Superbooth 2024

Hello everyone! Due to personal circumstances this will be a shorter blog post, just for a quick catch up on news.

Superbooth 2024 was again an amazing event and the cherry on top this year was that I shared not just a booth, but also an AirBnB with our third party makers, John (Wonkystuff), Toms (Kyaa), Gregory and Zeno (BF Synths) and we had a lot of fun. To me this is the spirit I want for the AE modular community, everyone working together, helping and supporting each other. Hopefully this example will entice more people to become creative and create new modules for the AE format. Even if you're just starting out in electronics and just have a great idea, there are people and resources in our community which can greatly help you to get started and beyond.

We showed off some new modules, but the main attraction was definitely the new IMDI system which adds MIDI capability to modules. Wonkystuff has pioneered this with the MIDI modules which are already for sale in his shop, Kyaa will include this protocol in his upcoming Tracker module and I showed a few working prototypes at the booth. There is even a post of Gearnews about this new protocol (in German): https://www.gearnews.de/tangible-waves-imdi/ 

You can find more information in the videos below and once those modules are ready for sale, we'll describe them in much more detail in one of the next blogs.

However one of the modules is ready and in the shop:

FADRMIX6

This is a performance mixer, very much like the MIXCONSOLE but with faders(!) and 6 channels. You can find it in our online shop.

KYAA

Another fun module to see was Kyaa's prototype of a Tracker sequencer. Even as a very early prototype it looked very impressive and duly attracted a lot of attention. Wonkystuff countered this development with a new module called (tongue in cheek) NaT (not a tracker) … which looks also like a very fun and quirky module to play with, especially in a live situation. Again you can see this presented in the videos below.

You can find more info about Kyaa's work and modules on his website:
https://kyaa.co/ ​

BF Synths

Gregory from France and Zeno from Belgium have officially announced their partnership as BF Synths and are producing existing (but slightly improved) modules from their earlier works, eg. 555 OSC, 5 Step, Dual Sloth and Le Module 01 (pronounced zero-un!) and have promised new and exciting developments in the future. Most impressive to note is that all their modules are produced completely in Europe and assembled by hand. You can find more information on the forum:
https://forum.aemodular.com/board/36/bf-synths

and on their Tindie store:
​https://www.tindie.com/stores/bfsynths/
​

Wonkystuff

John brought a really nice rack filled with analog drum modules … all controlled via MIDI using the mtr/8 module which converts MIDI to analog triggers. He also showed off the NAT and a very nice looking passive matrix mixer which uses magnets to make the connections. This mixer is again a collaboration with Matt Wand who also designed the BioT module a few years ago.

You can find more information at the Wonkystuff online store:
https://wonkystuff.net/product-category/hardware/ae-modular/ 

And on the forum:
https://forum.aemodular.com/board/20/wonkystuff 

Superbooth Coverage

We are always happy to see Chris from Sonic State at the booth and here is his excellent video:

Of course Carsten aka The5thVolt was at the booth as well this year and he has interviewed everyone, which you can see in these two videos below:

After the last day we were all quite tired and got back to the AirBnB to chill out, but Carsten again got us to talk about the experience and review what went well and where we could improve next year. If you're keen to "meet" the "gang" then you can watch us chat in this video:

This is it for today. Apologies to everyone who has posted great music and performances. Normally we try to feature as many of those as possible in the newsletter and we will try to get back to the normal layout of the newsletter next month.