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[Music] what is up people of the internet
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welcome back to another episode a special episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts I'm Marquez and I'm
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Adam hey Adam hi you're on this side of the table yeah I'm over here I graduated finally to the big boy table wait but if
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you're here then who's oh hey oh Andrew's at the producer table it's so weird over here can you hear yourself no
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no yeah we turned down it's a little different over here but we did we have a bit of a special episode because we
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thought uh this would be a really fun thing to sort of pull back the curtain on a little bit uh some conversations
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that we have around the studio have turned into podcast episodes for the longest time uh but we also have all
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kinds of other conversations with other people connected to the studio that are also sometimes really interesting yeah
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and this is one where we figured you know what before we even get into this let's just record it just to have it and
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it turned out to be one of those really good fun conversations that's actually worth sharing yeah like a lot of times
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for videos which you guys listening or watching don't get to see is we talk
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with the people that make the products a lot trying to better understand the products and those conversations
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typically never see the light of day they're usually secret or usually secret or yeah like that it's just like behind
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the scenes kind of thing you have a quick question hop on a call with someone yeah so I'm doing a video for Studio Channel and for that I reached
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out to some company and I was like hey I'm doing this video I would like to maybe speak to the person who was in charge of making these certain decisions
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that I want to know why they made those decisions and they were like sure yeah just talk to this guy this guy ended up
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being the co-founder of the company so last second David and I were like slacking each other that morning and
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we're like hm maybe we make this into an episode and we can just like turn this into a thing where these conversations
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we have with people behind the scenes can just be brought more to the foreground so people can kind of see how
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this stuff comes together yeah so this episode is with David Erikson the
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co-founder of teenage engineering teenage engineering is a company that makes a lot of my favorite gadgets like
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the op1 the opz they're like music synthesizers this is what they they've done most yeah they most known for but
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they've been in the headlines a lot more frequently lately for some other collaborations you might recognize them from a lot of other places like nothing
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like the new rabbit device that came out they were the ones designing it uh the play date if you guys remember that like
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a year or two ago it was like a little game boyes thing like they designed it so we just thought we'd play the play
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the interview and here you go this is it uh can you say your full name and
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what exactly you do at teenage engineering okay my full name is David
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Erikson uh and uh I was part of founding teenage with my dear friends and uh my
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here is head of Hardware head of hardware and hardware for us is basically you know the platforms that's
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inside the machines electronics and yeah and around that sounds
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complicated so you guys have a ton of different products so little backstory
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how this meeting came to be was I reached out asking to speak with someone about the EP 133 the new sampler you
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guys released and then you're the guy they put me in contact with so you headed product and that project and you
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had all of the projects Parts in all projects as in on the technology side if
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you look at our portfolio uh they are very different I mean we have from
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furniture to Advanced Digital mixers uh for everything that's that has
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Electronics inside we try and at least build them in a way so they work together I mean it could be simple stuff
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like making sure that they all all have a Bluetooth LE uh chip inside so we can
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send you know Med data or sync signals between like a mixer and the syn and
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something else or it could be that the fact that the USBC is on on most of our higher range products are dual roles you
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can actually take two sys and connect them with a cable you don't need to go to computer and back so I would say my
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role is partly to ensure that that happens so uh
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I mean to us it's not like we're trying to build like an ecosystem that's close to te devices it's more that trying to
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avoid the need for for a host computer in a in a setup I mean yeah part of the
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name of the field series that we have everything works Standalone but you can use them together uh um and then usually
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the way we work here is that some product I mean we usually try and keep the teams very very small so so it we
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have products that's been made out of basically a formation of two people like a software engineer and a and the E uh
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or me plus you know combination of you then of course you pick and pick some components from from
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previous projects whether it's like a physical component like a knob or it
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could be you know a chipset or a stack of code um but then then in terms of how
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the machine works there's usually one person that is like a product owner or
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lead for that and that can be an me an ID person software person uh and for the our most
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recent device this ko2 I I did that because it was um maybe you read online but it it
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was kind of a project we' never plan to do we talked of course about making a
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upscaled pocket operator uh with real keys and the real case but we started it
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in the summertime when we were both on vacation me and uh one of our lead mes
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mechanical engineers MH so uh we at that
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point in time we didn't really know what the product would do but I've always been into like just the Vintage Samplers
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a lot and we never really done that except for the ko1 um so so it was kind of okay but
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I'll I'll I'll manage this project it's it's very you know we don't really have
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you know structure in that sense so it made sense that I would do it uh and
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then of course we we've been a couple of software engineers and M and you know in
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the beginning we were like two three people in the in the you know crunch of the project we're maybe 10 momentarily
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and then we scale back wow that's not a lot of how we work it's it's very
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different but still it's important that the po group kind of has a passion for for the product and and so that's why
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but of course we still try and make them so so it they have some elements that are recognizable from other te devices
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yeah yeah like how much of this was you guys pulling things from like the pocket
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operators and how much of it was a brand new problem that you guys had to solve like is there a particular story you
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have in mind where it was something unique to the ko2 that you guys had to figure out I mean the old KO is roughly
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uh let me think a third in processing power and and of course it didn't have
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any like buil-in flash storage or it had a little bit but not not 64 megabytes so
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like comparing the two 64 megabytes is a lot comparing 64 megabytes with some
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other things on on that's out there now of course you can get gigabytes if you want but we felt that it was important
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to have this kind of quite you know
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limited feature set as in uh no menu
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diving uh not too much storage because you you kind of get stressed out of you know having 30 versions of your latest
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song and you and he's like no make make a new song You Know bounce it or track
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it down to tape or into your door or whatever so uh but it also has to do
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with cost of course because if you throw a big CPU in there and a lot of memory it's going to be maybe a couple
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of hundred dollars more retail uh and Battery of course as soon as you hit the threshold I mean the
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pocket operators are like extremely power efficient you can have two AAA and it can be on for a year and when you hit
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play it starts instantly and it still runs that's what mine does it just sits there until I hit play and then it just starts doing things um here we have a
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real power button actually so it's we actually cut the power physically when you turn off oh wow but it's also a very
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power efficient you know CPU or MCU whatever you want to call it yeah um so
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it was important for us not to throw in like a charge your IC and a lithium battery so it's it's again like AAA in
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the EP and po series you run off AAA batteries classic vintage yeah
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technology it's going to be around I think for for many many years whereas as soon as you put it customade cell like
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you have in your phones eventually that will dry out and M you have to rely on
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you know an experienced service teici to swap it out yeah so like to that point
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there's I don't know how true this is because I feel like I've only heard it once or twice from random like YouTube
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videos and stuff but I had heard that you guys had decided to like basically buy a bunch of like inexpensive
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components and you pull it all in a pile in front of you and then try to figure out what can you make with this is that
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kind of how the EP 133 came to be yeah partly true the way that they made this
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product to my understanding is after the pandemic they were like okay there's
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obviously not a lot of chips and things that people can buy remember there was the chip shortage of that whole thing so
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they went and looked at all these different companies that were making chipsets and tried to find substitutes
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for what they were already using using and after Gathering a bunch of those things and making like signing those
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contracts whatever then they sat down they were like okay now we can make this thing and they like kind of designed it as they went along which was interesting
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to me and I was just wondering like one have you ever heard of something like this before no like I've heard of like
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companies using their Old Stock like we make that joke about iPads all the time like oh they just have yeah Parts spin
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they threw an iPad together but like how many more cool gadgets could we have if everyone just took like the lowest common denominator from all these
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different like sources it would put something together yeah it's interesting I I do feel like you know they're known
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for their designs so I feel like in order to make something that is super uniquely designed you do have to have a
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somewhat unique process and i' I guess this could only these types of products could only come from a company that has
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a unique process like you would never get something as intricately or
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interestingly put together or thought out if you just did it the same way everyone else did yeah I don't know if that's exactly how they did it if so
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that's crazy and super cool but yeah you do have to have something special there yeah I found that pretty cool we spent a
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lot of time around 201 I was about to say 11 20 20201 okay
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I was like Wow uh uh just finding
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substitutes of components in our existing portfolio so it's like really
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you know tiresome work um and at the
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same time lead times to get something new it could be a chipset whether it's a power IC or a flash memory or MCU you
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know it was like lead times ranging from 64 to 99 weeks so it was like out of the
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question to pick anything like that so we basically what I did is that we have
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a lot of connections on the ship vendors so we just called every vendor like you
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know our favorites to random you know less known brands that Mak mcus we just
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have the same questions do you have you know this amount of chips in stock that we can get now or you know couple of
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months from now and most didn't so we had to and eventually you know one company called back and we worked with
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them before uh Cypress now they're acquired by infini in in Germany and
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they were like oh yeah we we actually have a pile now uh of mcus do you need
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them uh so we we like okay it has kind of the specs we need low power 150
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MHz it's a dual core CPU where we we actually don't use the other core yet uh
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and then so we committed to use that and then then we started ordering so as we went designing the
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schematic we we basically looked at distributors or even key it's like do
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they have enough stock it's like yes okay you buy it first you know enter
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your credit card order and then you add it to the schematic okay of course that you know once we got into like board
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bring up and verifying the system there was some mistakes so we we of course ended up with some excess Parts you know
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that you have to kind of find a good use of or sell but it was really fun to work like that usually you I mean yes five
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years ago you could design the whole board you buy all the components like in you know quantities of 10 or 20
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and then somewhere around the Finish Line you you place the orders some months later you can start to produce
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but now it's like then you would have to wait a year or two from you know designed for E to so it
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was both I but it was a good good kind of way of working and and at the same
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time we set a lot of you know rules we we knew from start we really wanted it to be not uh sent over $300
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retail why that number specifically um I mean we started 100
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lower but it was completely unrealistic no it's just like a balance of I mean we
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we have a lot of products that's in the high range like both feature-wise
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um and I mean it it's just there's so much stuff in in our other field
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products that you know they become quite expensive so we said that it's it's more
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important that it's an affordable machine that anyone will buy rather than
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just an experienced musician or like a you know it's kind of this we talked
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about it being like the Nerf gun of of synthesizers you know just just the way
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the plastic is built up really like it's good quality plastic but it's still it's it's it's it's kind of intended to not
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look too fancy but two sheap it's m uh was that always the design from the
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start did you guys always have like a dope ass calculator in mind or did it
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just come to be as you were making it it changed quite a bit along the way but we
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it was always kind of the the for Factor was pretty much defined M um I think we
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moved things around a little bit and and you know the way we did this kind of
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back printed uh I don't know what we call it on our
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website but it's it's just LEDs shooting up between behind like
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colored uh like a screen printed film it's like a light diffuser with a uh and
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then we made little custom three segment display with a funky type face M uh we
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could have used an LCD but again as soon as you do it's you kind of it opens up for menus and you
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know higher AR is so it was kind of nice not having that option and honestly
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neither on the EP 133 or the K2 or the pocket operators you don't really need
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the screen you don't it's fun at start and you can see the tempo but but once
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you get over like uh you know it's more into kind of muscle memory you don't
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really need to look at the screen MH that's a good point uh one thing too that I feel like is very obvious in
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something like the pocket op operator or even The Knockout 2 is I feel like you
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guys in general tend to like Define a limitation and then work your way in and
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figure out what you can make in that space um is that something that's
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intentional or for something like this were you trying to keep it under a certain price so that was the limitation
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or was it always more like a functionality limitation I mean I think normally we
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wouldn't look at the price point when we do a product I mean it's it's it's rare
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but it's important sometimes it's also like we knew we wanted to do it in one year I
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mean basically finish it and then ramp production which takes another set of
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months uh in one year you guys are crazy yeah it was it was quite quick so
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in we started in August 2022 it was we started soft ramping
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production in August 2023 um and then then we had to it's always slow
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at start I mean it's not like you just call a number and they just replicate it for you yeah we we manage the production
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lines in a way that we we design it we we we build the fixtures and the
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equipment needed and of course when you do a new product that breaks so some some days we
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could just make you know 20 units on the full day and in a good day we could do a couple of hundreds just very like so we
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we actually produce in in Europe in Spain and that was also part of this
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trip that we we were all like let's make this in Europe so we started in like
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Sweden where we are located it's there's not many factories in that sense because we
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used to have like you know Ericson and Son Ericson making phones here back in the day but those factories are gone so
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we had to look you know from Eastern Europe we went to like Estonia lva
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Poland Czech Republic oh wow Italy France we did 14
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different you know contract manufacturers that that we you know we made kind of an Excel sheet and and we
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looked at everything from like uh you know the people you know uh the environment do
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they have good like it backend machines you know could we shake did the CTO or
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CEO come to us and Shake hands you know yeah Al like a plus you know do they care or not that kind of
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parameter uh um and you know door too you know for us it's like a three and a
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half hour flight and then 20 minutes by car to where we ended up it's very
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convenient yeah of course being able to drive there would have been even better
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but I think we we found a good balance It's Kind kind of a very Tech driven
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contract manufacturer but they only do circuit boards as a profession this is probably the first book build that they
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they've done interesting meaning like a consumer product so we have to kind
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of train them how to do it and that that that's also part of this rampup process it's
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it's probably equal amount of hours spent on building the production line as building the
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syn and how many how many prototypes did you guys go through is there like a number in your head
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circuit boards I think we ship with revision
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five or six meaning uh that'sa changes oh not bad it
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was uh we had yeah um I don't remember what we change but it's usually power
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related or you know stupid mistakes and stuff like that and then Plastics we
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I think I don't remember exactly I think we we went quite fast into what you call hard
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tooling where you pay a lot of money to Tool Parts because it's a lot of plastic
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parts um have a few iterations to hit like the
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tolerances we need and then then on top of that you you iterate like colors and finishes and get the texturing right and
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all that stuff um um but yeah not too
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many honestly we I guess we were a little bit lucky but what took the most time again is is is to putting it
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together like just getting uh getting all of that like because we care still even if it's just
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just $300 retail we don't it we care a
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lot about the cosmetics and that's the hard part when when you move it around on the
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production line it's easy that you SC you know it gets scratched up or true um so we built a lot of like what do you
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say call it in in in in English like cradles and and and linear kind
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of actuators to plug in USB so it's not a human like trying to to PL type c
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because then they going to scratch like the back of it so it's actually a little moving oh wow interesting arm you have
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to to make sure to minimize all the risks uh but I think yeah obviously we
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we we did a lot of that work but you heard about the fader problems we ended up with in in at launch yeah has that
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been a headache for you or yeah I mean it's you kind of you don't remember
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previous projects but it's always something like that I think on some early ship I mean we have
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we have always had some problems like it's even if you try and predict
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everything that can potentially go wrong both in in the factory side or or
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shipping you know there's there's always something so quick backstory there okay
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fader Gates is this thing about this particular product and it comes with a
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small fader on the left side of the device that when people were first getting their initial orders they were
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finding that it was broken or wasn't working or you have to kind of like put it together yourself a little so there's
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little knobs that you have to push on to the little fader and people were doing that too hard and breaking it or it was
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getting messed up in shipping so it turned into like this whole thing where now if you order one it comes with like
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a little plastic hard piece on top to stop it from getting crushed in the packaging during shipping sure but
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couple things one that reminded me of all the different Gates that we've experienced over the years plenty of
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gates plenty do you know what's impressive too is he brought it up yeah
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I I'm just like trying to think like if we talk to any other like person at a company they would just never talk about
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anything like that and if you asked them questions it' be like yeah I had that question a little bit further down the
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list and he just brought it up himself and like this wasn't like I'm not I'm not doing any like journalism here I
00:24:08
wasn't trying to like press him for hard questions or anything but he just like I was just doing background information and he kind of brought it up himself
00:24:13
which I found really interesting yeah um but also the other thing that really caught me off guard was he said they
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shipped this on the fifth or sixth iteration do you remember how many iterations we went through for the shoe
00:24:25
for the sneaker plenty more than five or six more than five or six and that's a sneaker like no digital components no
00:24:31
like small little knobs and things it was to be fa I've never designed a shoe before so of course it took me a lot of
00:24:37
Provisions maybe he's just that uh dialed into to the type of Hardware that they're working on yeah what if we just
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got a bunch of pieces of other old shoes and then ask you to make a shoe right
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yeah it's basically what they did huh so I found it pretty interesting yeah process I also feel like I'm getting a
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look into the the the way the gears are turning in his head like you can see him like remembering things that are like
00:25:02
organically coming up as you ask questions which is that's fun yeah it's always fun to talk to people that like
00:25:08
are Hands-On with their products like this guy actually was the lead like he's a co-founder but he's the lead of this
00:25:13
product just because of the way that the company set up this is really interesting all right well we're going to take a quick break but after it we'll
00:25:19
be right back with more from David
00:25:26
Eric all right now that we paid some bills let's jump back in anything that sticks
00:25:33
up will eventually break if you drop it and in our case it was you know we were
00:25:39
quite optimistic with the packaging and the way the the actual you know Shaft or the fader was so so basically you could
00:25:47
just take a hammer and hit it like and and it will break but now we have a little spacer in the packaging yeah mine
00:25:54
came with that yeah so but partly also we we try to move away like many other
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companies from like using Plastics or foam stuff like that that that makes it easy to prot protect
00:26:07
the device so as soon as you go with just cardboard and and like molded paper
00:26:14
pulp you know it's it's just going to be more sensitive yeah but but it's all
00:26:20
good now I think uh it was just the first first badge yeah and yeah and
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that's what ends up on the early reviews but I hope people understand I was not
00:26:33
expecting you personally to have taken such a big role in all of this considering like your role at the
00:26:39
company um is that how every project gets worked on over there like does
00:26:44
someone like you said earlier someone takes ownership but let's say there's only what how many employees do you guys
00:26:50
have like a 100 maybe uh well not not really but I think we're 60 to 65 so
00:26:56
like one or two people will just take ownership of something and see that from start to finish yeah it EAS just like
00:27:02
that we don't have like a PM project manager for all projects or it's more
00:27:09
like on the let's say out of the 65 let's say that works here M half
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of it we call R&D meaning we actually group every
00:27:23
discipline that goes into making the product under R&D so industrial design mechanical engineering electonic
00:27:30
engineering software as well as like you know
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designing the operating system the foundation more support packages the back end we have lot of server you know
00:27:43
systems obviously to run the production lines um to run the you know our website
00:27:49
but we do everything inh housee that's always been important to us we don't really we don't
00:27:56
go to a company that builds factories or build Factory test equipment we yeah I guess it's it's it's
00:28:03
both when we started not knowing that of course you can buy it but it's always either too expensive or too slow so you
00:28:09
end up building those Primitives yourself and then you know uh eventually
00:28:16
you have a quite good uh system uh that you can make use of in in new projects
00:28:23
so we can have a junior team do a product based on you know BAS experiences from previous things and uh
00:28:31
but yeah we we we try and it's hard to but yeah back to to to
00:28:38
the head count I if if you then divide by the disciplines we're very few I
00:28:43
think we're like four EES in total five me like so so to do everything that we
00:28:51
do including the factories we we yump around a lot like projects so it's it's
00:28:57
it's it's getting this uh so I mean for the EP I mean all the factory sounds
00:29:03
like the content it comes in of course that's managed by I mean in this case it was managed by me usually the product
00:29:09
owner does that too so going to Studios recording we worked with a lot of producers and sound designers around the
00:29:15
globe but that's that's also same we don't have a sound person to do that or contam that's kind of what I'm getting
00:29:22
at is like it's weird that this was you personally doing all this one day you draw schematics the other day you be
00:29:27
some sort of like Factory test equipment the third day you you you edit you know drum sounds in in logic and yeah and
00:29:35
then you know we all do a little bit of coding to build like pipelines and tools to to make life easier and but it's it's
00:29:43
fun like that uh I think it's as soon as you start to build a hierarchical Dev
00:29:48
environment you're just going to slow down so it's like interesting okay so then one thing
00:29:57
that someone asked me the other day on Twitter or threads or something like that that I couldn't quite pin down is
00:30:03
someone was asking what is the overall design like what's the name for the design of teenage engineering products
00:30:10
what do you consider it because it's very unique it's very playful I guess
00:30:16
but it's not really like I don't know it looks like nothing else I answered I said kind of minimal and like retro
00:30:22
future but I don't even know if that's accurate like as someone inside the company as one of the co-founders what would you call it
00:30:30
um I mean I mean first of all I
00:30:37
think I mean we don't since we're not only doing musical instruments I mean we
00:30:42
we we try and be much you know you're like a design firm almost at this point
00:30:48
yeah I mean in the past the way we found I mean when we started with teenage and built the first product ob- Wan we we
00:30:56
kind of we did under you know stealth mode type Consulting for other companies
00:31:02
to kind of bring in money to pay the bills for the op1 development uh so it
00:31:09
you we've been doing a lot of stuff that in the past that people haven't seen
00:31:15
from like software engineering to Hardware to ID work um but I think we're
00:31:22
just maybe maybe other companies won't agree
00:31:27
but I think we have spend a lot of more time and and effort
00:31:33
on the design I mean from how it looks to the detailed work like I
00:31:40
mean I think in a bigger organization there would be a fixed you
00:31:45
know amount of money in the in the budget so you have to like ship the product here don't don't work on the on
00:31:53
the finish of this plastic or the aluminum parts you know any longer
00:32:00
because you know it doesn't make sense from from a business standpoint but since we're
00:32:05
not we uh how to say we I think we're more in it for for for you know it's
00:32:12
passion driven so we don't of course we have a little feel
00:32:17
for what might sell and how to pay pay our employees a salary every month but
00:32:25
it's we sometimes we spend an un how do you pronounce it
00:32:31
unproportional amount of hours on something that might sell you know in the thousands you know yeah so I
00:32:40
think it's it's a combination of you know we have a extremely skilled
00:32:46
industrial design boss which is also co-founder with me
00:32:52
yeser yes like you know really good at not only
00:32:58
the ID part but also the product feature set down to you know the graphics so we
00:33:04
we we don't I I think in many companies there is an ID team there's a ux team there's
00:33:10
a UI team and then there's a product team and they try and figure out how to make the product I mean we we all have
00:33:17
like Studios at home trying to figure out how to build the optimal you know
00:33:23
studio so so we we know so many you know uh products inside out and and the
00:33:30
limitations of current equipment on the market so we don't really as we design
00:33:35
we kind of come up with the with the ideas of how it should look like or uh but sometimes it's driven by a form
00:33:42
factor or size I mean the field mini devices are very very small I mean to the point where it's almost hard to to
00:33:49
you know turn the knobs on the mixer so so so then it could be equal amounts of
00:33:54
just you know we still want to do the small the world's smallest portable 12 channel digital mixer yeah uh you know
00:34:01
that fits in your pocket so it could be that that's the driving Factor combined with you know there's nothing like it on
00:34:08
the market so it I think it's just driven by the the feature sets and the Technologies that's out there combined
00:34:15
with just a a good good design eye for design yeah I
00:34:21
mean even the product manuals for the EP 133 are gorgeous like the website looks crazy and that also that actually
00:34:27
reminds me the EP 133 looks a little like the product
00:34:32
manuals look different than the other ones is that the is that going to be like the new thing going forward or was
00:34:38
that specific just for this I think we were maybe I mean the
00:34:43
initial manuals that we did like for the op1 back in the day they were very very
00:34:50
ambitious to the point where it gets very complicated you had to be like a
00:34:57
very skilled uh graphic designer typographies and to even update and add
00:35:04
a chapter for a new feature so of course eventually you move a way to make it more you know make the workflow easier
00:35:11
to to tweak the manuals over time but we now we're kind of dying that back so so
00:35:17
for the field series it comes with a thick booklet that's it's it's it's a lot of work to do those because every
00:35:24
page is like unique and there's a lot of illustrations in and and same with EP where we try and do it more like online
00:35:31
so there's you know we have this online sample tool to move things in and out from the
00:35:37
syn and we it we keep it a little bit more playful and and and graphical so the idea was try and communicate in a
00:35:45
way that it works for a you know someone that never owned a syn we don't talk in
00:35:51
terms as you know we're trying to avoid like lingo you know synthesizer lingo
00:35:57
it's more like this is how you record a a sample and then it has a footnote saying like a sample is a piece of audio
00:36:04
that you can you know uh it takes but yeah we it's actually a big team working
00:36:09
on the manual I mean from you know just drawing it might be me drawing on paper or it's one of our
00:36:17
uh sales guys that's been he drew Drew with uh what do you call aquarel like
00:36:22
with you know oh like U yeah like acrylic P yeah yeah so he did a lot of
00:36:28
like all the waveforms you know he he drafted like oh W and then our graphic design team took
00:36:37
that and made it into vector graphics and so it's yeah again uh why why why
00:36:44
spend that time on the manual but I think it's important because sometimes you I get a little bit turned off when I
00:36:49
go to to user manual for a product and it just looks terrible I don't feel like reading it yeah I when you go to the
00:36:55
manual maybe that's the first thing you do prior to buying the product so it's
00:37:02
like at least when I was a kid I was like checking the user manuals for like old Rolland gear and it was like oh man
00:37:08
so I knew the product before I even you know had the money to buy it because I read the M 10 times yeah that's kind of
00:37:16
the intention to interesting yeah okay so then this
00:37:21
also on the box cuz I'm looking at mine here it says EP series are there going to be more of these
00:37:27
[Music] I think yeah of course uh we want to do
00:37:34
more um there's no stress but yeah it's I mean the EP format is the 10 in
00:37:40
packaging and I think the form factor that's kind of where we reuse because we have a
00:37:47
few Dimensions that we stick to I mean the field mini has the you know the
00:37:52
little uh cigarette pack shape and then the microphone too Marquez has one I'm
00:37:58
very jealous so you use the microphone in your most re well not most recent now
00:38:04
at this point but in one of your recent videos yeah how did you like it like First Impressions like not a full review
00:38:09
but like you've had it for what a month now two months it's honestly it's very convenient so I don't have it on a stand
00:38:15
I was holding it in my hands yeah and you can still hear some handling noise and I should probably like get a stand
00:38:21
and put it on a stand but I found it very convenient that it's plug-and playay there's an on switch it's got a decent enough pop filter built in and it
00:38:27
sounds good from various distances and angles and I just just from those fundamentals I like it yeah so yeah it
00:38:34
was much better than the last time I tried that which I was holding a Blue Yeti so didn't didn't feel as good yeah
00:38:40
but a Blue Yeti is also like 90 bucks or something yeah but it's a heavy microphone that's true yeah all right so
00:38:46
that's been it so far we'll be back with David Ericson for the rest of the interview but let's throw it to a quick
00:38:55
break
00:39:04
okay now let's jump back into the interview I don't think it's going to be like the pocket operators where they look exactly the same but have different
00:39:11
you know displays it's it's more that without saying too much it's going to
00:39:17
be different it's not than the ko2 interesting okay nice keys there
00:39:24
periphery and and more um but it's good to find a form factor it's also fun now
00:39:30
when you can okay what what else can we build and but we can't add stuff we can't change the dimensions they have to
00:39:38
kind of be the same of course we can move things around you know change to knobs to buttons and vice vers and but
00:39:44
yeah You' have to wait and see and but yeah we we see a long you know uh I
00:39:50
think the pock operators has been out for nine years MH op1 is something like 12 13 years so it's uh so EP series
00:39:58
might be at least five if not more
00:40:04
hopefully um okay so then the last question I had was about like updates
00:40:10
and firmwares you guys are already updating and supporting the 133 with like new new things how does that come
00:40:17
out of like your workday specifically like as someone that is also I'm assuming juggling other things and even
00:40:23
collaborations like you guys are working with nothing you're working with rabbit like there's all kinds of other projects
00:40:29
happening how do you plan to support these things in the long term I mean we use the machines
00:40:36
ourselves uh so we the and we have a lot of musicians
00:40:41
and and and you know beat makers in the
00:40:46
building that's that's finding bugs and requesting features and then we have our our kind of close group beta team that
00:40:53
we always collaborate with they they get all our products early on and so we we
00:40:59
have a pretty good ongoing discussion and then actually I I don't know if it's good or bad but
00:41:05
sometimes I get you know couple of hours a Saturday night after you know kids
00:41:11
went to sleep where I join the forums our forums other forums you know
00:41:19
it's kind that's dangerous man that's dangerous that's like making the comments on a YouTube video yeah sometimes I go in there
00:41:27
should I yeah well so real quick yeah how often do you
00:41:33
guys just like jump into comments of YouTube videos and not like the recent ones I know you're in there like
00:41:38
immediately after it's published you're in there like for the next like two hours or whatever but like six months
00:41:45
ago and just like read your comments oh um I actually do I kind of have my
00:41:50
methods with sorting through comments because I've read so many that I know where to sort of find good comments
00:41:57
honestly sometimes I'll go to an old video and instead of looking at the top comments I'll look at the most recent comments because those are people who
00:42:03
are kind of just like showing up organically from a recommendation or something that just found it and I'll
00:42:09
also spoiler some of my favorite comments are not on YouTube they're from other sites that have their own comment
00:42:15
sections that have embedded it so like uh a subreddit for example will have a video that I've made and the comments
00:42:22
from the subreddit will be often way more informative and a little more
00:42:27
zoomed out than just like the first 24 hours of people like ah I'm first here's some spam interesting so I I found it
00:42:33
fun to read comments for people who I know have never seen one of the videos before yeah Andrew I read way too many
00:42:39
too many if it's my video like the keyboard one or the outdoor Tech probably like for the first month I'll
00:42:45
probably read every single comment every comment yeah it it gets to the point sometimes with pod releasing where on
00:42:52
Friday night we're watching TV and CLA won't hear me talk for a few minutes or like 20 minutes and be like
00:43:00
put the phone put your phone down you shouldn't be reading these it's Friday night like it's time to relax so I read too many maybe not for my own sake
00:43:07
sometimes perfect so if you have anything you really want Andrew to know he's just to just looking I need I need
00:43:14
nice nice comments no mean ones but yeah there's been some good
00:43:19
forums actually where sometimes we're just like lurking around to see what's out there but some
00:43:26
times I you know I actually the same with other product owners here for some some our other
00:43:32
s if you feel that someone is actually both providing feedback on like
00:43:38
this could have been you know done differently I mean a lot of people is is missing out on their way to sample
00:43:44
without holding your finger down because sometimes you want to like move away to piano and you people are solving that by
00:43:50
putting like a weight on a key or stuff like that Bo beats did that he had a little camera battery yeah we know that
00:43:57
and but but it's good to join that discussion on the Forum sometimes you know I I might just reply and say like
00:44:04
yep we know we're going to do it and we have I mean up until this stage it's yes
00:44:10
production and stability to get like yes the higher uh you know it's always some
00:44:17
glitches with like power and and stuff that we had to iron out so we build a lot of what we call like automated
00:44:24
automated test monkeys uh so we have EPS in our server
00:44:30
rack uh so one might just sample you know on and off 24/7 and we have like a
00:44:37
thing that cuts the power in the middle of a sample the other one is just doing patterns like really long ones stuff
00:44:43
that would take hours to do manually I think the third one is just like randomizing keep strokes and just you
00:44:50
know try to to make it break I would love to see that yeah and then eventually we get reports like oh uh and
00:44:56
then you but when when it can run for a couple of you know hours or days
00:45:02
straight you you kind of get more and more confident that it's actually robust and stable but then of course there's
00:45:09
always a user out there that managed to you know break things anyway uh but then we usually contact them directly and try
00:45:15
and like get the unit back or get the Repro how do you do it and but uh so I
00:45:22
think that's the first step for our new products and and now at the position where we can start looking at what is
00:45:29
like the second big release I mean of course we have millions of IDE what we
00:45:34
can do MH but of course it's a limited we don't want to have too much you know shift
00:45:41
combos to to enter these new features it have to be doable on the shift command
00:45:47
p7 and then resample I think good good uh YouTuber and a friend of ours rickyz
00:45:55
he has a lot of syn stuff but he he had a fun uh comment in you know if you if
00:46:01
you do everything kind of like the the user base ask you to it becomes like the
00:46:07
Homer Simpsons car there is like an episode where Homer designed a car and
00:46:13
and uh I think it's quite and it's same for us internally it's not like I mean users are usually right but it's it's
00:46:20
more that at some point you just have to look at what when when when does this
00:46:26
since became become too complicated to use because you just keep adding and adding then it's better to do another
00:46:33
machine that solves that problem like U but long answer to your question but yes
00:46:41
we do support all our products uh as much as we
00:46:46
can um uh for the for the ko2 we're just about to launch a new version of the of
00:46:54
the sample tool because right now you can pull samples on and off MH but we also added a feature to back up your
00:47:01
projects and restore and also restore the factory content because some people accidentally rease every Factory sample
00:47:08
so now we have a little it's not out yet but in a couple of weeks or days more days than weeks uh because then you can
00:47:16
suddenly perform live and then you know next night you know you have to restore
00:47:22
it you can you can mess with it without worrying basically interesting okay so you guys are definitely listening to
00:47:28
feedback because that's been like a couple of the things that I've been seeing everywhere people asking for no I
00:47:34
think we do it's just that we we decided not to have our own Forum because we want to have the kind of direct I mean
00:47:41
people can email us directly uh so that's the way in um okay so I'll put
00:47:47
your email on the screen right here yeah exactly uh no reply at uh no but we uh
00:47:58
but we definitely see what people online I mean we have some favorite YouTubers that that's been doing early reviews and
00:48:05
they've done follow-up reviews recently and just just looking at those
00:48:10
I mean we send them you know around internally we kind of have a pretty good
00:48:16
view of kind of what needs to happen with that specific product but it's fun it's it's just
00:48:23
that the same time you have to juggle your you know have to you know what's next in the EP series we have to we have
00:48:28
to do that too uh yeah it sounds like a lot of trying to like keep one foot here
00:48:34
but always looking ahead one foot in out the door ready for the next thing yeah a lot of and of course we talk with the
00:48:40
with this the door makers like you know ablon and and and you know around down
00:48:48
to like audio editor software that to make sure that whatever file formats we we
00:48:54
have we want of course their software to support because for instance on
00:49:01
tp7 recorder that we do we make use of multitrack wave files which is quite
00:49:06
rare because usually it's like multiple files and a proprietary file to tell you how your M track structure looks like MH
00:49:14
and Aon has one logic has another but we we kind of usually go to the standards
00:49:19
and see it's like oh 1984 some guy made a spec from multi Channel wave why not
00:49:25
use that and then and then you have to convince you know the other software companies to to
00:49:31
be able to import that some already support it some don't uh I think that's better to kind of keep an open standard
00:49:38
you know eventually people might do you know there's already some iPhone apps and stuff for our product so oh
00:49:44
interesting um same with the backup tools it's not really a secret we don't have documentation but you can figure
00:49:50
out how how it works yeah so hopefully someone will build a um um we actually
00:49:56
import sustain Loops from wave files and root note information from from you know
00:50:02
standard wave files already today but there's no feature on the EP
00:50:08
itself to to make use of it but it's prepared so it's yeah one day we might have like a loop
00:50:14
mode sample mode just just push it out just when people start waiting for it so
00:50:21
that was it thanks for David Erikson for taking the time to speak with me uh look at on the studio channel for video
00:50:27
coming soon on the EP 133 that's what this whole thing was about but yeah it was refreshing to talk to someone that
00:50:34
was actually a product guy and not like a PR person I like product people product people are cool there's we talk
00:50:39
to people all the time sometimes they're in like the pr world and that's a certain type of answer to a question
00:50:44
then they're in the product world and I like that one much better when it's like the actual person that was designing the thing they're like way more passionate
00:50:50
about it and you can tell no offense PR people oh yeah PR people are lovely but yeah product people are great until the
00:50:57
next one though we'll get back to our regularly scheduled programming but let us know if you want to see more stuff like this in the future as you know we
00:51:03
read comments catch you in the next one peace this episode of waveform was produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Roven
00:51:09
we are partnered with VOX media podcast Network and our Interra music was created by VIN still that was pretty
00:51:24
good [Music]
