Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - How Teenage Engineering Makes Cool Stuff!

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

This week, we have another bonus episode! Adam sat down with David Eriksson of Teenage Engineering to chat about the EP-133 K.O. II sampler. It was a great chat and we figured it would be a good opportunity to peel back the curtain on how some of these conversations go with people from certain companies. Hope you enjoy! Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Instagram/Threads/Twitter: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Listen on track. Headphones remastered. Buy from DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hamburglar, why are you calling? Rubble, rubble. McDonald's has a new biggest burger called Big Arch. Made with two 100% Canadian beef patties, a new delicious sauce, and all the McDonald's flavors you love.

And wait, you want me to help you get it? Rubble! Come on. Compared to beef burgers on McDonald's current menu at participating restaurants in Canada. What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode, a special episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques.

And I'm 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 you're here, then who's... Then...

Oh, hey. Oh, Andrew's at the producer table. It's so weird over here. Can you hear yourself? No. No, yeah, we turned down. It's a little different over here. But we have a bit of a special episode because we thought this would be a really fun thing

to sort of pull back the curtain on a little bit. Some conversations that we have around the studio have turned into podcast episodes for the longest time. But we also have all kinds of other conversations with other people connected to the studio that are also sometimes really interesting. Yeah. 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 it turned out to be one of those really good, fun conversations that's actually worth sharing. Yeah. Like a lot of times for videos, which you guys listening or watching don't get to see is we talk with the

people that make the products a lot trying to better understand the products and those conversations typically never see the light of day they're usually secret usually secret or yeah like it's just like behind 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 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 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 being the co-founder of the company. So last second, David and I were like slacking each other that morning and we're like, hmm, maybe we make this into an episode and we can just like turn this into a thing where these conversations we have with people behind the scenes can just be brought more to the foreground so people can kind of see how this stuff comes together. Yeah. So this episode is with David Erickson, the co-founder of Teenage Engineering. Teenage Engineering is a company that makes a lot of my favorite gadgets, like the OP-1, the OP-Z. They're like music synthesizers. This is what they've done most often over the years.

Yeah, that's what they're most known for. But 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, like the new Rabbit device that came out. They were the ones designing it. The Playdate, if you guys remember that, like the new Rabbit device that came out, they were the ones designing it. The Playdate, if you guys remember that, like a year or two ago, it was like a little Game

Boy-esque thing, like they designed it. So we just thought we'd play the interview and here you go, this is it. Can you say your full name and what exactly you do at Teenage Engineering? Okay, my full name is David Eriksson. And I was part of founding Teenage with my dear friends. And my title here is Head of Hardware. Head of Hardware. And hardware for us is basically, you know, the platforms that's inside the machines,

electronics and the round. That sounds complicated. So you guys have a ton of different products. So little backstory how this meeting came to be was I reached out asking to speak with someone about the EP-133, the new sample you guys released, and then you're the guy they put me in contact with. So you headed that product and that project? And you had all of the projects?

Parts in all projects, as in on the technology side. If you look at our portfolio, they are very different. I mean, we have from furniture to advanced digital mixers uh for everything that's that has electronics inside we try and at least build them in a way so they work together i mean it could be simple stuff like making sure that they all have a bluetooth le chip inside so we can send you know midi data or sync signals between like a mixer and the synth and something else or it could be that the fact that the usbc's on most of our high range products are dual roles you can actually take two synths and connect them with a cable you don't need to go

to computer and back so i would say my role is partly to ensure that that happens. So, I mean, to us, it's not like we're trying to build like an ecosystem that's close to just TE devices. It's more that trying to avoid the need for a host computer in a setup. I mean, part of the name of the field series that we have, everything works standalone, but you can use them together and then usually the way we work here is that some product i mean we usually try and keep the teams very very small so so we have products that's been made out of basically a

formation of two people like a software engineer and an EE or ME plus combination of you. Then of course you pick some components from previous projects, whether it's like a physical component, like a node, or it could be a chipset or a stack of code. But then in terms of how the machine works, there's usually one person that is like a product owner or lead for that. And that can be an ME, an ID person, a software person. And for our most recent device, this KO2, I did that because it was... KO2. I did that because it was... maybe you read online but it was kind of a project we'd never planned to do. We talked of course about making an upscaled pocket operator with real keys and a real case. But we started it in the

summertime when we were both on vacation, me and one of our lead MEs, mechanical engineers. So at that point in time, we didn't really know what the product would do. But I've always been into like just the vintage samplers a lot. And we never really done that except for the KO1. So it was kind of, okay i'll i'll manage this project it's very you know we don't really have you know structure in that sense so it made sense that i would do it uh and then of course we we've been a couple of software engineers and mms and you know in the beginning we were like two three people in the in the you know

crunch of the project we're maybe 10 momentarily and then we scale back wow that's not a lot of people it's very different but it's still it's important that the core group kind of has a passion for for the product and so that's why but of course we still try and make them so so they have some elements that are recognizable from other te devices yeah yeah like how much of this was you guys pulling things from like the pocket operators and how much of it was a brand new problem that you guys had to solve like is there a particular story you 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, let me think, a third in processing power. And of course, it didn't have any built-in flash storage, or it had a little bit, but not 64 megabytes.

So comparing the two, 64 megabytes is a lot. Comparing 64 megabytes with some other things that's out there now. Of course you can get gigabytes if you want, but we felt that it was important to have this kind of quite limited feature set as in no menu diving, not too much storage, because you kind of get stressed out of having 30 versions of your latest song. And here it's like, no, make a new song, bounce it or track it down to tape or into your DAW or whatever. But it also has to do with cost of course because if you throw a

big CPU in there and a lot of memory it's gonna be maybe a couple of hundred dollars more retail. And battery of course. As soon as you hit the threshold I mean the pocket operators are like extremely power efficient you can have two AAAs and it can be on for a year and when you hit 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 here we have a real power button actually so it's we actually cut the power physically when you turn it off oh but it's also a very power efficient you know cpu or mcu whatever you want to call it yeah um so it was important for us not to throw in

like a charger ic and the lithium battery so it's it's again like triple a in the ep and po series you run off triple a batteries classic vintage yeah it's not only it's gonna be around i think for for many many years whereas as soon as you put a custom-made cell like you have in your phones eventually that will try out and you have to rely on you know an experienced service technician to swap it out yeah so like to that point 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 videos and stuff. But I had heard that you guys had decided to like basically buy a bunch of like inexpensive 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 kind of how the EP-133 came to be? Yeah, partly true. The way that they made this product, to my understanding, is after the pandemic, they were like, okay, there's obviously not a lot of chips and things that people can buy. Remember, there was a chip shortage, that whole thing. So they went and looked at all of these different companies that were making chipsets and tried to find substitutes for what they were already using. And after gathering a bunch of those things and making, like signing those contracts, whatever, then they sat down and they were like, okay, now we can make this thing. And they like kind of designed it as they went along, which was interesting 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 companies using their old stock like we make that joke about ipads all the time like oh they just have been yeah parts been yeah 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 different like sources it would be really something together yeah it's interesting i i do feel like you know they're known for their designs. So I feel like in order to make something that is super uniquely designed, you do have to have a somewhat

unique process. And I guess this could only these types of products could only come from a company that has a unique process. Like you would never get something as intricately or 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 that's crazy and super cool but yeah you do have to have something special yeah I found that pretty cool we spent a lot of time around 2011 11th, 2021. Okay, I was like, wow. Just finding substitutes of components in our existing portfolio

is like really you know, tiresome work. And at the 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 know, it was like lead times ranging from 64 to 99 weeks. So it was like out of the question to pick anything like that.

Basically what I did is that we have a lot of connections on the chip vendors. So we just called every vendor, our favorites to random, less known brands that make sense to use. And we just had the same questions. Do you have this amount of chips in stock that we can get now or a couple of months from now? And most didn't. And eventually, one company called back and we worked with them before Cypress, now that they're acquired by Infineon in Germany. And they were like, oh yeah, we actually have a pile now of MCUs. Do you need them? So we said, okay, it has kind of the specs we need low power 150 megahertz it's a dual core cpu where we actually don't use the other core yet uh and then so we

committed to use that and then then we started ordering so as we went designing the schematic we we basically looked at distributors or even Digikey. It's like, do they have enough stock? It's like, yes. Okay. You buy it first, you know, enter your credit card border and then you add it to the schematic. Of course, once we got into like board ring up and verifying the system, there was some mistakes. So we, of course course ended up with some excess parts you know 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 just five years ago you could design the whole board you

buy all the components like in you know quantities of 10 or 20 and then somewhere around the finish line you you place the orders some months months later, you can start to produce. But now it's like you would have to wait a year or two from design freeze. So it was both. I mean, it was a good kind of way of working. And at the same time, we set a lot of rules. We knew from start we really wanted it to be not sent over $300 retail. Why that number specifically?

I mean, we started $100 lower, but it was completely unrealistic. No, it's just like a balance of, I mean, we have a lot of products that's in the high range like both feature-wise um and i mean it it's just there's so much stuff in in our other field products that you know they become quite expensive so we said that it's it's more important that it's an affordable machine that anyone will buy rather than just an experienced musician. We talked about it being like the Nerf gun of synthesizers. Just the way the plastic is built up, it's good quality plastics, but it's kind of intended to not look too fancy but not too cheap.

Was that always the design from the start? Did you guys always have like a dope-ass calculator in mind or did it just come to be as you were making it? It changed quite a bit along the way but it was always kind kind of the form factor was pretty much defined we i think we moved things around a little bit and and you know the way we did this kind of back printed uh i don't know what we call it on our website but it's it's just LED shooting up behind like colored, like a screen printed film. It's like a light diffuser with a... And then we made a little custom three-segment display with a funky typeface. We could have used an LCD, but again, as soon as you do, it opens up for menus and hierarchies so yeah it was kind of nice not having

that option and honestly neither on the ep 133 or the ko2 or the pocket operators you don't really need the screen you don't it's fun at start and you can see the tempo but but once you get over like uh you know it's more into kind of muscle, you don't really need to look at the screen. That's a good point. One thing, too, that I feel like is very obvious in something like the Pocket Operator or even the Knockout 2 is I feel like you guys in general tend to, like, define a limitation and then work your way in and figure out what you can make in that space. Is that something that's intentional or for something like this

were you trying to keep it under a certain price so that was the limitation? Or was it always more like a functionality limitation? I mean I think normally we wouldn't look at the price point when we do a product. I mean, it's rare, but it's important. Sometimes it's also like we knew we wanted to do it in one year. I mean, basically finish it and then run production, which takes another set of months. In one year? You guys are crazy. Yeah, it was quite quick. you know we started in august 2022 it was we started soft ramping production in august 2023 um and then then we had to it's

always slow at start i mean it's not like you just call a number and they just replicate it for you. We manage the production lines in a way that we design it, we build the fixtures and the equipment needed. And of course, when you do a new product, that breaks. So some days we could just make 20 units on a full day. On a good day, we could do a couple of hundreds. So we actually produce in in europe in spain and that was also part of this trip that we we were all like let's make this in europe so we started in like sweden where we are located it's there's not many

factories in that sense because we used to have like you know ericsson and sony ericsson making phones here back in the day but those factories are gone so we had to look you know from eastern europe we went to like estonia latvia poland czech republic oh wow italy france we did 14 different you know contract manufacturers that we you know we made kind of an excel sheet and and we looked at everything from like uh you know the people you know the uh the environment do they have good like it back end machines you know could we shake did the cto or ceo come to us and shake hands you know yeah like a plus you know do we shake it did the CTO or CEO come to us and shake hands you know yeah like a plus you know you do they care or not but that kind of

parameter and you know door-to-door you know from for us it's like a three and a half hour flight then 20 minutes by car to where we ended up it's very convenient yeah of course being able to drive there would have been even better but I think we found a good balance. It's kind of a very tech driven contract manufacturer but they only do circuit boards as a profession. This is probably the first box build that they've done. Interesting. Meaning like a consumer product. So we have to kind of train them how to do it. That's also part of this ramp-up process.

It's probably an equal amount of hours spent on building a production line as building the synth. And how many prototypes did you guys go through? Is there like a number in your head? Circuit boards, I think we ship with revision five or six meaning that's just a matter of changes. That's not bad. I don't remember what we changed, but it's usually power-related or, you know, stupid mistakes and stuff like that. And then plastics, we, I think, I don't remember exactly. I think we went quite fast into what you call hard tooling, where you pay a lot of money to tool parts

because it's a lot of plastic parts um just a few iterations to hit like the tolerances we need and then then on top of that you iterate like colors and finishes and get the texturing right and yeah that stuff um but yeah not not too many honestly. I guess we were a little bit lucky, but what took the most time again is to putting it together, just getting all of that. Because we care still, even if it's just $300 retail, We care a lot about the cosmetics. And that's the hard part. When you move it around on the production line, it's easy

that it gets scratched up. True. So we build a lot of, what do you call it in English? Cradle sets and linear actuators to plug in the USB. so it's not a human like trying to type c because then they're gonna scratch like the back of it so it's actually a little

moving wow interesting arm just to to make sure to minimize all the risks but i think yeah obviously we we we did a lot of that work, but you heard about the fader problems we ended up with at launch. Yeah, has that been a headache for you? Yeah, I mean, you don't remember previous projects, but it's always something like that. I think on some early ship, I mean, we have always had some problems. Like it's, even if you try and predict everything that can potentially go wrong, both in the factory side or shipping, you know, there's always something.

So quick backstory there. FaderGate is this thing about this particular product. And it comes with a small fader on the left side of the device that when people were first getting their initial orders, they were 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 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 getting messed up in shipping. the little fader and people were doing that too hard and breaking it or it was getting messed up in shipping so it turned into like this whole thing where now if you order one it comes with like a little plastic hard piece on top to stop it from getting crushed in the packaging during

shipping sure but a couple things one that reminded me of all the different gates that we've experienced over the years plenty of gates plenty do you know what's impressive too is he brought it up yeah 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 anything like that and if you ask them questions would be like yeah i had that question a little bit further down the 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 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 which i found really interesting yeah um but also the other thing that really caught me off guard

was he said they shipped this on the fifth or sixth iteration do you remember how many iterations we went through for the shoe for the sneakeraker? Plenty more than five or six. More than five or six. And that's a sneaker. Like no digital components, no like small little knobs and things. It was crazy. To be fair, I've never designed a shoe before. So of course it took me a lot of revisions. Maybe he's just that dialed in to the type of hardware that they're working on.

Yeah. What if we just got a bunch of pieces of other old shoes and then asked you to make a shoe right yeah it's basically what they did huh so i found it pretty interesting yeah but i also feel like i'm getting a look into the the the way the gears are turning in his head like you can see him like remembering things that are like organically coming up as you ask yeah which is that's fun yeah it's always fun to talk to people that like 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 product just because of the way that the company is set up.

It was really interesting. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break, but after it, we'll be right back with more from David Erickson. Hamburglar, why are you calling? Rubble, rubble. McDonald's has a new biggest burger called Big Arch, made with two 100% Canadian beef patties,

a new delicious sauce, and all the McDonald's flavors you love, and wait, you want me to help you get it? Rubble. Come on. Compared to beef burgers on McDonald's current menu at participating restaurants in Canada. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it.

Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that road trip bucket list, get after it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. All right, now that we paid some bills, let's jump back in. Anything that sticks up will eventually break if you drop it. In our case it was, you know, we were quite optimistic with the packaging and the way the actual shaft or the fader was. So basically you could just take a hammer and hit it like and it would break. But now we have a little spacer in the packaging yeah mine came with that

so but partly also we try to move away like many other companies from like using plastics or foam stuff like that that makes it easy to protect protect the device so as soon as you go with just cardboard and like molded paper pulp, you know, it's just going to be more sensitive. Yeah. But it's all good now, I think. It was just the first... First batch. Yeah. And yeah, and that's what ends up on the early reviews. But it's all good. I hope people understand.

I was not expecting you personally to have taken such a big role in all of this, considering like your role at the company. Is that how every project gets worked on over there? Like the someone like you said earlier, someone takes ownership. But let's say there's only what, how many employees you guys have like 100 maybe? Oh, no, not really. but i think we're 60 to 65 so like one or two people will just take ownership of something and see that from start to finish yeah it's easiest like that we don't have like a pm project manager for all projects

or it's more like on the let's say out of the 65 let's say that works here half of it we call r d meaning we actually group every discipline that goes into making the product under r d so industrial design mechanical engineering electronic engineering software as well as like you know designing the operating system the foundation more support packages back and we have a lot of server you know systems obviously to run the production lines to run the you know our website but we do everything in-house that's always been important to us we don't really we don't go to a company that builds factories or builds factory testing equipment we yeah I guess it's it's it's 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 end up building those primitives yourself and then you know eventually you have a quite good system that you can make use of in new projects so we can have a junior team do a product based on you know the experiences from previous things and but yeah we try and but yeah we we try and it's hard to but yeah but back to to the head count i if you then divide by the disciplines we're very few i think we're like four ees in total five me like wow so so to do everything that we do including the factors we we jump around a lot between projects. So it's getting this... I mean, for the EP, all the factory sounds, the content that comes in, of course, that's managed by...

I mean, in this case, it was managed by me. Usually the product owner does that too. So going to studios, recording, we work with a lot of producers and sound designers around the globe but that's that's also saying we don't have a sound person to do that yeah that's kind of what i'm getting at it's like it's weird that this was you personally doing on one day you draw schematics the other day you build like some sort of like factory test equipment the third day you you edit you edit drum sounds in Logic. And then we all do a little bit of coding to build pipelines and tools to make life easier.

But it's fun like that. I think as soon as you start to build a hierarchical dev environment, you're just going to slow down. So it's like, hmm. Interesting. OK. you just can slow down so it's like interesting okay so then one thing that someone asked me the other day on twitter or threads or something like that that i couldn't quite pin down is someone was asking what is the overall design like what's the name for the design of teenage engineering

products what do you consider it because it's very unique it's very playful i guess 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 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 um i mean i mean first of all, I think, I mean, since we're not only doing musical instruments, I mean, we try and be much, you know. You're like a design firm almost at this point. In the past, when we started with T&H and built the first product, OP1, we did stealth mode type consulting for other companies to bring in money to pay the bills for the OP1 development. We've been doing a lot of stuff in the past that people haven't seen from like software engineering to hardware to ID work

but I think we're just maybe maybe other companies won't agree but I think we have spent a lot of more time and effort on the design I mean from how it looks to the detailed work like i mean i think in a bigger organization there would be a fixed you know amount of money in the in the budget so you have to like ship the product here don't don. Don't work on the finish of this plastic or the aluminum parts any longer

because it doesn't make sense from a business standpoint. But since we're not, how to say, I think we're more in it for, you know, it's passion driven. Of course, we have a little feel for what might sell and how to pay our employees a salary every month. But sometimes we spend an unproportional amount of hours on something that might sell, you know, in the thousands, you know. Yeah. So I think it's a combination of, you know, we have an extremely skilled

industrial design boss, which is also co-founder with me, Jesper. Yes, like, you know, really good at not only the ID part, but also the product feature set down to, you know, the graphics. So we don't, I think in many companies, there is an ID team, there is a UX team, there is a UI team, and then there's a product team,

and they try and figure out how to make the product. mean we we all have like studios at home trying to figure out how to build the optimal you know studio so so we we know so many you know products inside out and the limitations of current equipment on the market so we don't really as we design we kind of come up with the with the ideas of how it should look like or but sometimes it's driven by a form factor or a size i mean the feed mini devices are very very small i mean to the point where it's almost hard to to you know turn the knobs on the mixer so so so then it could be equal amounts of just, we still want to do the world's smallest portable 12-channel digital mixer that fits in your pocket.

So it could be that that's the driving factor combined with there's nothing like it on the market. So I think it's just driven by the feature sets and the technologies that's out there combined with just a good design. Eye for design, yeah. I mean, even the product manuals for the EP-133 are gorgeous. Like, the website looks crazy. And that also, that actually reminds me, the EP-133 looks a little, like, the product manuals look different than the other ones is that

then is that going to be like the new thing going forward or was that specific just for this i think we were maybe i mean the initial manuals that we did like for the op1 back in the day they were very very ambitious to the point where it gets very complicated. You had to be like a very skilled graphic designer, typographist, to even update and add a chapter for a new feature. So, of course, eventually you move away to make it more, you know, make the workflow easier to tweak the manuals over time. But now we're kind of

dying that back. So for the feed series, it comes with a thick booklet. It's a lot of work to do those because every page is unique and there's a lot of illustrations in there. And the same with the EP where we try and do it more online you know we have this online sample tool to move things in and out from the synth and we keep it a little bit more playful and and graphical so the idea was try and communicate in a way that it works for you know someone that never owned a synth so we don't talk in terms as you know we're trying to avoid like lingo you know synthesizer lingo it's more like this is how you record a sample and then it has a footnote saying like a sample is a piece of audio that you can you know it takes but yeah we it's actually a

big team working on the manual i mean from you know just drawing it might be me drawing on paper or it's one of our sales guys that's been he drew drew with uh what do you call aquarelle like with you know like uh yeah like acrylic paint yeah yeah so he did a lot of like all the waveforms you know he drafted like oh wow that's cool and then our graphic design team took that made it into vector graphics and so it's yeah again um why why why spend that time on the manual but i think it's important because sometimes you i get a little bit turned off when i go to to use a manual for a product and it just looks terrible. I don't feel like reading it. When you go to the manual, maybe that's the first thing you do prior to buying the product. So this is like, at least when I was a kid, I was like checking the user manuals for like

old Roland and it was like, oh man. So I knew the product before I even, you know, had the money to buy it because I read the money 10 times. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the intention to... Interesting. Yeah. Okay, so then this also on the box, as I'm looking at mine here, it says EP series. Are there going to be more of these? I think, yeah, of course we want to do more um there's no stress but yeah it's I mean the EP

format is the 10 inch packaging and I think the form factor that's kind of where we reuse because we have a few dimensions that we stick to I mean the field mini has the you know the little cigarette pack shape. And then... The microphone too. Marques has one. I'm very jealous. So you use the microphone in your most recent,

well, not most recent now at this point, but in one of your recent videos. Yeah. How did you like it? Like first impressions. Like not a full review, but like... Yeah. You've had it for what, a month now?

Yes. It's honestly, it's very convenient. So I don't have it on a stand i was holding it in my hands yeah and you can still hear some handling noise and i should probably like get a stand and just put it on a stand but i found it very convenient that it's plug and play there's an on switch it's got a decent enough pop filter built in and it sounds good from various distances and angles and i just just from those fundamentals i like it yeah so yeah it 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 but a blue Yeti is also like 90 bucks or something yeah but it's a heavy that's true yeah all right so that's

been it so far we'll be back with David Erickson for the rest of the interview but let's throw it to a quick break. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces, a message from the government of Canada. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed?

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you're anticipating its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks, and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. 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

you know displays it's more that without saying too much it's going to be different it's not than the ko2 interesting okay nice keys there periphery and more um but it's good to find a form factory it's also fun now when you can okay well what else can we build um but we can't add stuff we can't change the dimensions they have to kind of be the same of course we can move things around you know change the knobs to buttons and vice versa and but yeah you have to wait and see and but yeah we we see a long you know uh i think the point of radius has been out for nine years op1 is something like 12 13 years so it's uh so ep series might be at least five if not more hopefully um okay so then the last question i had was about like updates and firmwares you guys are already updating and supporting the 133 with like new new things

how does that come out of like your workday specifically like as someone that is also i'm assuming juggling other things and even collaborations, like you guys work with Nothing, you're working with Rabbit, like there's all kinds of other projects happening. How do you plan to support these things in the long term? I mean, we use the machines ourselves, so we... musicians and beat makers in the building that's finding bugs and requesting features. And then we have our kind of closed group beta team that we always collaborate with. They get all our products early on. And so we have a pretty good ongoing discussion. And then actually, I don't know if it's good or bad but sometimes i get

you know a couple of hours saturday nights after you know kids went to sleep where i joined the forums uh you know that's dangerous man that's dangerous that's like making the comments on the youtube videos yeah sometimes i go in and it's like should i yeah well so real quick yeah how often do you guys just like jump into comments of youtube videos and not like the recent ones i know you're in there like immediately after it's published you're in there like for the next like two hours or whatever but like six months ago and just like read your comments oh um i actually do i kind of have my methods with sorting through comments because i've read so many that i know where to sort of find good comments 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 are kind of just like showing up organically from a recommendation or something. They just found it. And I'll also spoiler some of my favorite comments are not on YouTube. They're from other sites that have their own comment sections that have embedded it. So like a subreddit, for example, will have a video that I've made. made and the comments from the subreddit will be often way more informative and a little more zoomed out than just like the first 24 hours of people like i'm first uh here's some spam interesting so i i found it fun to read comments from people who i know have never seen one of the videos yeah andrew i read way too many too many if it's my video like the keyboard one or the

outdoor tech probably like for the first month i'll probably read every single comment every comment yeah it gets to the point sometimes with pod releasing we're on friday night we're watching tv and claire won't hear me talk for a few minutes or like 20 minutes and be like 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 sometimes perfect so if you have anything you really want andrew to know he's just totally nice i need i need nice nice comments no mean ones but yeah there's been some good forums actually where sometimes we're just like lurking around to see what's out there but

sometimes I actually think with other product owners here for some other sense if you feel that someone is actually both providing feedback on like this could have been done differently I mean a lot of people is missing out on a way to sample without holding your finger down because sometimes you want to like move away to piano and use people are solving that by putting like a weight on a key or something yeah Bo Beats did that he had a little camera battery yeah we know that um but but it's good to join that discussion on the forum sometimes you know I might just reply and say like yep we know we know we're going to do it.

And we have, I mean, up until this stage, it's just production and stability to get like, you have to hire, you know, there's always some glitches with like power and stuff that we had to iron out. So we build a lot of what we call automated test monkeys. So we have EPs in our server rack. So one might just sample on and off 24-7 and we have a thing that comes to power in the middle of a sample. The other one is just doing patterns, really long ones, stuff that would take hours to do manually. I think the third one is just like randomizing keystrokes and just, you know, try to make it break.

I would love to see that. And then eventually we get reports like, oh, and then you, but when you can run for a couple of, you know, hours or days straight, you kind of get more and more confident that it's actually robust and stable but then of course there's always a user out there that managed to you know break things anyway but then we usually contact them directly and try and like get the unit back or get the repro how did you do it and but so i think that's the first step for our new products and and now we're at the position where

we can start looking at what is like the second big release i mean of course we have millions of ideas what we can do but of course it's limited we don't want to have too much you know shift combos to to enter this new feature It has to be doable on the... Shift command P7 and then resample. I think a good YouTuber and a friend of ours, Ricky Tinas, he has a lot of synth stuff, but he had a fun comment in, if you do everything the user base asks you to, it becomes like the Homer Simpson's car.

There's an episode where Homer designed a car. I think it's quite... And it's the same for us internally. It's not like... I mean, users are usually right, but it's more that at some point you just have to look at when does this synth become too complicated to use because you just keep adding and adding. Then it's better to do another machine that solves that problem.

That's a long answer to your question, but yes, we do support all our products as much as we can. For the KO2, we're just about to launch a new version of the sample tool. Because right now you can put samples on and off. But we've also added a feature to back up your projects and restore and also restore the factory content. Because some people accidentally erase every factory sample so now we have a little it's not out yet but in a couple of weeks or days more days than weeks because then you can suddenly perform live and then you know next night you know you have to restore it you can you can mess with it without worrying interesting okay so you guys are definitely listening to feedback because that's been like

a couple of the things that i've been seeing everywhere people asking for yeah no i 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 people can email us directly. So that's the way in. Okay, so I'll put your email on the screen right here. Yeah, exactly. No reply at... No, but we definitely see what people online... I mean, we have some favorite YouTubers that's been doing early reviews

and they've done follow-up reviews recently. And just looking at those, I mean, we send them around internally. We kind of have a pretty good view of what needs to happen with that specific product. But it's fun. It's just that... At the same time, you have to juggle your... You know, you have to, you know, what's next in the EP series, we have to do that too. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of trying to like keep one foot here, down to audio editor software, to make sure that whatever file formats we have, we want of course their software to support. Because for instance on TP7 recorder that we do, we make use of multitrack wave files, which is quite

rare, because usually it's like multiple files and a proprietary file to tell you how your multitrack structure looks like. And Amazon has one, Logic has another. But we kind of usually go to the standards and see, it's like, oh, 1984,

some guy made a spec for a multi-channel wave. Why not use that? And then you have to convince the other software companies to be able to import that. Some already support it, some don't. I think that's better to kind of keep an open standard. Eventually people might do... There's already some iPhone apps and stuff for our product.

Oh, interesting. Same with the backup tools. It's not really a secret. We don't have documentation, but you can figure out how it works. So hopefully, someone will build it. We actually import sustain loops from WAV files and root node information from standard WAV files already today. But there's no feature on the EP itself to make use of it, root note information from standard WAV files already today. But there's no feature on the EP itself to make use of it.

But it's prepared. So one day we might have a loop mode, sample mode. Just push it out, just when people start waiting for it. So that was it. Thanks for David Erickson for taking the time to speak with me. Look out on the Studio channel for a video coming soon on the EP 133. That's what this whole thing was about.

But yeah, it was refreshing to talk to someone that was actually a product guy and not like a PR person. I like product people. Product people are cool. We talk to people all the time. Sometimes they're in like the PR world and that's a certain type of answer to a question. 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 about it.

And you can tell. No offense, PR people. Oh yeah. PR people are lovely, but yeah. Product people are great. Until the 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 read comments.

Catch you in the next one. Peace. This episode of Waveform was produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We are partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by Vain Still.