Making music with test equipment

A MusicRadar feature on musicians who make electronic music with repurposed lab and test gear — signal and function generators, oscillators, oscilloscopes, and analog computers built for radio, telecoms, and military work rather than for music. It is the “found-instrument” edge of the synthesizer story: the raw oscillator without the synth wrapped around it.

The scene

• Cold War Synths — a studio in a Welsh-border nuclear bunker run by producer/archaeologist Matt Thomas (King Unique), housing test equipment back to 1948 alongside classic synths (Yamaha CS-80, Roland Jupiter-4, EMS VCS3).
• Willem Twee Studios (Netherlands) — a room dedicated to test equipment, laid out to reproduce the workflow of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1950s Cologne studio, including a Hitachi 240 analog computer once used as a NASA flight simulator.
• Andrea Taeggi — a jazz-trained musician who recorded the albums Zimní Král and Nattdett on this gear.

”Better sine waves”

The article’s hook is a sound-quality claim: Thomas insists the tones are “extremely raw and harmonically rich,” with a purity hard to replicate — “These are better sine waves. They just are.” This is the analog-vs-digital argument in its purest form (see synthesis): the appeal of the original signal path over a modelled one. It runs parallel to filtopia‘s all-analog pitch, at the DIY/experimental extreme.

Technique

A “manual studio” approach — hand-controlled modulation with no MIDI or CV, the way 1950s studios worked, which is the deliberate opposite of modular-routing‘s patched automation. The unfamiliar, “impenetrable” interfaces are framed as a feature: they invite happy accidents. Entry points named include function generators (cheap on eBay / radio fairs), Bernd Ullmann’s THAT analog computer, Eurorack’s Make Noise Maths, and software emulations by Hainbach / AudioThing. A magazine feature, opinion-heavy → T2.