Derrick Estrada, an electronic musician who performs under the stage name Baseck, had just showered and was nursing a cup of yerba mate in the back room of the Los Angeles home that a musician friend dubbed the “synth flophouse.” It was 10 a.m. on a recent Thursday; very early, he explained, for a house full of musicians.
Estrada had promised a demonstration of a remarkable new instrument, one that had changed the whole way he made music. Two walls of the room were dedicated to racks of synthesizers — row after row of buttons and knobs and unwieldy wiring, a veritable museum of advanced technology spanning decades and costing thousands of dollars. Estrada ignored all of it. Instead, he plucked a small device from the spot where it was hanging from a hook. It looked like the exploded innards of a calculator, with a splat of knobs and buttons. There was no keyboard. Estrada plugged it into a set of speakers, held it in both hands and hunched over it slightly, as if handling a phone while texting, and began to play.
He punched the buttons, and a rapid-fire sequence of clicks began to repeat. Then he twisted one of the knobs, and the clicks deepened into a more hollow sound, like that of a kick drum. More button punches, more knob twists, more sounds: a spacey high-hat, a background static roar, a tonal burst that altered slightly and quickly became a repeated phrase. Suddenly there was more than a beat; there was a little song.
And just as suddenly — more punches, more twists — the sounds changed, and the song evolved. This went on for about 10 minutes, with Estrada nodding slightly, in a concentrated semi-trance over the device, coaxing out new sounds every few seconds. This was all in real time, and it sounded fantastic — ready for radio.
Estrada was playing a Pocket Operator, a device released four years ago by a Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. To date, the company has made nine different models of the same basic design, and it has sold more than 350,000 of them worldwide, making the Pocket Operator one of the most popular synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 — famous for producing the sound of Seinfeld’s slap bass and Madonna’s “Vogue,” and one of the best-selling and most influential synths of all time — is estimated to have sold 100,000 fewer units over nearly twice as much time. The “portable” version of one of the Pocket Operator’s earliest forebears — the telharmonium, constructed more than a hundred years ago — cost more than $5 million to build in today’s dollars, weighed 200 tons and required a team of specialists to achieve peak performance. A Pocket Operator costs about $60 and fits in the palm of your hand.
Because it is mass-produced, cheap and easy to use, the Pocket Operator is closer to an acoustic guitar or a harmonica than it is to the telharmonium — a new kind of instrument for popular music, with new kinds of possibilities. Just as folk and rock musicians took the humble guitar and harmonica onstage and played music that was exciting and modern for thousands of people, electronic musicians can now do the same.
After he finished playing, Estrada told a story that illustrated the kind of range the device had. He recently traveled to Tokyo for a synth festival with his kit of bulky synths, but when he plugged them into the big sound systems in some venues, they sounded muddier than he might have liked. One night, nearing the end of a set, he thought, What the hell? He plugged in his Pocket Operator.
“The sound just, like, punched through,” he said. “People poured onto the dance floor. Afterward, everyone was like: What was going on at the end? It was the Pocket Operator.”
The four founders of Teenage Engineering started the company in 2007, with a more traditional keyboard synthesizer, the highly regarded OP-1. But they quickly became involved in a wide variety of modish design-oriented projects. They updated and reintroduced a ’70s-era speaker designed by another Swedish engineer, Stig Carlsson. They also did some outside work — for Ikea, it was a cardboard camera and forthcoming Bluetooth speakers; for the Chinese search-engine giant Baidu, a colorful smart speaker. The Pocket Operator was more of a lark. A friend at a clothing company called Cheap Monday told them the company had some extra cash on hand, because it had been bought by the fast-fashion giant H&M. Maybe Teenage Engineering could develop something for Cheap Monday to sell? The first three Pocket Operator models worked as drum, bass or “lead” sequencers, and they could all be synced up to play together as — in the promotional language of Teenage Engineering — a “pocket band.” Later models introduced new sounds (“noise percussion”) and capabilities (sampling).
Nearly all of Teenage Engineering’s 45 employees are in fact engineers (audio, computer, mechanical), and the style of the company’s products — playful, a little rebellious, definitely strange — does indeed evoke the slouchy insouciance of teenagers, but it draws as well from an even more youthful gestalt. “Everything must be simple, primary colors and shapes,” says Jesper Kouthoofd, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders. “If we cannot draw it quickly on a pad of paper, it is too complicated.”
Estrada had promised a demonstration of a remarkable new instrument, one that had changed the whole way he made music. Two walls of the room were dedicated to racks of synthesizers — row after row of buttons and knobs and unwieldy wiring, a veritable museum of advanced technology spanning decades and costing thousands of dollars. Estrada ignored all of it. Instead, he plucked a small device from the spot where it was hanging from a hook. It looked like the exploded innards of a calculator, with a splat of knobs and buttons. There was no keyboard. Estrada plugged it into a set of speakers, held it in both hands and hunched over it slightly, as if handling a phone while texting, and began to play.
He punched the buttons, and a rapid-fire sequence of clicks began to repeat. Then he twisted one of the knobs, and the clicks deepened into a more hollow sound, like that of a kick drum. More button punches, more knob twists, more sounds: a spacey high-hat, a background static roar, a tonal burst that altered slightly and quickly became a repeated phrase. Suddenly there was more than a beat; there was a little song.And just as suddenly — more punches, more twists — the sounds changed, and the song evolved. This went on for about 10 minutes, with Estrada nodding slightly, in a concentrated semi-trance over the device, coaxing out new sounds every few seconds. This was all in real time, and it sounded fantastic — ready for radio.
Estrada was playing a Pocket Operator, a device released four years ago by a Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. To date, the company has made nine different models of the same basic design, and it has sold more than 350,000 of them worldwide, making the Pocket Operator one of the most popular synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 — famous for producing the sound of Seinfeld’s slap bass and Madonna’s “Vogue,” and one of the best-selling and most influential synths of all time — is estimated to have sold 100,000 fewer units over nearly twice as much time. The “portable” version of one of the Pocket Operator’s earliest forebears — the telharmonium, constructed more than a hundred years ago — cost more than $5 million to build in today’s dollars, weighed 200 tons and required a team of specialists to achieve peak performance. A Pocket Operator costs about $60 and fits in the palm of your hand.
Because it is mass-produced, cheap and easy to use, the Pocket Operator is closer to an acoustic guitar or a harmonica than it is to the telharmonium — a new kind of instrument for popular music, with new kinds of possibilities. Just as folk and rock musicians took the humble guitar and harmonica onstage and played music that was exciting and modern for thousands of people, electronic musicians can now do the same.
After he finished playing, Estrada told a story that illustrated the kind of range the device had. He recently traveled to Tokyo for a synth festival with his kit of bulky synths, but when he plugged them into the big sound systems in some venues, they sounded muddier than he might have liked. One night, nearing the end of a set, he thought, What the hell? He plugged in his Pocket Operator.
“The sound just, like, punched through,” he said. “People poured onto the dance floor. Afterward, everyone was like: What was going on at the end? It was the Pocket Operator.”
The four founders of Teenage Engineering started the company in 2007, with a more traditional keyboard synthesizer, the highly regarded OP-1. But they quickly became involved in a wide variety of modish design-oriented projects. They updated and reintroduced a ’70s-era speaker designed by another Swedish engineer, Stig Carlsson. They also did some outside work — for Ikea, it was a cardboard camera and forthcoming Bluetooth speakers; for the Chinese search-engine giant Baidu, a colorful smart speaker. The Pocket Operator was more of a lark. A friend at a clothing company called Cheap Monday told them the company had some extra cash on hand, because it had been bought by the fast-fashion giant H&M. Maybe Teenage Engineering could develop something for Cheap Monday to sell? The first three Pocket Operator models worked as drum, bass or “lead” sequencers, and they could all be synced up to play together as — in the promotional language of Teenage Engineering — a “pocket band.” Later models introduced new sounds (“noise percussion”) and capabilities (sampling).
Nearly all of Teenage Engineering’s 45 employees are in fact engineers (audio, computer, mechanical), and the style of the company’s products — playful, a little rebellious, definitely strange — does indeed evoke the slouchy insouciance of teenagers, but it draws as well from an even more youthful gestalt. “Everything must be simple, primary colors and shapes,” says Jesper Kouthoofd, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders. “If we cannot draw it quickly on a pad of paper, it is too complicated.”
by Ryan Bradley, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image: Lernert and Sander for The New York Times
