All things considered, Music Thing Modular founder Tom Whitwell can be considered part of the vanguard of Eurorack DIY as it stands today, one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the now‑ubiquitous Thonk. With a catalogue of excellent designs to his name, his most recent innovation comes in the form of the gorgeous Workshop System, a compact modular ‘field kit’ with formidable functionality, which even ships in a bespoke flightcase.
On his entry into modular
I was at school, some time in the 1980s, and spent my paper‑round money on a Korg MS10 for £75, which was my first modular. I really didn’t understand it. This was pre‑acid house, and I didn’t really have any way to connect it with music that I liked, I just wanted it because it was cool. I sold it to a friend for £50; presumably it’s still out there somewhere.
Much later, after ReBirth and running the Music Thing blog in the 2000s, I got into DIY at a Tom Bugs workshop on Brick Lane. He taught me how to turn a handful of components into a living, bleeping, chaotic thing. I was hooked, slowly.
Then, in 2010, three friends took me to a Post Modular event in Vauxhall. It was the first time I’d seen the new wave of Eurorack: Make Noise, Harvestman, Flight Of Harmony... That year, SchneidersLaden had a demo system at Rough Trade. I’d go after work and try to make sense of it all.
On his go‑to modules (aside from his own!)
I’m very comfortable with the Make Noise DPO [oscillator] / Maths [funtion generator] / QMMG [Quad Multi‑Mode Gate] setup that I’ve had for years. James Blake said that learning Maths is pivotal to understanding Eurorack, and I do think it rewires your brain a little bit. Maths teaches you a patching mindset. I learned to build devices from simple elements, rather than just connecting blocks together. Over lockdown I built and learned the Buchla Music Easel inside out — it’s such a quirky personal device, one man’s very eccentric ideas about interfaces and sound and what these devices are for.
On the story of Music Thing Modular
The real magic of designing musical instruments is the moment when someone does something unexpected with something you’ve made. For me that came when I released Mikrophonie. It’s a really simple module, just a contact microphone built into a panel. It was designed as a joke! A way to hear all the switches and sockets in a system that I thought would be funny. Then I saw people using Mikrophonie to trigger sounds and short delays. I saw someone playing a Mikrophonie panel with the rubber on the end of a pencil, someone strumming the panel with a plectrum.
My job is to make something that’s useful or interesting, but in a way that leaves as much as possible open to the musician using it.
When I put an object out into the world, it’s only half‑finished until someone uses it — that’s when most of the creativity is added. My job is to make something that’s useful or interesting, but in a way that leaves as much as possible open to the musician using it.
So far everything I’ve designed has been DIY — built by the musicians themselves. This started with my first public project, the Turing Machine, which is a random looping sequencer.
I published the project on ModWiggler with open source PCB plans, details of the parts and where to get them. Within a few hours, someone appeared on the forum and offered to do a group buy so people could buy kits. It was Steven Grimley‑Taylor, and that group buy became Thonk over the next year or so. Twelve years later, Steve is like my record label boss — he tells me which ideas are good, where to focus, and gives me a sensible way forward when I’ve got decision paralysis.
On the Workshop System
I was invited to host a week‑long retreat by Dyski, an arts organisation in Cornwall. During the planning process, we realised it would be nice if the attendees all had the same little portable modular, so I designed and built 14 little all‑in‑one systems over a period of about six months. It’s a complete modular synth that’s slightly smaller than a hardback book, the first standalone thing I’ve designed, and it really condenses all the ideas I’ve had about interfaces and sound since buying that MS10 in the ’80s.
It was designed to be as small, cheap, portable, flexible and open as possible. There are lots of opportunities to connect outwards — to other devices, guitar pedals, computers. It has 13 modules, 58 sockets, 28 pots and eight switches. The system has its own computer module on the left that can become anything when you swap the little program cards; a reverb, a MIDI interface, a Turing Machine sequencer. There’s already a little community of developers writing cards that I’m really excited about.
It’s completely modular — it won’t make any sound without a patch cable, and it somehow quickly soaks up as many patch cables as you have. It’s good at the sounds I like. FM’ed sine waves, ring modulation, clean‑but‑also‑gritty filters, and weird computer‑generated oscillators and sequencers. Hopefully the openness of the system can lead to community and longevity, so in five years’ time people are still extending it, finding more interesting things to do with it. My ideas are the small limited seeds that hopefully grow into something more unexpected.
On the culture of modular
I think there’s a fundamental openness that people who enjoy modular share, a sense that there isn’t a ‘right’ way, and that experimentation is open and fun. I’m sad when I see people trapped in ‘composition by shopping’ — buying new things in the search for a perfect system rather than experimenting with what they have.