Art and Tech Collide in Colorado Modular Synth Society

It started with a theft.

David Soto, a musician who performs under the name Sine Mountain, has had a lifelong interest in music, floating between different genres and scenes, including hip hop, electronic and others. In 2017, after having been inactive for several years, he found himself wanting to return to making music.

“I had no idea what kind of music I was even going to make,” Soto said. “I knew I didn’t want to do stuff that would be on the computer, because my job was already on the computer, so I thought I’d get into hardware. I stumbled across a modular synthesizer YouTube channel and was like, ‘Woah, what is this?’ It looked awesome to have something that was super tactile, super experimental.”

While searching for hardware to start his journey, he found himself at a pawn shop, which had plentiful material from WM Devices, or William Mathewson Devices, a business that develops and produces musical instruments based in Denver. Soto noticed that some of the gear at the shop was new, or in some cases hadn’t even been released yet. 

“My buddy told me about some modular synth stuff at a pawn shop,” Soto said. “And I noticed it was made by a local company and that it hadn’t actually come out yet. I called them up and said, ‘Listen, I think this stuff might be stolen.’”

After Soto got the items returned to the company, he struck up a conversation with some of its members, helping to bolster his interest in modular synths. This led him to develop a space in 2018 where people could help produce and practice music with the instrument together: the Colorado Modular Synth Society.

“We became really close friends, me and the folks at WMD,” Soto said. “They were already doing an event, and they were just getting started with that, and I decided to go all in on modular [synths]. Since all that had happened, it felt like all this good fortune.”

In the years since, Soto has organized many events monthly and built up a community around the Colorado Modular Synth Society, made up of other enthusiasts passionate about the art form. Today, the group is composed of over 700 online members on the social platform Discord, as well as dozens of members who regularly attend the events they hold every month.

Modular synthesizers are used in a range of different electronic genres and are valued for providing an unparalleled level of control over the sound. Traditional synthesizers come with preset “sound fonts,” which either emulate the sound of preexisting instruments like a piano or have predesignated variations that are already built into the machine. 

Modular synthesizers take this a step further, with practitioners of the hardware interacting directly with different elements of the sound wave the machine emits, including pitch, frequency and amplitude, to change granular elements of the noise, allowing them to make much more specific soundscapes that are directly tailored by their input. This leads to the usual look of modular synthesizers, which often consist of a large board with wires strewn across the top plugged into different sources and inputs.

“You can design your own synthesizer every time,” Soto says. “And that allows you to rearrange and create your own system that is unique to you. You don’t have to have it patched up in a traditional way.”

Many enthusiasts who work with modular synthesizers, including several members of the Colorado Modular Synth Society, have homemade or custom-modified elements as part of their setups, which are designed and created by them.

One such developer of homemade gear is Toby Hendricks, a musician and member of the Colorado Modular Synth Society who performs under the name Otem Rellik. Originally from Fort Collins, Hendricks has worked with modular synthesizers since the early 2000s, making music with the hardware and developing his own devices. He moved to Denver in 2015, where he continued experimenting with electronic music and building his own instruments.

In 2023, Hendricks was let go from his job as a software developer. In the aftermath, he decided to commit to his work developing musical hardware, starting his own company called Rainy Day EI, or Rainy Day Electronic Instruments, which sold modular synths and other instruments and gear for creating electronic music. At around the same time, he began going to events with the Colorado Modular Synth Society, which became a valuable client base for his new company as well as a source of feedback on how to improve his creations.

“I knew about them, but I was very much more of a homebody at the time,” Hendricks said. “But when I got laid off, I was like, ‘There’s a community here who is into the same stuff I’m into.’ And they’re actually a great resource to have when I’m building stuff to get people’s feedback, and they’re right here.”

Since then, Hendricks has been a frequent attendee of their events, performing often at their showcases, as well as taking the opportunity to meet others who share his passion and interests. “It’s just great to talk to people that are into this stuff, because I really hadn’t had that,” Hendricks said. “It meant a lot to have that community there.”

The Colorado Modular Synth Society plays host to a wide variety of musicians working in different genres and with different musical backgrounds. No matter the genre, most of the music that is made and shared in the space is instrumental, leading to the unique sounds generated through the synths playing a large role in the personal expression conveyed through the music.

“I was making soundtracks to movies that didn’t exist,” Soto said. “It’s a lot of experimenting to get that to work, because the synth has so much range, it can do a lot of things, and you want to throw everything at it, but it’s a lot of information to take in. I try to play with space and silence mixed up with these cool textures. I definitely think of music like painting, where I’m trying to put different layers to give it a feeling and an idea of depth.”

The CMSS has become a hub for many to hone their skills in the area, with the community fostering a spirit of shared information that helps those within the group become more developed and receive feedback from their peers.

“Everyone is very much trying to be an educator,” Hendricks said. “If you learn something about a specific module or synth, everyone is really down to share that information. It’s all about that, just having people coming in and talking about how they do their live setups. That’s definitely unique compared to other scenes I’ve seen in the past, which have been very much gatekeepy.”

On Tuesday, July 8, many members of the Synth Society attended and participated in Freq Boutique at Fort Greene in Northern Denver, a musical showcase put on by the CMSS and WMD Devices. Anyone who is interested is able to sign up to perform for the evening, showing off their music and the machines they use to make it. 

With limited seating, attendees stood in a crowd, intermittently mingling with each other before falling silent during the musicians’ performances. After each set, the master of ceremonies would take a moment to interview the performer, pulling back the curtain on their thought process and showing others how they do what they do.

“The music is just part of the story,” Soto said. “The building is part of it, the learning is part of it, the art is part of it, and the community is all part of what it’s all about.”