthese, some slightly more specialized offerings such as the Erica drum sequencer module, and updates to existing modules such as the WMD trigger sequencer. We may be seeing the dawning of the a golden age of Eurorack step sequencers.

May I Have The Envelope, Please?

As you might imagine, anything this large and focused is a huge invitation for me to completely miss The Most Important Thing At The Superbooth EVER, depending on who you are (my view is that the change and expansion of Superbooth itself is the most important thing, but your mileage may vary). The reason for all of these links to videos from Superbooth is that maybe a little link-chasing will show you a thing or two I didn’t shine a light on. But yeah – Since I am just as idiosyncratic and driven by bias and desire as you are, the following Superbooth Awards will provide an excuse to mention things that I personally enjoyed/will be parting with money for a some future date, etc. Okay – drum roll, please:

Most Thoughtful Schwag: The bags and the T-shirts were great. The keychains were cool. But the folks at Noise Engineering take home bragging rights for their logo-enhanced lens cleaning cloths. If schwag is supposed to remind you of a brand, then I see the Noise Engineering logo twice a day, every day – once as something blurry on the lens cloth, and then the second time as a clear and pleasant bit of design when seen through my newly-cleaned glasses.

Most Revealing Hands-On Experience Award: The most revealing physical encounter with an instrument had nothing to do with Eurorack gear, and – actually – nothing to do with any of this century’s technologies. The Ondomo is a portable analog update to one of the great expressive electronic instruments of the early 20th century - the Ondes Martinot . The nice folks showing the Ondomo wound up in the most steampunky room in the whole FEZ (it was supposed to resemble a space station, I think) initially without the instrument they brought to show, courtesy of the airlines. Happily, the instruments were located quickly, and I got to spend time playing with/on something I’ve heard more than seen, and dragging acquaintances off to try it themselves.

The Japanese-made Ondomo is beautifully made (a travel case worth of Captain Nemo himself), sounds exquisite, and spending a little quality time with it answered a question I've wondered about: I've always heard that the original instrument's developer was a 'cello player, but until I had the instrument in front of me and had a chance to see how articulation and vibrato/pitch were divided between my hands, I didn't really understand. Now, I do.

Best Performance By A Max/MSP Patch In A Supporting role: Believe it or not, it’s not the Max patches for Roli gear this time out. There I was in the Haken Audio booth, geeking out over what a pleasure their Continuum keyboard is to play, and particularly enjoying how well the touch surface mates with their EagenMatrix synth when something caught my attention. Some of the little number boxes on the softsynth looked a little… familiar. So I tweaked it, looked a little more, and got up my courage to ask. Yes, the user interface for the EagenMatrix was a Max app - a graphical front end for the Continuum's built-in synth (Hey, it's got a SHARC DSP chip on board....). It made my day.

Best Repurposing of Someone Else’s Tech: No contest on this one – the Ableton guys took a bunch of Lego Mindstorm sets, rolled their own Max for Live controller interfaces to play nicely with the Legos, and hey presto! Lego-based pendulum triggers, percussion instruments, and… um… something with a marble. Well played, gentlemen. Well played.

The Trifecta Deferred Gratification Awards: Supposedly, waiting for something good builds character (that’s what I’m told anyway). In the case of places like Superbooth, one has a chance to get sneak peeks at modules which aren’t commercially available as of yet. I’m not sure whether to spin this as “pre-orders are an act of faith and praise” or “it’s good that I have a little time to save for this,” but I saw a trio of things out there that would have had my checkbook out. In a way, that’s probably a good thing, since I’m just about to write a check for the Tom Erbe-designed Morphagene from Makenoise that I saw at NAMM in January (and again, with the guidance of Walker Farrell and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe). Here’s what’s next on my list - once they’re out):

As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that realiy characterized this Superbooth for me was the number of approaches to the sequencer. Eloi from the Barcelona-based firm Winter Modular walked off with the best-of-show sequencer of the lot, as far as I’m concerned – and, if the rest of the post-show buzz is anything to go by, I’m not alone. His Eloquencer is an 8-track CV/gate step sequencer that’s intuitively laid out, quickly modifiable on the fly, and appears to have pretty much every single step sequencer feature you can imagine (I actually tried playing “find the absent feature” on this with Eloi, and I lost), all in a compact 38 HP package.

Klavis – a Belgian Eurorack outfit I confess I hadn’t run across before – absolutely knocked my socks off with something new. No, it wasn’t their divine-sounding Dual LFO/VCO module (although it was amazing), but their pre-release Trancevolver – a dual stochastic wave pattern generator. Do you remember the Korg Wavestation’s ability to sequence waveforms to produce evolving timbres? Imagine that as a way to generate control voltages for your Eurorack bad boys in ways you can store, recall, morph between, and probabilistically clone or mutate on the fly. In short – things we do in Max-land all the time if we’re interested in generating variety, but it a well thought-out Eurorack design.

I’d initially gone over to the 4MS booth to meet Matthias Puech and to thank him for his awesome Parasites firmware that runs on nearly all of my Mutable Instruments modules (he was there to show his own first foray into Eurorack module design – The Tapographic Delay) when I first laid eyes on 4ms' new Spherical Wavetable Navigator, which looked like a cousin of their Spectral Multiband Resonator.

Once Dan Green had run me through its paces, I was in love. It repurposes some of the UI and technology from the SMR, but in the service of a six-pack of digital wavetable oscillators with simple dial-in access (CV and otherwise), an integral mixer, and a six-pack of LFOs (which you can pitch into the audible range, too) to animate the proceedings. And the sound is amazing. This was my Superbooth answer to the question, “Who needs another VCO, anyway?” I do.

And out on the farther horizon, Andrew Kilpatrick showed a prototype of something very interesting, indeed - the Tungsten.

Whew! Well, that’s about it for me. Superbooth was an exciting and inspiring week full of amazing gear, the chance to hang with the wonderful people who imagined them and made them, and the chance to join in imagining what we might do with those wonderful things.

P.S. Reason 9.5 is going to support VST. It’ll be a free upgrade, out at the end of May. Surprise!