Creator Chats: Talking a learner's mindset and happy accidents with Kamus & PinballSpider 

Eurorack is a modular synthesizer format originally specified in 1996 by German manufacturer Doepfer Musikelektronik. Growing in popularity since, as of 2018, it's become a dominant hardware modular synthesizer format with over 5,000 modules available from more than 270 different manufacturers. Producers and frequent collaborators PinballSpider and Kamus typically produce on their laptops - "in the box" - using plugins to process recorded sounds. With a recently acquired Eurorack in their possession, they set out to try something new. 




Being novices with the Eurorack allowed PinballSpider and Kamus to approach making this pack with a learner's mindset, freely exploring and experimenting with the instrument. They explained, "when we heard the wacky and original sounds coming from it, we saw so many possibilities, we were almost overwhelmed." That's how they knew the instrument would be ideal for creating a pack - they could make hundreds of short songs for other creators and themselves to use in other projects. 

 

With being amateurs to the instrument came some happy accidents. For one, they did not have a clock so they weren't able to clock the sounds from the Eurorack to Ableton (their DAW). As a result, every jam was off tempo and they had to warp them back to the grid in the DAW. They shared, "we think that might have played into the creativity of it. Warping them back onto the grid played into making new sounds, rhythms, and textures that we previously couldn't get."




This collaboration gave the producers a new way to work together beyond making music and radio mixes. They've learned how to be honest with each other if they're not happy with the way something sounds and no one gets offended. 




Due to this exploratory process, there are tons of easter eggs throughout this pack. If you keep digging deeper, you'll continue to find gems. They see this pack as a library you can go back and visit anytime. They shared, "Everyone has their own creative process, we're curious to see what people do with the loops. We ended up using them in entirely different ways than expected." 

 

They added, "We're both into how sounds sit and how they should work when we're producing. Sometimes it's nice to not contextualize sounds and to instead give way for other people to contextualize them. It was cool to make sketches out of these sounds and give people the creative freedom to turn them into whatever they want. Although we weren't sure what would happen with the Eurorack, the result was a collection of sounds that sit in between genres and styles that creators can morph into their own, if they want. We paid great attention to the timbre and tone of each loop, so if you're not using the loop at face value, you can use them as source material." 

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