“Art is what you can get away with” - Andy Warhol
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Thanks for this btw
Really detailed explanation of your viewpoint which I mostly agree with 
Well, in this case the name is a hint…Tetrax is meant to compare to a polyphonic “organ” in tone and just features a banana patchbay, sliders, knobs and pressure sensitive wood rather than a traditional keyboard.
It’s like a single purpose acoustic instrument not a sampler or digital workstation w/ presets.
Plenty of ordinary people have just one instrument whether that’s a guitar, violin, piano, drum kit or something else. And $600 wouldn’t be outrageous for any of those things…especially an intermediate or professional quality instrument. Make no mistake, all that CL gear is built to last and durable enough to gig with.
I won’t drag this point out because I’m pretty sure your opinion of eurorack is formed already and I have no need to convince you otherwise
$800 is enough to start a decent rack but it would be capable of sampling and sequencing like a digitakt which is purpose built for the task. I could still easily make a track or album with it though.
However $1700 is more than enough for me to replace the standalone functionality of an AR. It just might not be as fun to play
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Pete is an artist who makes instruments for other artists.
I guess the above sentence sounds “elitist”. But I honestly have never felt that Pete wanted to cultivate a feeling of belonging to an exclusive club in which club members can feel superior to other humans - which is what I associate with “elitism”.
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I like euro, I think it’s great. I was comparing AR vs the Erica Techno system since they are both primarily Drum Machines at least in how they are presented/marketed to public.
Also as I’ve tried to say I have no problem with CL, how they design their instruments (well maybe a little instruction on panel would be nice), what they sell for, how they’re built. I like them!!
And yes you can build a good euro system for $1700, too. I was just trying to show where my squiggly line was drawn on the question.
Yeah I think we all have squiggly lines drawn when it comes to choosing gear. I don’t claim to be consistent or logical in choosing stuff either
Lean into the Elitism everyone!! We’re talking about instruments made in the 100s for some of this stuff, that has a barrier to entry (even understanding what it does EVEN if you know synthesis) - this ain’t populism! 
It’s fitting the OP mentions the Lyra-8.
SOMA Lab has a lot in common with Ciat Lonbarde. Lyra-8 has a fairly detailed manual, yet it’s still a challenge to understand what’s going on in the instrument. The instrument was designed for a particular artist’s vision rather than for popular appeal. The only barrier to entry is economic, though it’s a matter of degree. I bought my Lyra-8 for just under $600, which for me is “affordable”, but would not be considered so by a college student who has to work 2 jobs just to pay rent and continue self-financing college education.
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But who’s the elitest of the elitists?
Friend of mine looked at me cross-eyed when I said I bought an Fender American Elite Telecaster. Didn’t like the “elite” in the name.
I said don’t look at me like that. I had endure many trials, feats of strength tests and airing of grievances to earn the right to own one.
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I am guessing Stregas design has a lot to do with the idea of touch patching and knob prodding at the same time, so they are more or less scattered inside the knobs. I will say there labeling on this one does seem like they are trying to build into the mystic idea of not fully understanding how something works which I could take or leave, I only really can fully support labeling something “Activation” if it actually is doing something different than a normal LPG. It is more or less laid out how one would expect left to right. Input section/voice sectoin/FX section. Really if anything Strega is suffering from not being out yet and not haven’t been explained yet (it probably should have been fully explained considering there have been 2 longish videos released on it).
Make Noise graphic design always reminded me of old vector arcade machines… which is a nice aesthetic imo, and is still enough originality of their own brand in there.
To me Elektron, Modular, Buchla, and EMS all didn’t make sense (or if I thought I knew how they worked they actually worked differently) until I spent time with them or things very similar to them. Make Noise has a bit of its own design language and it generally clicks when you get it and helps lead you down a different patch than usual.
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I found the mini display of the OT hard to read wether it was recording or not.
Agreed, some of the wiggly lines snaking all over the place could just be straight lines with some clear unfancy (is that a word?) direction.
Oh god, so weird. That’s nightmare fodder!
How much better would they do if they ditched the confusion and kept the functionality.
I think maybe, the Erica stuff follows the early Serge style. Eg, Every hole in the front panel on a grid. Knobs are all the same size. Sockets usually all in one plane so to avoid wirey mess.
The MN stuff ( and others) is possibly a reaction to that very ordered sensible world. And nothing more. ’ We dont want to look like a serge module’ when maybe, in reality, that is precisely because that module is another serge module.
Reinventing the wheel, over and over again.
I’d love a techno system too. Simply because it is gorgeous. At least it looks gorgeous in the photos. It would probably irritate the crap out of me.
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I’m not really in love with MN’s designs but I think I see it a little differently than some here.
If we talk about “practical” design, the question then is: practical for what purpose, and for whose purpose? I think the point of MN’s design is they don’t want to tell you how you should use it. They want to give you options.
In that way I think their design is actually functional, but functional for a different end than most gear. If you really want some pointers of what to do you can squint at the panel and get some hints. But the path of least resistance is to just try stuff. But it serves another purpose too. Even when it’s off and unplugged, it has a look that makes you think, “wow, I bet that thing sounds weird.” Personally I think that’s what they’re going for and they achieved their goal.
Now, is it beautiful… well, as someone who’s about to order black buttons for his Digitone I’d have to say it’s not my thing, but I do think their design is purposeful and effective.
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I think you have sarcastically put your finger on the actual point.
I’ll take the wogglebug as the totemic example of the design philosophy. The wogglebug was a character in Frank L. Baum’s Oz series, to quote the wiki:
According to The Marvelous Land of Oz , the Woggle-Bug was once a regular tiny woggle-bug, about the size of a pea. He lived the life of a normal insect until he crawled into a country schoolhouse (presumably somewhere in the Winkie Country of the Land of Oz) and listened to the lessons and lectures the famous Professor Nowitall gave his pupils for about three years. One day the teacher found and caught him, and decided to use him for an impromptu lesson on woggle-bugs. Nowitall put the bug under a microscope and projected his highly magnified image onto a screen with advanced technology. The bug was proud of his new size; he bowed to the students, and one unnamed little girl standing on the windowsill was startled and fell backward out of the window. While everyone rushed outside to see if she was all right, the bug secretly jumped off the screen and ran away. He has remained magnified ever since.
How does this relate to the wogglebug? Well at the heart of the module is a PLL, or phase lock loop, which is considered so common that you will find at least 5 of them in any mobile device and anywhere else there needs to be a frequency synthesizer at some multiple of the reference. We are surrounded by PLL circuits and few of us even know what they are.
But phase locked loops are really fun, they are a primordial building block and so have a lot of quirks. They don’t track changing pitches well and wiggle back and forth with a distinctive character, and when you continuously change the pitch it almost seems to take on a life of its own.
By giving the wogglebug a module that contains a system of drawing that life-like behavior out of the humble PLL, you get a whole different experience than if you go with a Doepfer A-146 PLL.
In short, there is an aspect of art in the design that is as significant to the experience, not reflected in the sum of its parts.
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Yeah I love the sound of Erica Synths Techno System, but of all their big premade systems I think that it would be the hardest to visually break it apart for quick intuitive use because it is just a giant grid of same sized knobs. The little pico system 3 probably suffers from this worse than most anything give the size and lack of color, it is so easy to grab the wrong knob and have that moment of why isn’t this doing what I want. The Make Noise stuff while visually a bit confusing if you aren’t used to it, in a full system there is basically no way you are accidently grabbing the wrong knob after the normal learning period.
It might just be that make noise stuff is better for visualy minded people while a grid based system is more in line for numbers minded people
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since we’re talking about design on elektron forum, i just wanted to say that the silver boxes are still the best looking ones
i read somewhere that acne was involved in this, does anyone here know how much say did they have on this? did they design the whole aesthetic or just part of it? or just the packaging? i mean just look at this… 
and i have a feeling that the monomachine price after this will blow up even more because of SOPHIE
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I want a Mono Maschine because of this vid:
From a general perspective, i like functional designs, but if somebody would come up with something colorful, which helps to understand the machine, i wouldn’t say no.
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