Celebrating a decade of retro 07:07:07

I would like to personally thank everyone for making the first 10 years at FR the absolute best! Thank you for believing in our vision, supporting us in our work, and taking our products farther than we ever imagined! My, how time flies when you're having fun. And a lot has happened in the last decade so I thought it would be fun to turn the clock back and have a look at where it all began. And walk you through the past, as we unveil pictures and thoughts of our collective works.  I guess you could say it's in my blood... As a child I grew up playing with the tools and machinery on the assembly line of my fathers company, which designed and manufactured musical tuners, guitar and bass amplifiers, PA systems, and more during the 70's and 80's. It was like a jungle gym of technology, innovation and craftsmanship. At the age of 7 I would attend my first NAMM show, as my father's company displayed their products to the music industry. Interesting however is that looking through their old photos of that show, I find pictures of the TB-303 and TR-606 on display for the first time. Why they even took those pictures I don't know, they weren't into synthesizers at all. And me... I wanted to play the drums. Who knew that 15 years later I would end up making instruments similar to those.  At 14 I began DJing and playing electronic musical instruments. I remember my first instruments were an Ensoniq SQ-80 synth, Kawai R-50e drum machine, and a Boss SE-50 processor. It wasn't much, but having less kept me creative and I learned them inside and out, as I made my attempt at creating "industrial" type music. In highschool I was in a cover band for a short while where we played songs by, NIN, Ministry, Janes Addiction, The Cure, New Order, The Shamen and more. It was a lot of fun, but lets face it, getting all the members together to practice rarely happened. So I focused more on the electronic side of music, producing dance music as my DJ instincts took over, doing music for a few local hip-hop acts, mixing dance music for choreographers, doing live mixes on the radio and creating radio commercials, promoting and DJing raves, opening a dance club for teens, and finally landing several full time residencies as a DJ in the club scene all by the age of 19. While working in the clubs I would also work in record stores, and music instrument shops, where I started doing repairs for others and modifications to my own synthesizers. As I learned them inside and out, I thought, I can do this... I want to make my own synthesizer and I want it to have this feature and that, and be able to sound like all my favorite groups.  And so I spent just over a year creating the circuits which would later be known as the 777 synthesizer. Although not without a few setbacks. I remember having the first prototype laid out all over my desk, bread boarded up with wires going everywhere, and everything was working as I make a few last tweaks here and there to the circuits... until one day I got caught up in those wires as I walked away from my desk bringing the whole thing crashing down on the floor. It took weeks to bring it back to life. Once I had it working again the next step was to make the first physical prototype. So I molded my own chassis out of fiberglass, hand made all its stickers and legends, fabricated some wood ends, and hand wired all the circuits onto perf-boards which I could mount inside the unit. The result was a lot of work, although I remember thinking... hmm... I could make a couple of these a year. So I took that prototype around to local concerts with me, trying to get musicians opinions of what I had created. It was then that I met up with Dennis of Skylab2000, and he played the prototype and gave me his feedback... I like this, why did you do that, can you do this instead? So I took it back to the drawing board, convinced my father to write the code for our sequencer, as we spent the next year implementing some of his ideas and our own, and also thinking how can I make more than just a couple of these a year?

777 Prototype Synthesizer

A close up shot of the controls of the first 777 prototype. This unit was nearly the same size as a typical 5 octave keyboard.

777 Synthesizer

A year later I met up again with Skylab2000 at the Dreamfest music festival where they were to play a live set. I showed Dennis the new production model which was less than half the size of the prototype, lighter with a more ruggid construction, and all the new features implemented and he was sold. Within a couple hours he had it on stage integrated into their live set, and it was a thrill to hear the acid chirps screaming out of the massive system. And then it was official, this wasn't just a passion, it was a business. Within the first few months we had an impressive list of customers including NIN, KMFDM, Skylab2000, and Uberzone.  As years passed the list of artists grew to include Plastikman Richie Hawtin, BT, The Crystal Method, The Chemical Brothers, Air Liquid, Aphex Twin and countless more.  

The first 30 units made were these purple faced models. 

The 777 was originally called the Bassix, which can be seen printed on the PC boards. Although it was never publicly called this, it was a nickname given during development. This was a derived combination of the TB-303's "Bassline" name and the TR-606's "Drumatix" name. As this unit could sound like the 303, but its sequencer operated more like the 606 with its live note entry and editing features. 

We then produced approximately 25 of these blue faced models. In the early days we would create different colored key combinations such as this one. Early models such as this would have had oak wood end pieces. 

This is the only white faced model ever made. Notice one layer of the screen printing is missing as this screen layer was destroyed in making the blue models. At sometime around this point we switched over to the nicer looking cherry wood end pieces. 

The keyboardist from... well let's just say a very well known band, called once asking for a custom silver model, and here's what I created. This unit started its life as a stock unit, and I stripped the black powder coating off the chassis, spent days hand brushing the surface, screen printing it by hand, and clear coating it. Needless to say I never heard back from the person I made it for. I liked the look of it so much I ended up making a total of 7 of these panels. I was going to release them as a special edition run of 7, however the first customer I sold one too complained about screen printing and so I took the unit back, and I told myself I'd never sell another one of these. Although I did sell one to friend "RR", serial number 666. Last I heard this unit had about 3 owners, and recently fetched $1,800 on Ebay. 

This is how the majority of the 777 models looked. Although this is my personal unit, which the wood fabricators gave a custom guitar-like sunburst finish. Notice these models had slightly different screen printing with the 777 name typed out instead of using a symbol like the first models had. Personally I liked the first artwork better. But some of our customers would come to us in the early days and say, what model is it, what's it called? I don't think they could fathom a product just be known as a symbol, so we had to spell it out for them. 

Not only was the artwork changed, but somewhere in the 200? serial numbered units we did a completely new PC board layout. The features remained the same as early units, but minor tweaks were made here and there to the design. The most noticeable difference between the early and later models was that early ones had a much more aggressive distortion circuit, it sounded fabulous but also caused the output to increase drastically in volume. So we created a completely new overdrive stage on later models which kept the output more consistent as the overdrive was increased. I would say later models had a cleaner sound overall. 

All of our products are hand made, but the first 200 plus units of the 777 were made entirely by myself. It took at least 8 hours to assemble a single unit. After that I was tired of assembly line work, and finally hired another hand assembly company (who was already assembling audiophile grade stereo components and medical equipment) to do the majority of parts stuffing, while I focused on final assembly, and the testing and tuning of each unit, and the day to day chores of running a business.

In 2003 production of the 777 models stopped. And we had built 678 units in all. These units quickly became collector like commodities, often fetching nearly twice their original list price. With a cult like following, some claim it's the best mono synth ever. Cheers!

Here is the original 777 logo inspired by the Penrose triangle. 

Obviously the Aliens prefer this logo as well, as they were last seen leaving this bit of graffiti in the fields of England. 

Mobius Sequencer

In 2000 we released the Mobius sequencer. This spawned from the sequencer used in the 777, but in place of the sound section we added numerous interfacing methods to allow this unit to control nearly all types of synthesizers, including CV/Gate analog synths, MIDI synths, and Din Sync devices. At that time there were quite a few companies building TB-303 clones, however nearly all of those units did not include the sequencer which played an equally important role in generating those slippery acid lines. Today many artist still use this unit to control their clones, although many others have found it to be a powerful sequencer in its own right with the real time editing capabilities. The Mobius is still one of the only modern day sequencers to support both the V/Oct and Hz/V CV standards. 

All of these units are hand made, and at this time just over 450 units have been produced. 

Abstrak Prototype Sequencer

Shortly after creating the Mobius sequencer, I started to experiment with new ways of generating and manipulating patterns mathematically. Above is one concept I worked on for years. The Abstrak was a new type of analog sequencer built using discrete logic components. The rhythm switches could define if notes were off, on, or sustained, while the knobs set the pitch for each step. This model also had a true analog swing function. The rhythm and pitch elements were considered completely independent, so you could loop a pitch sequence for so many steps while the rhythm looped at a different number of steps. Or you could play pitches forward, while rhythm played backwards. Here I also developed the remix function later used in the Revolution's design, that allowed me to apply different remix patterns for both the pitch and rhythm parts. One could easily loose track of hours trying all the different combinations that a single sequence offered. 

Revolution Synthesizer

In 2004 we released the Revolution synthesizer, which included all the features of the original 777 sequencer, with the addition of the new Remix feature providing 256 variations of each pattern, the ability to play patterns forwards or backwards, shuffle pattern timing, and the ability to remotely select patterns using program change messages. 

Here we see a picture of the Revolution's shipping carton. Notice how a 7 was used for the R. This was to signify that the Revolution was the evolution of the ideas that went into the 777.

The Revolution was the first commercially available synthesizer to include a circular sequencer layout. 

Above you can see the first Revolution prototype. I had originally planned for these units to have a white UV finish, that would glow under blacklights. Although this UV finish had a texture to it that was nearly impossible to screen print clearly on, so this idea never made it to production. Also the aluminum end panels were originally going to have a brushed finish. Although these proved to be too costly, so we opted for the CNC routed wood pieces shown below.  

The first 300 or so Revolution units came with these cherry end pieces with our logo routed in them.  

In 2006 we did a very limited production run of what we called the SE units in both a silver and UV orange finish. In addition to the obvious color changes, these were the first Revolution units to have the black aluminum end pieces, they also featured unique combinations of colored key caps, and included one modification that provided a logical accent gate output on the ring connector of the gate output jack. Each unit was also hand signed and numbered. 

All silver models shown above were sold exclusively through Nova Musik in the USA. Only 15 of these units were ever made. 

The UV orange SE units shown above were all sold exclusively through Analogue Addiction in the UK. Only 9 of these units were made. These units were very bright in color, and glowed just as bright under blacklight. These units shipped with UV red key caps which would glow orange under blacklight as well. This picture is not quite accurate with its white key caps, but is my personal unit saved for our collection. 

After creating the black aluminum end pieces for the SE versions of the Revolution, we liked them so much that we used them on all production models after that point. This was closer to our original prototype concept, and ended up giving the unit a more modern appearance. 

In 2007 we released the Revolution R2. The R2 has a completely new PC board layout, and uses a new RAM chip which allows the internal back up battery to last nearly 10 times that of earlier Revolution units. These units come with V2.0 OS installed which improves the compatibility for use with our XS synthesizer. And to top if off, we gave it a fresh new look with the gun metal grey finish.

Here we have a look at the inside of the Revolution, and its PC boards. 

We will typically build 100 units per production run. Here we see a mass of Revolution units waiting for their final stages of assembly. 

XS Prototype Semi-Modular Synthesizer

Here we have the first generation prototype of the XS synthesizer. This model was made in late 2005, and is the only one in existence. This unit was completely hand fabricated, including the chassis, painting, front panel stickers, and hand wiring of all internal circuits. This model was originally designed to be an analog synth expansion module providing a wide range voltage controlled oscillator, sub-oscillator, mixer, multimode filter, voltage controlled amplifier, and an ADSR type envelope with additional accent times. The XS prototype was first shown at the 2006 winter NAMM show. 

XS Semi-Modular Synthesizer

We debuted the 2nd generation of the XS prototype at the 2007 winter NAMM, and Musikmesse trade shows. The newer version is a full blown semi-modular synthesizer which can be used as either a rack or desktop model providing a very compact portable design. Numerous features have been added, which now include 2 oscillators, 3 sub oscillator divisions, ring modulation, white noise source, more filter types, a mixer, 2 unique velocity sensitive envelopes, voltage controlled amplifier, 2 stages of overdrive, an LFO with MIDI sync capabilities, and integrated MIDI to CV conversion. This unit provides inputs and outputs for nearly every feature, and also provides a plethora of internal modulation routings. 

Don't let it's small size fool you, its sound is huge and the possibilities endless. XS, it's more than you imagine... It's the next big thing!

This model is planned for release in 2007