Interview: We met Propellerhead at Superbooth
From the 20th to 22nd of April 2017, Superbooth 17 was being held in Berlin. After a great success in its first year of 2016, this year the wonderful people from Schneidersladen in Berlin, who specialize in selling analog modular synthesizers, moved close to 170 exhibitors (mostly modular developers) into the FEZ building on the Berliner Wulheide.
Knowing that even the Propellerheads would be there I simply couldn’t resist a couple of days of modular madness. And that is exactly what it turned out to be.
Besides meeting the Propellerheads, and bringing them a gift from ReasonTalk, there was ofcourse a lot more to enjoy. I’ve played with the new Behringer Deepmind 12 and D Minimoog Clone, tried lots of modules for my rack (luckily sales were not allowed), played a beautifully crafted Ondes Martenot recreation, a Moog model 15 (not the iPad version), had some module walkthroughs at the Makenoise booth from Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and attended a few great performances, Colin Benders particularly.
At the Propellerhead booth I was greeted by Mattias Häggström Gerdt (Product Marketing Manager), Tage Widsell (Creative Director of Marketing) and Mats Karlöf (Senior Product & Business Development Manager).
Olivier – Why is Propellerhead at Superbooth?
Mattias – Well, Superbooth is really for people who love synthesizers, and we love synthesizers. I mean, you can tell from our history we started as a synth rack with CV and so on, so it’s important for us to show that that’s what we are about. We are as modular as any modular, so why shouldn’t we be here ?
Olivier -What did you bring for Superbooth?
Mattias – For Superbooth we have Reason 9.2 setup with just a keyboard, so you can check out all the new stuff. And we have also partnered with Intellijel, a eurorack manufacturer. We have a skiff (a small eurorack system) that we have hooked up with MIDI to Reason. This way we can show the interaction between Reason and a modular system, the stuff you can do with CV, Players and all the devices in Reason.
Olivier – I see you have MIDI to CV in one of the modules in the Rack?
Mattias – Exactly, so Intellijel makes a module called uMidi that I really like. Basically it’s a USB MIDI Interface. You connect your computer to that interface and then you get all your MIDI signals from Reason out as CV.
So right now in the background, while I’m talking, I’m driving an Atlantis which is kind of a synthesizer clone with some players playing the melody through a Distributor and I’m using a Pulsar to modulate the filter frequency. It’s really flexible to connect like this.
Olivier – About flexibility, we are reading Reason is coming to mobile. Is there anything you could tell us about this, for example, will it be compatible with the desktop version? What are the ideas about this?
Mattias – We don’t have much to say right now as we are really just starting out. We want to get back into mobile development and bring the Reason feeling to mobile platforms.
The only thing I can say is that we want it to feel like a Reason product. We want it to feel like it’s something from us, something we care about and that you can feel is Reason and Propellerhead. That’s all the details right now. If you guys want something in particular, like connect it to Reason on desktop, let us know! We want to hear everything you’d want in a mobile product from us.
Olivier – So stuff like, will it have flexible routing, RE support, this still has to be decided?
Mattias – Yes, absolutely. And we are always tight lipped so even if something is decided, we’ll tell you when we’re ready to tell you.
Olivier – Back to Reason. One of the things that gets asked from time to time, and which we see all around us here is front side patching. Do you think we may see this in Reason?
Mattias – The cables on the front, that’s an interesting topic actually. Cables on the back came natural for us as we came from a studio hardware background and that’s where they were. Not from the modular synth background. We never talk about what we have in plans, but there’s definitely stuff that can be done about how you interact with the rack. There are many ideas and if there’s stuff you want to see, like front side patching or anything like that, again let us know ! We’re on Facebook and Twitter all the time. Stefan is looking at it and he’s sending everything to me. I see it all.
Olivier – One of the things Reason 9 introduced was themes. How about a dark themed mixer?
Mattias – That’s an interesting thought. We really want to know how people like the dark themes.
We want to know if the dark theme is that what you are using. If you have feedback about that, what works well and what doesn’t we want to hear it. Based on that, who knows?
Olivier – Just recently Propellerhead brought Verdane onboard as an invester. We can see the community got both anxious and excited. Any comments on that?
Mattias – The only thing I can say is that I think it is really positive. Verdane is a company that seems great. I’ve talked with them and they seem really nice and primarily interested in what we already do. They like what we are doing, think Reason is a great program and Propellerhead’s a promising company and that’s why they invested.
Olivier – From your perspective, do you feel Propellerhead will, with Verdane onboard, be able to stay true to the Propellerhead vision?
Mattias – We will continue making the stuff you love. We’ll keep making great things, hopefully you’ll like them (you’ll see when they are announced). Verdane doesn’t impact our current plans that much. If anything we will just have more possibilities to do more great stuff.
Olivier – We also noticed you are looking for more developers. How many people are you looking for? Are you doubling your team, what kind of figures are you working towards?
Mattias – In the last few months we’ve put about 10 ads for several positions within the company. We’ve never hired as many people as we do now. I can’t say anything about our target size but we’re always looking for talented people that can help us make great music software.
Olivier – Well that’s it from me, thank you very much.
Mattias – Excellent!
As a final note: If you are serious about modular, superbooth is a great place to be. Highly recommended. I’ll do my best to be back there next year!
Olivier
Discuss this article!
