FAQ

I am Shane Etter, aka MANMADEMADMAN. From Denver, obviously. I've been a fanatical hardware synthesizer user for 30+ years, have owned hundreds of hardware synths and effects units, and still use them today. I love sharing my nerdiness with others, so I've rented them out to people for 10+ years now. I've produced 25 albums under different monikers and done hundreds of remixes — both solicited and unsolicited — and played live hundreds of times. All of this has been done 99% on hardware. I am an elitist, a snob, a die-hard analog luddite. But that's all changing as I make the synths and effects I've always dreamed of.

I perform live techno too, but I have no idea how I'm going to play these things live. Anyways, I've dreamed of being able to do this since 1996, when I had to sell all my hardware due to financial hardship. I sketched designs in Microsoft Paint of synthesizers that could be digital. An expert at the time informed me it would take a single computer's entire CPU to make those things work. So I've got a vault full of ideas in my head I've been roiling on since then.

My partner and BFF Landon handles the Apple/tech side of the house — builds, testing, marketing, social media, and inspirational new designs. His main job is reigning me in and telling me "no," which I hate!

I think it comes down to this: because of my enthusiasm for sound, I tune all of these things by ear. Not by test harnesses or sweeps or mathematical analysis. Our ears are why we love sounds, and I've gotten to the point where when I make a plugin, it's got to sound better than my hardware, or it doesn't make sense to release. KICKSTOMPER, for example, is the best kick drum I've got, and there's hundreds — maybe thousands — in there! I put it up against all my hardware drum machines, all my samples, and other people's "pro" kicks. It won, and you can still tweak it, or EZ it to something better.

I also feel like we're making things that don't exist. Somehow, there was no Leslie simulator? So I made one. There wasn't a way to hear transformer saturation, so I made IRONWALL. The DSP in there was eye opening.

It's been done to death, and that's not interesting. We don't need another Prophet-5/Minimoog/Roland clone — we need new, futuristic synthesizers that inspire us to go forward, not backwards. I say that, but my designs are heavily influenced by hardware of the past. I'm just upgrading them. Look at AVALON — an existing 303 idea, and I put everything into it I wish my hardware had, like snapshot sequencing (you can save a sound to a step, and then the sequencer plays that sound back on each pass). The feedback on that one was incredible.

We're all inspired by sounds, and yes, sometimes those sounds are achievable by classic methods. But what about the future? Part two to this: we do make some of those, too! We have multiple hardware deals to make software versions of real hardware — most we can't talk about yet, but you'll absolutely hear it in the future. It's exciting stuff.

Because I feel that in order to learn gear, you need to dig in and get your hands dirty — not scroll through 20 presets and get bored finding something good enough. You know what else had no presets? A Minimoog. An ARP 2600 or Odyssey. A Hammond B3. An SH-101 or TB-303. A modular synth. People still somehow made music with them! I spend a ton of time on the UI so it's inviting enough for beginners and pros alike, and you know it without RTFM.

Then there's the EZ button: in most of these designs, you can EZ-roll to something interesting in about three tries. I want people to really dig in and tweak to find the sound they're looking for — move those sliders and knobs, or MIDI-map them. Get close, then tweak it further. Or EZ to something inspiring and make it unique. Nothing great ever came without some struggle, and I caved on that and put an EZ button in things. You couldn't do that on most hardware!

It seems like every single video you see on YouTube is some heavily edited piece of music done by a professional. Which is great, but I think that's close to being misleading. I want to showcase how we actually interact with this stuff. And you're right, sometimes it's just us having a play. But when was the last time a digital plugin inspired anyone to "have a play"? Some of these tools I play with for hours and hours — ZEROBOY and INFIDEL, for example. Simple ideas that led to hours and hours of inspiration and fun. I think that's how I come up with song ideas, not just sounds.

I catch a lot of flak for that — "it's just noise!" or "yeah, but use it in a song!" — but that's okay. That's how you get there, I think. Also, it comes down to taste. A noise artist doesn't care about a melodic house track, a melodic house producer doesn't care about distortion processors, and neither of them cares what the next person thinks. What's weird is that no one seems to notice this: if you like the demo song, it does not guarantee you'll like that synthesizer.

DISTROYBOY and SAWZALL were the first things off the bench. DB started as "what if..." and the next thing I know, I was hearing things that shouldn't come out of a digital plugin. Suddenly sounds were alive in a natural way — nasty, distorted, but sometimes calmed and filtered. DB spawned the db-cell tech, which I've used in most "analog" things since, and that's really what sets us apart from others: non-repeatable analog sound. (It's true — two rendered db-cell-influenced tracks do not phase-cancel.)

SAWZALL started as a bassline machine and became something incredible. It just sounds so tight and controlled and slippery, because it's phase coherent. Anyway, they both sounded so good that I keep imagining other designs.