Ruin Wesen 2010 Goals
Ruin Wesen 2010 Goals02.02.2010 23:58:01
The last post gave some insights about the story of Ruin & Wesen, while this post will explain what we think are our core values, and what our concrete goals for 2010 are. We were building electronic devices for our own use, and wanted to sell them to a bigger number of people in order to make a living doing what we love. We think that is really the core value we have, building electronic music instruments from musicians for musicians. We spend a lot of time doing music, building tools that allow us to be creative, making them better, more interesting and more flexible. That is also the biggest commitment we can make about the care we put into our products: using them ourselves, we are as much interested in improvements and fixes as our customers. That’s also why we care a lot about the sound, interface and overall design, because we know how important these aspects are when you are creating music.
Having learnt a lot from the community, we also want to give our knowledge, insights and ideas back, which is the second big core value of Ruin & Wesen. We want not only to share our technical designs (opensourcing our hardware designs and all the software we write), but also to share the thinking and mindset that went into creating them. We try to document our experiments and knowledge by writing technical blog posts on our blog, recording tutorial videos and screencasts (ranging from techno playing to pcb layouting to software programming) and giving workshops at tinker gatherings and schools. We received a lot of very positive feedback for doing this, which we are very thankful for and shows us that we are taking the right direction. We are also very interested in feedback and ideas from our users, and are very thankful for all the nice words, links and ideas we already received.
This blog post will now describe what our primary goals in 2010 are going to be:
- polishing the Minicommand firmwares
- creating a community around Mididuino
- releasing our first analogue synthesizers
The intense work last year resulted in the Minicommand and the Mididuino framework, of which we are (without false modesty) pretty proud. The software development work went very fast (and the framework itself was strongly evolving), resulting in about 30000 lines of C++, 10000 lines of Java and about 5000 lines of Common Lisp. This huge amount of work provides for a lot of very cool features on the Minicommand: automagic midi learning, algorithmic sequencers, full support of Machinedrum and Monomachine features. However, as everybody dealing with software will realize, there is no way that all this software is perfect. There are some bugs (not much, thankfully), but mostly unclear features or very “rough” firmwares. 2010 is going to be a year where we are going to take it slower feature-wise, and instead going to focus on making simpler, more flexible firmwares, and trying to leverage the power of the framework that is already present. The realization that the device already has a huge amount of unleashed potential means that we will take it slow, but in a very focused manner, building upon the intense exploration and work of 2009.
The most interesting way to use what is already there is going to be the creation of a community around the Minicommand and the software libraries. Although the code is opensource, we are the first to admit that it is not easy to deploy or get a handle at using it. We are now working on finishing the release of the framework, along with the editors for Windows, MacOSX and Linux, and an up-to-date documentation. This is our primary goal along shipping the devices for the next few months, and we really hope that this will make it much easier and interesting to work with the devices. Our patch manager since day one had the feature to allow registered users to upload their own firmwares, so that they can easily share it to the community. We will work hard to make this feature available very soon.
In a similar manner, we are putting a lot of work in describing the features of the firmwares. We have already recorded (and are currently cutting) about 50 minutes of new tutorial videos for the Minicommand and the Mididuino framework in HD-quality, and hope to put these online in the next few days. A lot of features of our devices are not immediately “apparent”, and a lot of them also require some “training”. We hope that these nice detailed videos, showing in full detail what we are doing when using our devices, will trigger new ways of working with them. We also hope to create a small kind of community showing new tricks and techniques and ideas using the Minicommand.
A very important second goal we are working on is finally release some of the analogue devices Ruin has been working on. A lot of devices have already been prototyped, and we are working on turning them into finished devices. One aspect we are going to focus on is bridging the world of analog and digital by including digital control modules built upon the Mididuino framework. This will not only allow interesting, powerful and an open way to control the analogue electronics (because the devices are going to be open sourced too), but also allow us to build evolving and generative hardware synthesizers. We feel that it is important for a hardware device to have character and quirks, so we strive to create something unique that will make you approach your music at a different angle. About quirks: what interests us in sound design is non-linearities, distortion, noise, crosstalk, inter modulation, and so on. These things may sound undesirable to some people, but the way it is implemented it adds the depth necessary to stand out amongst a crowd of sound-a-likes. Since there has been a boom in the analog synth market, we will try to bring something special like sonically unique oscillators and filters, flexible digitally controlled routings (striving for modularity), and lots of varying types of aural distortions.
2010 is shaping up to be a very exciting year, and the great support from our customers makes us even more committed to our products and ideas. We are taking things slowly, but steadily, and thank you for all the kind words and encouragements.
