This one in via Davide Mancini who has contributed numerous posts to the site: "After a long time considering and planning, I will start, within my electronic development company, a musical instruments brand "soundmachines". We plan to start selling stuff (eurorack modules) at the end of september/early october.Please have a look at this thread at MuffWiggler, where I introduce stuff and put some teasers on!"
Some of the relevant bits from that thread:
"Dear All,
after having spent 15 years splitting interests at home (not.only.electronic music) and at work (electronics), I decided to re-join those two beautiful fields into one, and so I started writing down business plans and product family projections... My company is already developing and manufacturing electronics (consumer and industrial market, mainly) so, on the operations side, let's assume that we have the 'numbers' to manage such a scenario (high mix, low volumes).
Well, what we will sell ?Basically we will start with eurorack modules, more on the sound processing, sequencing, performance, specialty side than vco, vca, vcf side (I think that we already have on the market plenty of excellent products in these area). Then we have some interesting designs regarding stand-alone effects, performance oriented controllers and some products related to lighting. We already started the design of a full blown analog polysynth that should be prototyped at the beginning of next year. Don't hold your breath tho', that's a really heavy project, especially for what regards industrialization, manufacturing process and sustainability of production.... There is also in the plans an analog monophonic, complex synth and (to be defined) some kind of analog/digital groovebox.
Obviously, we are just the last one to enter the market, and we will be careful and realistic about what could be done, but nevertheless, we will come!
Last but not least, many of our products will be opensourced, to leverage the people out there that have talent and the love for tinkering with stuff.
The roadmap (two years are already booked!) is dense enough to scary me and all the guys that will work on the development side, but it's really exciting, open, and we hope, innovative.
As of today we are still working on the planning and I don't really have a fixed date to give you, everything is positioned circa 'after the summer', meaning anywhere between the end of September and late November.
Anyway, this is just a 'be prepared' thing, we have about 4 modules coming in the following 4/5 months. Then, later next year, other toys will arrive...
So, I will keep you informed in this very thread, as long as news are coming, including renderings, spec sheets, videos, prototypes etc..
To start, we will setup a very small on line shop. We are still in the definition phase. And we will ship worldwide.
Soundmachines is based in central Italy, ancient home of [/b]many beautiful exercises in synth magic !!!!
Stay tuned, we are coming!!"
followed by:
"I would like to thank you everyone that took his time to read the post!Just to put some more gasoline on the fire, I will disclose the first modules by their name!
The first wiggler that correctly guesses what each module will actually do will receive one of the prototypes that certainly will be built (please allow some manual soldering or rework here hihi ) before getting the production ready!!!!!!
He will be obliged, tho', to capture at least a couple of vids and upload to youtube for "dissemination" !!! hihi (I think that this is actually a good idea that could be used also for the other modules... yes!)
Ok, there you go:
RB1 Robotto
RC1 RadioStar
CS8 ChromaSeq8
MC1 ModularCommander
DC1 Drumcomputer
SP1 Slicer
CG1 GridConnector"
Followed by:
"Robotto: no it's not a vocoder, nor a cv generator... Robotto is this: [video previously posted here on Dec 13, 2009]
RadioStar A part from being a gratitude nod to the song, no it is not a radio (look at the work of Tom Whitwell, or ADDAC). Let me just leave this here: tablet,smartphone,cv,gate... OK?
ChromaSeq Sorry no Rhodes Chroma love here.. seriously, i just don't get it It's a sequencer.... the fact that it's full of RGB leds it's not for a light show, though....
ModularCommander I think that this one will remain mysterious for another while.. cool
DrumComputer Yes it's a drum sequencer but with a couple of interesting twists... Yes you can drive those beautiful Tiptop drum modules... Patterns, songs, leds!!!!!
Slicer Think about slicing things in the frequency domain, not in the time domain. + more twists.
GridConnector It's not a matrix mixer, it's the last module before the PA or the DAW...."
