DivKid's Month Of Modular Issue #14 November 2016 | Page 17

It's fair to say you made a big splash with the ADE-32 Octocontroller. Were you aiming to make something that would really ignite a small system? Or was it making a swiss army knife module that filled any sort of "I wish I had more modulation" type thoughts users may have?

Yeah, obviously I’m very proud of the Octocontroller, it’s become Abstract Data’s flagship module and it’s great to see that new people are still discovering it and experienced users are still finding new things to do with it.

The ADE-32 design came out of trying to solve a problem that I was having with my own rig in that, if you’re doing music that relies on clocked and quantised sequences - like most forms of dance music for example and you’re running a rig that is stand-alone i.e. you’re not slaving it to a DAW - then getting multiple, synced modulations going is actually really

challenging. That seemed like a glaring hole in my early Eurorack experience - so I set out to fill it.

It ended up being a lot more than just a bunch of synced LFOs but I found that once we’d sorted the navigation method - which gives you access to all the key features right on the front panel - then we could squeeze in some bonus features like looping CV and arpeggios.

The upcoming waveshaping VCO, envelope generator and VCA flesh out the Abstract Data system into a full and comprehensive voice. Was an all Abstract Data rig always a goal?

That idea evolved over the first couple of years of designing modules but it is the long-term plan to have a complete Abstract Data signal path.

We have VCO, VCF, VCA, VC-AHDSR and a number of modulation and utility designs in

development and the current Abstract Data demo rig has prototypes of all those modules running.