Mark Verbos is the designer behind Verbos Electronics, the modular synth company he has been running together with Sonya Verbos since 2014. His roots in electronic music go back all the way to the early days of the American rave scene in the early 1990s, and his module design is strongly influenced by his three decades of experience of performing electronic music live.

In this lengthy interview conducted at the Verbos Electronics HQ in Berlin, Mark goes deep into his background in the American rave scene, his time as a studio engineer and commercial music producer, how he got into fixing vintage Buchla synthesizers, the origins of the Verbos Electronics company, his module design philosophy, and the benefits of taking risks during live performances.

What were your early experiences with music like?

I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in a musical environment and started playing the violin at five years old. I was also singing, taking lessons in different instruments, studying music theory in high school, that kind of musical world. But then I gradually became interested in electronic music through stuff like Wax Trax! and New Order. I had a band with two other people when I was 13 or 14 where I was working with a keyboard, a drum machine, a sequencer and a four track — but eventually, it got to the point where I started making electronic music by myself, just because I couldn’t get the other people to come in enough, because I wanted to do it all the time (laughs).

That’s such a common story (laughs).

Then around 1992, when I was 16 years old, some friends came over and I showed them some of the things I was working on – none of it was recorded, it was all just sequences. And they were like, “you should do that at our party” and I was like “do what?” and they were like “just do this, what you’re doing right now, at our party” (laughs). So I kind of reluctantly agreed to do a live performance – in those days, we didn’t even know what to call it – at that party, which was just this basement party with maybe fifty people, but the person hosting told me that the guys from Drop Bass Network had been at that party and that they had a note for me. 

And the note just said, “my name’s Patrick, here’s my phone number, we really need to talk” (laughs). And so I called him, and he said, “I didn’t know anyone else here was making music like this, do you wanna come down and jam?” and I was just like “WHAT?!” (laughs). Because, for those who don’t know, at that time, Drop Bass Network were the biggest party promoters in Milwaukee, they were really these untouchable heroes to me, and they would later become much more significant for the US rave scene as a whole.

And at the time you were already doing more rave-y stuff?

Yes, that was the early days of the rave scene already – you know, looking back, it’s funny, because the rave scene in Milwaukee had maybe been around for a year at that point (laughs). So I packed up my three or four pieces of gear that I had and drove down to his house, and he had stuff like a 909 – which I had never even heard of at that point! But those guys were really DJs first and foremost, they didn’t really make music for the most part.

There was no record store in the area at the time, so they would buy the records directly from the Watts distribution list for stores. They would look at the list and then do a group buy, as if they were a store (laughs). Those guys were probably spending 200 dollars a week on records when a domestic 12” was five dollars and an import was 6,5 (laughs), so they were also really clued in to what was happening in Europe and elsewhere.

And so they were like, you should come here every Thursday when the new records come in, and every week I would come down and listen to the records and I also started performing live at their parties – and so suddenly, out of nowhere, I was performing at these big parties with 1000 or 1500 people (laughs). They had significant names from that time coming down, people like Adam X, we were all playing at the same parties.

And then they also had this idea to do a record label, and they said Woody [McBride] is going to do the first one, [DJ] Hyperactive is going to do the second one, and then you should do one. You know, at that time it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was possible to do a record, I was just making these loops in my basement (laughs)!

Were you also DJing at that time?

So after I started to release records, people started asking me to DJ and I did that for a while. But I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I never really liked DJing. For me, from the very beginning, the performance aspect of it was the most interesting to me. I feel like our scene had come up with this idea of helping artists by giving them DJ gigs – just as something you can really easily do – but no one really cared about what you were doing when you were DJing (laughs).

But you know, it’s funny, because in the very early days, I almost felt pressured to pretend like I was doing a DJ set (laughs) – structuring the music like it would be in a DJ set, so it was more suited to the audience’s expectations, and to me it then was a great achievement when people came up to me afterwards and only then realized that I had been performing live instead of DJing (laughs).

Obviously, as I got older, I realized there was no reason to do that and that there is no reason to stick to formulas established by DJs – like sticking to certain BPMs, having smooth transitions, and so on – so my philosophy on that really changed towards the opposite. You know, in those old days, we would concern ourselves with things like mixing and perfect blends – “oh this DJ  sounds like a rattling shoebox” (laughs) – and looking back, it was kind of getting in the way of the artistic element, I think.

Meanwhile, Jeff Mills was just proudly trainwrecking every transition (laughs).

Totally, and I think that willingness to take the risk and try to achieve something that may not go over completely well allowed him to achieve something more artistic.

Did you know anyone else in the rave scene doing live performance at the time?

Locally, it was really just myself. But over time, I met people around the world who were doing similar things, for example, there was a group in New York called Prototype 909 and one of the members of that group was Dietrich Schoenemann, who later went on to become a mastering engineer and was at one point running the distribution for [the label and record store] Sonic Groove.

You then also studied audio engineering at one point, right?

Yes, after I finished high school, I went to Full Sail in Florida. After that, I worked in a recording studio in Chicago in the second half of the 90s. I think what got me into that was that when I was a teenager, I [looking at the credits] noticed that a lot of records I liked had the same producer. And I didn’t even know what a producer was but I just knew that that’s what I wanted to be (laughs) – like, if Trevor Horn produced all those records, then I wanted to be like him, and I believed that the way you become a producer is by first starting as an engineer.

Of course, that’s not actually how it worked in the studio business. Working as an engineer in a studio, all the high-profile projects that came in had their own engineer, and so you mostly got the ones that didn’t even realize they needed an engineer (laughs). And since most of the other engineers in the studio came from a more traditional music background and fought over the rock and blues projects, nobody else wanted to do the house – and I mean, this was Chicago in the 90s – projects. So I became the go-to engineer for the house sessions and found myself working with all these legends like Mike Dunn and Farley Jackmaster Funk and Braxton Holmes (laughs).

What were those house sessions like?

They would often produce the majority of the track at home and then came in to record vocals and do a proper mixdown. And you know, this was the tape days, so I often got to spend a lot of time talking to those guys while the tape was rewinding. I remember, one time I was working on records with a guy and he was like “what is your music like?” and I said “oh, just whatever comes into the studio”, but he went “no, I want to know what your music is like”. And I was a bit apprehensive to tell people that I was making techno, because maybe the more traditional musicians wouldn’t trust me after that.

And then he said, “have you ever heard of a label called Tresor”? and I thought he meant that he owned records on that label, but then after a bit more conversation it become clear that he meant that he released on the label and then after a bit more time he explained that he and his friend had made the first house record ever – and I was like what?!, and it turned out I was talking to Vince Lawrence (laughs). A lot of the engineers at the studio had actually worked on those 80s house records – they didn’t want to do, but they essentially had to make the records for them, because those early guys were DJs, they didn’t know how to (laughs).

What was the Midwest techno scene like? From everything I’ve heard, it was a lot harder to throw parties in the US, so you had to improvise and be a bit more punk and irreverent.

For sure. You know, it’s a little bit like when I was a kid into skateboarding – we would skateboard in a parking lot, and then the police would come. It was always this sort of spirit, because the latest a club or a bar in Milwaukee would be able to be open was 1am. Everything was so strict and regulated that things necessarily moved to other spaces like warehouses and even farms, there was just no way to do any of this in a legal and easy manner.

It was also basically impossible to make a living from it unless you were successful enough to tour in Europe. I met DJ Rush around 1997, and he brought me over to Berlin for a gig in 1998 and it took me about one day to know that I’d rather live here than in Chicago (laughs). So I came back a few times and moved to Berlin for the first time in the spring of 2000.

How did you first get into fixing and modifying synthesizers?

I was always into synths, but a big moment for me was when I was still living in Milwaukee, around 1994 or 1995, I had a roommate that had an ad on the bulletin board at the university of Milwaukee looking for old synthesizers. I remember they also had a studio and they had an ARP2500 and a Fairlight, and I went in there a lot because he had the keys (laughs).

And then one day, someone called, and my roommate was like there’s someone on the phone, I think maybe you should talk to this guy. And then the person on the phone said “maybe I have an EMS VCS 3 for sale, I thought about donating it to the university to get a tax discount” and I asked how much would that credit be, and he said maybe 400 dollars, and so I walked over to his house, this 80 year man, and got this EMS for 400 dollars (laughs).

So I tried to turn it on, and even though it was in perfect visual condition it wasn’t really working and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. And then somebody said to me, there’s this guy who can fix it. And so I called, but he said "I don't fix things anymore for people — wait did you buy this locally?”, and it was like he couldn’t resist, he was like I can’t stand it seeing it broken, just bring it over (laughs). And so I brought it over to this guy, and he had an ARP2600 and all of the EMS instruments, an eight-panel paperface Serge and a Buchla that was fifty spaces, a Music Easel, all in this room. So that was Grant Richter, who later ended up starting Wiard Modular.

And so then he fixed my EMS in like five minutes, and he showed me this synthesizer he was designing. I eventually ended up working for him, soldering pots and so on. At the time, in the 80s and 90s, he was the guy to fix broken Buchlas. He was the guy for that stuff, and I had the opportunity to use all these instruments and he would show me the insides, what went wrong, and I got the schematics from him – which in those days was like striking gold. And then by 2004 or 2005 he didn’t really want to repair the Buchla stuff anymore and he sort of passed it on to me, and I became the vintage Buchla repair guy.

Were you doing repair work full time by then?

No, I was really only working on Buchla, and there just aren’t that many of these instruments. At that time, I had moved to New York from Berlin and was working as a full time music producer for a bit, working with other artists, doing remixes – I actually did hundreds of these commercial dance music remixes with a guy called Tommie Sunshine. Like, we did a remix of Yoko Ono that was a number one billboard dance track (laughs). At the time, I wanted to get back into engineering, and thought this was going to lead to getting more work on my own, but that never really happened. I quickly became very disillusioned with the music industry, and then it kind of collapsed commercially around that time anyways.

How did you then arrive at starting the Verbos Electronic company?

An important part of that was that I started doing custom work for vintage Buchla systems — in fact, I actually still do the custom modules, there’s just not that many users (laughs). The foundation of doing the company really lies in the experience of fixing these vintage synths and doing custom modules for them, together with those decades of experience as a live performer and then bringing those two things together.

I went to NAMM for the first time in 2008 after having designed the circuit boards for three of the early Snazzy FX pedals, and I ended up meeting a lot of people I knew over the internet and realized that I was sort of synthesizer-famous through my work with these Buchla instruments and the blog I was running talking about these things (laughs). And so I got more into that world and Shawn from Analogue Haven and Ken Macbeth started working on me to start an actual company and not just do custom work – and then from that point it only took them five years or whatever (laughs). 

In 2013 at the NAMM show they had finally convinced me, and then it was about a year of prototyping and we finally launched Verbos Electronics in January of 2014 with five modules. I think part of the reason it took me a long time was just that I had a lot of ideas about how I wanted things to be, and I wasn’t interested in changing those ideas to better fit the market or whatever, so I kind of brought that underground techno ethos into the synth world (laughs). 

You’ve mentioned before that user experience and interface is really important to you. How did that impact the design philosophy behind Verbos Electronics?

If you want to be able to improvise, to have an idea and to then realize that idea, you need a certain predictability – like, with the range of a knob, the taper on it has to be musically sensible. And with a design like a Serge PCO, the big selling point is that it can operate from 20 kHz down to several minutes per cycle, all on one control. And that has its advantages, of course, but it also means that the usable range for whatever you want to specifically do in a given moment is always like five degrees just because it has so much range. It’s not curated in any real musical way, which makes it hard to use in a performance context where you’re often only hearing what a knob is doing to the performance while actively tweaking it.

Meanwhile, the Buchla philosophy was always that every control is scaled like the ear hears it. He really paid attention to interface, I think my main inspiration from Buchla really is coming from the way he dealt with interfaces more than anything else. So what that means is that the decisions of user interface are really driving the product design entirely.

It’s not about squeezing in as many controls as possible, it’s about making sure that what’s there is functional, and what wouldn’t be functional is not there, so you can reach for a control and it actually does what you want it to do. We want to empower you with a lot, but also make it so you can wield that power with sense and musicality. So what we’re effectively doing is almost packaging patches into ways where you can curate the user experience to where you can get to places that might be theoretically possible on a really flexible device, but would be so complex or cumbersome to achieve that you would never really do it in practice.

So you’re thinking about the interface and layout before even thinking about the circuit?

Absolutely. The ideas live as concepts, even just a name, for a long time before anything else. Like, with the Verbos Polyphonic Envelope, we had the idea of a strum envelope for a long time, but then the discussion was really about how would you address that, what the controls for something like that would be. Sometimes, that means inventing a new interface or control.

And so – irresponsibly (laughs) – we leave all the electronics design aside until we’ve already committed to what the panel is going to look like, what the controls are going to do. In the context of software, that would be easy because any control can easily be mapped to anything, but this is the analog world, so I then have to find out a way to make those concepts work on a maths and electronics level, and I’m very stubborn with that — like there’s no way it won’t work, I have to figure out a way to make it work (laughs), because there’s just no way I can bring myself to change the panel, unless it is a change driven by the user experience.

If it’s a sound generating module, is there already a kind of sound in your head before designing the circuit?

Yes, and that’s partly built on this idea of having a sort of  “library” of synthesizer history in my head, knowing that in this thing that existed before it was like this or like that. The history of synthesizers is full of these forks in the road. Oscillators can be sawtooth or triangle cores, you can have VCAs be exponential or linear, you can have four pole Moog or two pole Oberheim filters, and so on. And I’m aware of that, and when I can, I’m interested in almost sidestepping those forks and doing something different entirely — like, what if instead of two pole versus four pole you just didn’t use a filter at all?

So there’s a part of me that is attracted to synthesizer concepts that I feel have been historically underrepresented. I think we as musicians have the potential to make more interesting music if we move away from these obvious tropes like a Minimoog patch. And that goes back to the design question — like, what if we make it difficult to get those kind of tropes out of the instrument (laughs), thereby encouraging the users to explore different things?

For that to work the alternative concepts also have to be easy to use, of course. If something like the Harmonic Oscillator that is based around this less common idea of additive synthesis would be really hard to use, that would quickly push the user back to the familiar. But if we can make the interface feel engaging and familiar, they’re going to be motivated to go to different things. Obviously it’s not my job to police what music people make with the instrument, but I am trying to provide a platform where you can be inspired to do something different and create your own path that perhaps isn’t so well travelled.

Is there a certain character to the sound that you associate with your modules?

So I just got done telling you it’s all about interface (laughs) – but now I’m going to go against that and say that I like to design with discrete transistors, doing it the old way. I think there’s a softer, quite organic element to the tonality of the modules that also comes from specifically avoiding some the most obvious elements, like four-pole resonant filters. 

You know, whereas with guitars, there’s a lot of currency in this idea of “I want exactly what that guy has, same guitar, same amp, same pedals” – I’d like to think that with synthesizers, it’s a bit more of a free for all, where we are all forging our own sound. Obviously, that's not always the case in reality, but I do think there is a lot of potential there.

When you strip away the history and business of it and just talk about making electronic music from the perspective of the needs of a musician, then you can look at things from a different angle. You can look at what a musician might want to do, and then you can recouple some traditional notions and do something slightly different. I always know we’re in a special spot in the design phase when I’m like “what do I call this control?” (laughs), when it’s this territory that’s not been covered enough to have a standard nomenclature.

Did that happen during the design of the Real World Interface (laughs)?

Absolutely. You know, the concept of putting a microphone inside it, that’s a little outside of the box — and of course, you can then immediately ask, “who is this good for?”.  But I think it’s more interesting to make a set of tools that are unique, and to then see if there’s somebody out there who is empowered to do something new with that. That is what’s really exciting to me, rather than someone just buying another 303 clone or something and making music from 40 years ago with that.

What is some of the user feedback you’ve gotten with the Real World Interface so far?

You know, in synthesizer design history, there’s this whole thing with pitch-to-voltage converters, it’s almost kind of an unsolvable dilemma to make one in analog that functions well (laughs). I was always fascinated with that on a technical level. And then — this was still during the prototype stage — there’s a guy in California that is doing these improvised ambient sets at a yoga studio, and his wife sometimes performs with singing bowls alongside him.

And he was telling me about how he always tries to play off of what she is doing, and right there, it occurred to me that this is an actual use case where this idea of a pitch-to-voltage converter with a microphone can turn into something useful to people. It’s definitely our strangest module, but I think there’s a world of electro-acoustic territory that I think hasn't been explored that much yet. I also use the compressor in it quite a lot for really aggressive compression, or the preamp as overdrive, the envelope followers …

Where did the idea for the Sawtooth Stack come from?

I was fascinated by this patch that Barry Schrader, a professor at CalArts in the 1970s, made with the Buchla 200, stacking five 258 oscillators on top of each other, using CV processing to be able to control pitch, waveshape and spread dynamically. And obviously that was a whole thing to set up and be in tune, especially for his lab assistants (laughs).

So for a long time I wanted to find a way to recreate this patch in a way that was more seamless and had auto-tuning. And then over the years that evolved into the idea of doing it with a more complicated oscillator core, and we eventually arrived at doing that with the Foundation Oscillator core that has a much more powerful waveshaper than the old Buchla had.

I think that it’s tempting for people to just say “oh, it’s a supersaw!” — I guess the name pushes you in that direction (laughs) — but it definitely can do so much more than that, and it has MIDI which already puts it into a totally different context in terms of being used with a computer and other gear. It also fits into a Black Box, so it’s basically this complete portable synth voice that you can put in your backpack and take anywhere.

What's your approach to setting up an initial patch when performing live?

I try to do it differently every time, so that I don’t repeat myself. So I basically start from zero and just hope that the direction I’m going in is something that the audience shares with me. I think that’s something that can’t really be taken away from the moment and can’t really be captured by a recording — improvising live, dealing with the choices you make in the moment, there’s nothing you really could do that would make it sound amazing on earbuds, but that also doesn’t really matter, because it’s about making sense in that moment, in that room, on that sound system.

Fueled by that idea, I’ve done my best to make the live performance itself the art or the product, rather than treating it as a promotional tool to sell the record – and of course, now nobody really buys the record anyways (laughs). It just doesn’t make sense to me to take away from the performance in that way, which is the thing I care about.

Do you still get that feeling of “I’m screwed, I have no idea what to do next?”

Of course – but that’s also the reason for why it’s interesting to perform live! Most times, I still get this feeling that I’m totally screwed. But I feel like that feeling, that panic, is really the only way to get to a place where I am forced to dig deep and try to do something meaningful in the moment. You know, starting with nothing patched, that’s really the easiest situation to be in with a performance. That’s the most possibilities you’ll ever have and every time you make a decision, you further narrow down your options (laughs).

And then, when I feel like I’ve finally totally run out of ideas during a performance — that’s a terrible feeling (laughs), but a fantastic place to be in artistically, because in that moment, there are no longer any preconceived notions, I’m going to take risks, try something I haven’t done before. I think if I felt like everything I do just goes smoothly and is so great, I would start to lose something. I have to have a bad night sometimes for it to matter when I have a good one. I have to question myself all the time to be at my best.

You can find out more about Verbos Electronics over at their website and listen to some of Mark's music over at his Bandcamp.