Hesperides Mobile Synthesis Platform from Altered State Machines

From the creator of Aristotle

Currently on Kickstarter

Introducing Hesperides

Hesperides is Altered State Machines' new handheld synthesizer built

to accompany you on your venture to the outer regions of dissonance and back.

Designed for performance and explorative sonic mangling.

Every control can bring a drastic adjustment to the sound.

Go from vanilla to completely alien.

Self contained and portable, especially so with the battery pack.

Lend your support to our project, and put a little more chaos in everyone's pocket.

Altered State Machines history

Hi, we're Jesse and Ed.

Jesse became fascinated with modular synthesis around 2016 and went back to school as an electronic engineering technician to learn how to repair and create his own eurorack modules.

Altered State Machines grew out of Jesse's first project, the Aristotle sequencer which is now in its fifth iteration. Jesse is our electronics and hardware mastermind. Ed joined forces to twiddle bits with the software.


We've designed and built a number of eurorack modules. Visit our website at https://alteredstatemachines.net to check them out.

See our 36 five-star reviews and rave customer comments on Etsy, Perfect Circuit, and Reverb.

Eurorack is great, but it's expensive, and it certainly isn't easy to take it on the road and play.

Why digital

Hesperides is our first digital project, a software-defined "fun" synthesizer which is intended to be easy to use, but also have enough depth to keep confirmed knob wigglers out of trouble designing their own sounds.

It's designed to be capable for offline, "dawless" play and performances. I figure we all could appreciate an opportunity to have fun, unplugged from our phones and computers for a change.

That said, it has MIDI in and out, eurorack clock in and out, and a mono line-in for connection to other instruments. The stereo headphone output doubles as a line-out.

Normally, I'll plug the headphone out into a portable speaker or headphones, and sample from the line-in; but for playing around the campfire, there's a little built-in speaker and microphone.

We deliberately chose a small one-color screen. It's handy to have a screen for menu navigation, but we wanted the interface to be more muscle-memory than staring-at-screen.

A micro USB port provides an avenue for firmware updates and a way to load samples and pre-sets for the drum machine and synthesizer, or save pre-sets back to a computer. No computer or internet access are required for every day operation.

Where we are now

We're doing our best to reduce risk on your behalf. Initially we had planned to simply self-fund development from sales of other modules, and that has taken us quite a long way.

In fact, the electronic hardware design of the synth proper is completely finished.

Here's a quick overview of the evolution, we originally started with a square prototype, and expression keys on the reverse side.