Inheriting Mantis from Chris Huggett
Chris Huggett founded the Oxford Synthesiser Company in the 1970s. He spent his career designing what became classic instruments: the EDP Wasp and OSCar synthesisers, most of Akai's samplers in the 1990s, and pretty much all of Novation's musical products.
In 2019, Chris took on a commission for a new company. Given creative free rein, he started developing a hybrid synth that revisited some of his earliest work, but improved it with modern features. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with cancer at around the same time, and didn't survive the first lockdown.
Having worked with Chris for a while at Novation, and being a little involved with the same new company, I was standing in a footlight when the music stopped. With the permission of his estate, the contents of Chris's desk and hard drive allowed us to inherit a well-conceived, sometimes brilliant, but technically rough proof of concept. We were given permission to see what we might do with the hardware and software.
As a solo engineer, my job was to understand the context and intentions embodied in Chris's draft, to shape and polish it without losing his fingerprints, and to see it into production before the money ran out.
This talk will cover the technically interesting aspects of this project, following the evolution of Chris's demo into a manufacturable product and a codebase for the future, whilst working out which of his fingerprints he meant to polish out and which to leave.
Ben Supper
Prioprietor
Supperware Ltd
Ben engineers synthesisers, loudspeakers, MIDI controllers, and other products for various companies, and sells spatial audio hardware via his own company, Supperware.
He likes solving problems that combine elements of acoustic design, hardware, firmware, DSP, and application development. The first half of his career was spent mostly at Focusrite and ROLI, running the latter's R&D team and realising that he prefers the lab to the boardroom, but doesn't get to choose.
Ben's been involved with ADC since it started in 2015. He's spoken about MIDI, spatial audio, the craft of making hardware, and on weathering a demanding and satisfying trade, the practitioners of which are often invisible.