It’s become a tradition each year for us to wrap the year with a personal note from the team. I speak for all of us when I say thank you. We are but a small collection of misfits who can’t imagine doing anything but what we’re doing, and YOU are the reason we get to do this crazy job of making modules. We are eternally grateful to you for that.
Each year, we shut down for the last week of the year for a needed break. Stephen and I will head to Joshua Tree to spend some time together with the dogs, our respective instruments, and some good food.
If you want to take advantage of our fantastic End-of-Year deals, we have some great things happening this year. We won’t be responding to emails between December 21 and January 2, but we’ll be sure to reply to any questions as soon as we return. Orders placed during this time will also be held while our distribution team is also on break. Orders will begin shipping on January 3, 2025.
The Year in Review
This year saw a new direction for us with the release of Dystorpia, our first guitar pedal. When we designed it, we knew we wanted it to be not just a distortion, but a versatile distortion. With multiple separate flavors of distortion and a tone control section that sounds fantastic on its own, Dystorpia checked all the boxes we had when we envisioned it.
This year also saw the reintroduction of our classic oscillators Ataraxic Iteritas and Cursus Iteritas on the Alia platform, along with Incus, our reimagining of the classic Basimilus Iteritas. We also released two new firmwares for our Legio platform, Sinc (based on our Sinc Iter module that we had to discontinue years ago) and Morbus, a noise-based oscillator that is more fun than it should be.
We filled the void of pitch sequencing in our line up with two new modules: Opp Ned, our quad arpeggiator, and Gamut Repetitor, a NE take on the classic Source of Uncertainty.
Finally, this month, we dusted off our platforms and released Ampla Legio, Fala Versio, and Toros Iteritas Alia.
We also saw lots of your faces at KnobCon, the inaugural Buchla and Friends, the Pedal Expo here in LA, and Earthquaker Day in Akron, Ohio (just down the freeway from where Kris grew up!). We made some new friends when we co-hosted a workshop on using modular synths for film composition. Shout out to the Composers Diversity Collective, AIAIAI, and René G. Boscio for helping make that event such an incredible success.
Closer to home, we started a trial on a 4-day work week for the team late this year. We’re in the evaluation phase but permanent 3-day weekends are pretty sweet. If you email on a Friday now, you may not get a reply until Monday, but Kris often can’t be kept away on the weekends, so you may hear from her.
We also have implemented a whole host of changes on the website, including moving the NE Customer Portal over to the main website. There’s always room for improvement, so we are actively looking for ways to streamline and improve your experience on the website.
As always, we remain committed to our environmental charities. We continued with our 1% for the Planet membership, donating at least 1% of revenue to vetted conservation organizations, and donating time through our Volunteer Hours program. For more on the organizations we support through our membership (and ones we just like), check out our Giving Tuesday post.
Here’s NE’s Patrick with a group of volunteers spending the day cleaning up picnic areas at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.
And of course, we spent a lot of time working on some new things that we are very, very excited about. More on those in the new year!
And now, a personal note from each of us.
Kris
What to say about 2024? It went so fast that there’s so much I wanted to do but didn’t! This year was all about more web development with a dash of C++ thrown in. I’m excited to develop my programming skills more in 2025 even if some days I want to bash my head against the computer screen. I spent time patching but never really put anything together that really brought me joy, except maybe the catharsis of pulling out all the cables. Maybe that’s why I enjoy modular so much.
In my free time, I spent a lot of time in the air with my aerial hobby. We managed to pull off a burlesque aerial performance to Lady Marmalade and dropping from a height on a silk while wearing a very large Christina Aguilera-esque wig was definitely something I didn’t realize was on my bucket list.
Stephen and I took our first get-on-a-plane together vacation since we went to Superbooth in 2017 (does that count as vacation?). We spent most of September wandering around Iceland. We met the kind folks at Genki Instruments (brilliant minds and watch for some very, very cool announcements!). Iceland is stunningly beautiful and it was so nice to have time together that wasn’t business-related. Sometimes that balance can get tricky.
Mostly 2024 was spent working on fun things I want to see exist and taking very frequent breaks to snuggle with Alice and Eddy. All in all, it was a pretty good year.
Stephen
Finally we have released our first guitar pedal out into the world. It was well received and we are very proud of this work and of the pedals coming in the near future. We are very new in this space and are still just starting to learn about the many communities. To say this was a struggle would be an understatement. This was four years in the making with everything going wrong along the way (global pandemic: check!, cancer: check!, worldwide parts shortage: check!, crazy inflation: check). Not to mention the many hard lessons learned along the way. Our plan was torn to shreds and restarted a few times. But we finally got everything nailed down this year. I’m excited we are over the initial hump as we have so many interesting ideas for this space in the works.
We released Opp Ned and Gamut Repetitor. I was personally very surprised at the community's response to Gamut as I figured it would be a pretty niche nerdy module. I am reminded of how awesomely nerdy the eurorack community is. It is always rewarding when we spend a lot of time designing/creating/testing a deep module and when it is released the community really appreciates what it became.
We also got the last tranche of the initial Alia release out including two of our old Iteritas and a new one: Incus. Incus is one of my favorite modules we have built in the last few years. It was fun to make as it was revisiting some of our core synth concepts but with many years of experience added since the last time. For the first time in so many years I'm putting together cases to play without a Basimilus included. Feels like a new era to me.
Sales in all music instrument categories including ours continue to be down. This unfortunately forced us to reprioritize things mid year which pushed into the future many things I was excited about. 2025 looks like it is going to be fun. Lots of firsts for us in the near future.
Markus
2024 was pretty cool. It feels like the year flew by. This year I got to help with some really cool projects and I’ve been working to improve my art and technical skills to help make our products even better. Toros Iteritas Alia and Fala Versio were particularly fun to test and help design, and our release that we’re announcing early next year really challenged my technical knowledge. It’s something I’ve been excited about for a long time, and I’m really excited to share it with all of you at our next show.
In my own life, I’ve been focussing on taking time away from my synthesizer (sad) to spend more time outside (important, apparently). It turns out when you take care of yourself, you feel better! Who knew?
I’m looking forward to 2025. I’m getting married, I’m hoping to spend some time travelling, and, of course, we’re going to be bringing some awesome synth stuff (and more) to all of you. I’ve been at NE since 2018, but every year seems to bring something unexpectedly new and fun to my desk.
Patrick
In 2024, I embarked on a new journey in guitar pedals, pushing my creativity further than I ever imagined. I’m particularly proud of how the Dystorpia art came together. Watching the transformation from the first version to the final design was a fun process. Fun fact: living next to a firehouse inspired me to include the big siren on the pedal, thanks to hearing the trucks come and go all day long.
On a personal note, 2024 was truly the year to look up - literally. I checked off a number of celestial bucket list items. I witnessed a total eclipse, spotted the brightest comet to date, and ventured to Norway to witness the Northern Lights and polar nights. My wife and I also made a habit of escaping south to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia for a few weekends, where dark skies reveal far more than we could see in DC. One of the coolest (and nerdiest) highlights? Spotting space junk with our own eyes—a fascinating yet slightly unsettling experience.
As always, it’s been great to see so many synth friends around the country. I got my fix after a couple trips to Los Angeles and boothing/performing in Chicago for Knobcon. I also checked off two more Modular on the Spot cities, performing in Greensboro and Philadelphia.
From all of us
We are so pleased to be a part of your music-making journey. Whatever you celebrate at the end of the year, we hope it is lovely and peaceful and joyous, and we will see you in 2025!
