"Latency To Cool Should Be Zero" Meet The Makers | Noise Engineering's Kris Kaiser & Stephen McCaul

Noise Engineering’s Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul on building their eurorack modular synth company after leaving jobs in sound engineering and biology academia. What makes this process unique? How do they manage a squad of dedicated people? What is the best thing about being your own boss?
This video is NOT sponsored by Noise Engineering or anyone else
00:00 - Intro
00:39 - Why modular synthesizers?
02:43 - How is a modular synthesizer different from a more traditional synth?
04:18 - What does your job look like in 5 years?
05:51 - Does that uncertainty create a lot of stress? How do you deal with it?
07:13 - How did you decide to change careers to start Noise Engineering? What factors went into that?
09:08 - How did you know it was time to grow your company? What were you looking for?
11:00 - What are the pros and cons, in your opinion, for starting your own business?
12:46 - What are some major hurdles you and other eurorack companies are dealing with right now?
14:51 - How have these factors affected pricing? What goes into pricing your modules?
16:28 - What are some of your most important lessons from being in business all these years?
17:23 - What's one thing you did, or decision you made, that greatly helped you, your company, or your career?
18:25 - In your opinion, what are the keys to building and maintaining great relationships?
19:20 - When you have disagreements, or when things go wrong, how do you deal with that?
24:29 - What are your core values that you don't want to compromise?
27:52 - Walk us through your process from Idea to Creation?
33:41 - What's it like to finally release something (Xer Mixa) that you've been working on for years?
35:23 - So what happened to the Iteritas line (BIA etc) Why did it retire?
40:20 - Is the Versio line now the most popular product?
41:42 - What can be done about the lack of diversity in the Eurorack and modular synth community?
43:45 - What advice would you give a young person or someone seriously considering starting their own creative business?
Meet The Makers is a series of interviews and discussions about the creative forces behind small maker industries. These questions were created to help young artists and people new to the modular synth community discover more about the people who make the tools, their challenges, successes and lessons. Coming up 12/2/2023 we'll be live streaming a discussion with Steady State Fate founder Andrew Morelli.
Thanks Kris and Stephen for generously giving time to this project. And to Patrick O'Brien for providing amazing samples of Noise Engineering modules in action.
SUBSCRIBE for more upcoming interviews with designers and wizards of the modular music maker community

[@digitalghostmusic]

Awesome interview! Love Noise Engineering. Lovely people and super cool to hear them talk about the company! 🤟

[@metamyther]

Great talk! Always love hearing insights from one of my favorite module makers.

[@Bilijie]

What’s your favorite NE module? I only have BIA, a Versio and a Legio so I’m curious what others have made good use of!

[@metamyther]

I have tried I think all of the voices except for Ataraxic...Loquelic is great for the range of sounds. BUT I profess my love for Lacrima Versio, with Polydactyl in second place. Those have become my end-of-chain that I run a lot of stuff through. Not a lot of people know about these modules, criminally overlooked imo@@Bilijie

[@WilliamTan-yp1ud]

amazing thank you..... you guys are awesome.....we believe in you....

[@caldarion2506]

such pleasant & likable people. will buy more of the stuff (..well, would do that anyway..)

[@GuitarsAndSynths]

same here

[@GuitarsAndSynths]

Excellent the heart and soul behind this amazing modular company! I am a fan and own many of Noise Engineering modules and they have been awesome with my questions on how things work.

[@peace_ramen]

Such a great interview! I especially loved hearing about Kris' journey from academia to transitioning to work that is more fulfilling and purposeful for her. It's never too late in life to change directions

[@trigmusicnz]

love the ruina plug.

[@trigmusicnz]

lovely to see companies cooperating too rather than competing, well, competing in a sense of innovation, but cooperating like how you guys were building wmd stuff for a while, and how erica have taken over hex. more of this and less behringer and inmusic

[@FileTransferProtocol]

I think small businesses are struggling across the board. ( I run one myself, and we’ve seen the same) The big tech companies all started yelling about “the coming recession” for the first quarter of 2023. That, while they were also posting record profits, and blaming it on inflation, caused many people to curtail spending. Hopefully this year will bring business back.

[@trigmusicnz]

i , like many others started with a bia, but how found my love with lip, and lapsus, fed from a voltage block. you guys should do some crazy VB like seqs. - i suppose memetic gets close

[@CoffinNachtmahr]

When traded my bia for manis i was wondering if the hardware was super identical cause i thought about trying to figuring it out

[@Bilijie]

Same hardware!

[@praveensharmanyc]

🎉🎉🎉