The Synth That Looks Like Legos: An Interview with littleBits

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: things are good right now for synth geeks. More proof: The littleBits Synth Kit: an analog, modular synthesizer developed in collaboration with Korg that has already received praise from the likes of Brian Eno, Reggie Watts, every corner of the internet, and dudes wearing glasses and thick socks in their parents’ basements. Rightfully so, as the kit does what no one has done before: by breaking a synthesizer down into distinct parts, the user can connect the various pieces in any order they wish, creating their own tiny version of the modular synths we’ve all only dreamed about (or maybe I’m the only one, who knows).

Last week, I went to the littleBits office here in Greenwich Village, NYC—which looks like something straight out of Wonka’s Chocolate Factory—to speak with Product Development Manager Paul Rothman about the Synth Kit, how they hooked up with Korg and man-about-town Reggie Watts, and what future modules they had in store. Oh, and I made some sweet synth jams too.

Noisey: So, people have been pretty excited about the Synth Kit. Did you have an intended audience in mind when it was being designed, or was that not a consideration?
Paul Rothman: We have our standard customer base at littleBits but with this kit, we were thinking we would be able to reach out and extend beyond that. Definitely getting young people involved in electronics is always part of the goal, but we think this had a lot of cross-demographic appeal to much older people as well.

The intention was that we would have both kids and adults being really into this, whether or not they are brand new to music or electronics or analog synthesis or they are people that are familiar with it. I know the people in our office and in Korg’s office who are very familiar with synthesizers and things like that have a lot of fun playing with the kit because it is a totally different way to play with a synthesizer. It’s very free and loose and you can try things you normally wouldn’t think about with a conventional instrument.

Right. It seems like it has a lot of cross-generational appeal. What do you think kids can learn from the kit?
We have this really great booklet that we’ve developed that comes with the kit that starts out with the basics of “what is sound.” It starts out describing what a sound wave is and then also talks about the history of synthesizers, famous musicians who have used them, and we think that there’s an opportunity here to teach about sound and music. There’s a lesson about playing the keyboard and using it to play a song, so there’s the wider knowledge of sound and music and then the more focused knowledge of what a synthesizer is and what each module does.

What was Korg’s involvement in the project? They’ve obviously been at the forefront recently of bringing back small, analog instruments to a range of musicians.

Korg got involved with us in December of 2012 saying they really liked what we were doing and that they were interested in hearing more about what our product plans were. We met with them in January and started the partnership from there. The idea was a modular synthesizer that would work within the littleBits library, so we went back and forth ideating what kind of modules we would want to have in the kit.

From there we had a MAX/MSP patch that we used to simulate the functionalities and the interplay between the different modules, and then once we solidified the behaviors and the feature set, the engineers at Korg worked on putting some schematics together. They gave us the schematics and we built and designed the PCB’s. We prototyped those and then went back and forth tweaking the designs. We sent them some of the hardware that we designed to fit within the littleBits system and then worked together tweaking and perfecting the circuits, which went on for a couple of months.

How exactly did their Monotron series influence the design? Has anything been carried over?
We started with a digital oscillator that was different from the Monotron, but somewhere along the way we weren't happy with the sound quality of that oscillator so we switched to an analog oscillator, which we thought might be somewhat based off the Monotron. Because our system is 0-5 volts, it’s slightly different from what they had but it has similar character. It’s a square and sawtooth wave oscillator. There’s nothing in the kit that is 100% taken from the Monotron. Everything had to be adapted, although the delay module is using the same chip that they use, but the circuit is a bit different. The filter is based on the MS-20, but again it’s modified.

How did you get Reggie Watts involved? What drew you to him?
It’s kind of a funny story. Our CEO Ayah was at the TED conference last year, she was a fellow giving a talk and Reggie was as well and they ran into each other in the hallway and struck up a conversation. Ayah invited him to come by our office and told him we were thinking about doing something with music and asked if he wanted to come and give his thoughts on what the product features should be included. Once we actually had a product to show, we had another meeting with him and he was really interested. We asked him if he would be interested in working with us doing demos and performing and showing off what was possible, so from there we arranged with him to do a video and he performed at our launch concert and it all sort of came about from that chance meeting at TED. He’s a fan of what we do and we’re big fans of him and what he does.

So, let’s talk specifically about the kit. Luckily, I had a chance to play with it first and it was very hard to stop! First, are there any plans to incorporate MIDI into the kit? That’s immediately something I could see being useful.
Thats one of the things people have been asking on forums and from musicians that we’ve given this to, so in terms of next steps from us and Korg, I think thats one of the modules that is high on the list—to be able to get MIDI into the system so people can control it from a full-size keyboard or from their computer for sequencing. So thats definitely one of the modules we’re going to start prototyping next.

What about a more extensive envelope? Are there any plans for that?
I think we’ll have to see what the demand is for the envelope. We chose a more simple attack / decay envelope partially for real estate purposes because we wanted to keep a lot of the modules as small as possible. An ADSR would end up being as big as the sequencer and so we just thought that for the initial customer base, the attack / decay envelope would be sufficient, but I've already seen people on forums requesting an ADSR. That would make more sense once we have something for MIDI and people are playing with full-size keyboards.

I think a lot of the next modules will partially be coming from the community and what people want. That’s a big part of what we do at littleBits—there’s a page on our website called DreamBits where people post what sort of modules they’re interested in, so we’re really engaged with our community. We want to make the products that people are interested in, so if we get a lot of certain things on that page then we’ll push that up in the development process. We had a lot of people asking about an Arduino module, so over this last year we’ve been in contact with the people over there and in September we announced a partnership with them. We’re currently in the process of designing an Arduino / littleBits module that will come out sometime next year.

Ah, yes, the Arduino stuff is great. What sort of functionality would that provide?
Basically, to be able to write your own code to run on the system. We just have preliminary designs so far, but having the microcontroller pins available, the inputs and outputs—you could potentially write programs that read sensor data and then depending on what that data is, you could connect to and control an output. There’s potential to make your own midi controller by using a serial output on a serial pin, so there’s a lot of new possibilities that people can have once they are able to program behaviors using the system.

How soon is that expected to arrive?
We don't have a definitive date on that yet but it’ll be sometime in the first half of next year. We just announced the partnership and we’ve had some preliminary conversations in-house about the design. We’ve been really focused on the Synth Kit for the last couple of months so we’ll get more into that probably starting next month. And then people can use that to work with the Synth Kit if they want to program their own sequences. You could write a song in code and have that play out of the Synth Kit.

And you mentioned people pairing the Kit with full-size keyboards and MIDI. Is there any way to integrate the Synth Kit into traditional modular synthesizers?
Definitely, and actually at the launch concert last week, NullSleep performed with his regular live rig, which is a sequencer called the Sequintix Cirklon, which is a digital sequencer, but it has MIDI as well as CV outputs. So normally when he performs he would have the Cirklon and a Eurorack modular synth but for our performance he got rid of the Eurorack and replaced it with the Synth Kit. Actually two and a half kits. They do work on different voltage levels so we made some adapters so he could get trigger the Synth Kit modules, so that’s something that we would like to do as a module that we would sell. Basically a modular synth interface for a higher voltage system so that people could incorporate it into their regular rigs. We think that there’s a lot of power if you think about the price of this compared to one Eurorack module, you basically get an entire small modular synth system, so we think it could be a great addition to that.