Stochastic Instruments

Stochastic Instruments Ltd. is a 'Micro-Entity' VAT Exempt UK-based Registered Limited Company (Company Number 13111638) incorporated on 4th January 2021. Our UK Export EORI Numbers are GB079397159000 (to confirm, follow this link and copy/paste the number) and XI079397159000 for exports N.Ireland, exported using HS Commodity Code 8542311100 All our products are fully tested and RoHS compliant. Our contact point is on the contact page, and our official company address is 68 Molesworth Road, Stoke, Plymouth, Devon, England, UNITED KINGDOM PL1 5PD

Stochastic Instruments believes companies should be inclusive of everyone, transparent, pay taxes, be ecologically responsible, supportive of education and above all, ethically brave. Every big ethical step forward a society takes was once unpopular, born from the fortitude of individuals striving for a better future and a better world. We believe this applies to all its sentient inhabitants, irrespective of race, colour, creed, belief system (or none), gender, sexuality or species. We bank ethically, use biodegradable materials wherever possible, minimise energy use, offset carbon emissions in shipping, and ensure that we and, whenever it's possible to control, the services we use, do not invest in weapons, tobacco, gambling, tax-avoidance or any form of exploitative practice, most pertinently animal agriculture (= Killing Industries) or any parallel industry predicated on animal abuse. We reserve the right also to refuse sale to these industries.

We have worked hard to secure the best balance between cost and security for your valuable package and monitor services for the greenest (CO2 offset), fastest, most reliable, and best value options available. We also do not profit from our P&P: everything is done at cost. Please see the Shipping section of our Policy page.

Music transcends all barriers: including those artificially forced upon us by politicians. SI hopes this is au revoir e auf wiedersehen––it's EuroRack, not BorisRack––but until then, our EU friends should expect a similar situation to ordering from a US company. We are registered as VAT Exempt so our sale price is the actual price: there is no VAT to remove at the point of sale. This actually disadvantages us financially, but we have taken this decision to pass the savings on to our customers. As with every other UK export to the EU, EU customers are now charged their local sales tax, Duty (typically 0-3% on electronic goods) and processing fees. There is simply nothing we can do about this. We can only provide the cheapest reliable shipping options available (and a range of pricing/insurance options within that), as well as the appropriate customs paperwork stating the full value of the items. As a brand new start up already facing potentially increased production costs through Brexit, sadly we cannot absorb the additional costs for EU customers that these politicians have created. Thank you for understanding. Please see our Policy Page for more information. It is important EU customers are aware of these details.

Stochastic Instruments has the coverted Official Manufacturer Status on Modular Grid (thank you Knut!) and is found here... https://www.modulargrid.net/e/modules/browser?SearchVendor=906

Company panel colour is black but we recognise that Eurorack is also all about individuality. If you really wanted a particular alternative colour it is something we can explore, but is limmited by the options available with the PCB fabricators we use and will cost more as it will be a special order. If you still want to pursue this, please contact us. Finally, please see our Support page for details (including free Mech Files!) of how to make your own panels if you really want to show off!

You will see the dBs Institute (formally dBs Music) logo on our modules. dBs is an highly innovative and long established teaching and research institute in music, audio and sound engineering based in Plymouth UK and with sites in Bristol and an afiliate institution in Catalyst Berlin. SI company director Phin Head has been a staff member there for nearly 20 years and, lectures there in Electronic Music Composition and Performance, heads up their ground-breaking Modular Research Group and was also on the team that set up Catalyst. The MRG is an open research forum open to any staff or student member with a good idea related to Eurorack and/or music software that they want to develop into a product. It aims to help integrate accademia with industry (a key dBs ethos!) both through the generation of new ideas and through connections with our friends in the Eurorack community (see below) where we collaborate on beta-testing. The Stochastic Inspiration Generator grew out of support from dBs, and both Phin and Stuart see their industry work as a fully integrated aspect of their academic teaching, allowing their respective students in music and electronic to see innovation in the flesh and the marketplace, not just the classroom. SI maintains extremely close ties with dBs Music (as the teaching institution) and also its sister companies dbs-i (where Phin is a research collaborator) and dBs' commercial wing dBsPro. To recognise this, and the essential link between innovation and education, we proudly put dBs' logo on our modules to thank them, our colleagues, and our wonderful students for their continued support.

The Eurorack community is mostly small (often single operator) companies doing amazing things. Along the way, we've met many extraordinarily talented people making incredible modules. Best of all, because it's people making things that interest them as individuals, there is much less sense of direct competition between makers than with the big music tech giants. In no particular order, we'd like to shout out to our modular manufacturer friends, from whom you will find many wonderful things. Tubbutec - Tobi makes the best multifunction MIDI & tuning system in Eurorack, period (and much else besides). Phin was lucky enough to get to beta-test it and deliver a microtonality lecture/gig on the µTune at Superbooth '18. ThisIsNotRocketScience - Stijn & Pricilla, working out of Amsterdam have somehow found a way to reinvent the building blocks of modular with incredible combinations of familiar concepts with innovative twists. And, the new Fenix will be a history book classic. WMD - from Denver Colorado, Will, Alex and friends build modules that combine the grit of urban techno with the intellectual refinement of process-driven composition: truly modules for players, by players. The Performance Mixer, MSCL and Overseer redefined output staging in Eurorack, and Metron is simply untouchable for trigger sequencing. We would also like to personally thank Will for his kind technical advice during the manufacture of SIG! [Tragically, in August 2022 Will announced that WMD would be closing for business. We hope desperately to see them return in the future. Until then, we raise a glass to fallen heroes. They were the best of the best.] Fully Wired Electronics - The amazing Dan Legg who has been is a pivotal part of the SIG fabrication process started his own Eurorack and PCB assembly service in early June 2021. He's been working on his own incredible range of new modules and is now going public! This guy is one to watch. Kinesotronic - Our great friends, colleagues and collaborators Matt Ward & Chris Pratt created the incredible Refractor multidimensional gestural morphing application initially for use in Ableton (bridged to Eurorack via a DC-coupled soundcard) but are already planning to take this much further. Winter Modular - Eloi's 8 track powerhouse has fast become the centre of many people's racks and with good reason. There's little to touch it in terms of compact immediacy and functional depth and it's saved Phin's life a few times an hour into an improv set! We would also like to personally thank Eloi for his kind technical advice during the manufacture of SIG! Superbooth - Where else combines an international academic conference, a music festival, a trade show, the best vegan food in the vegan capital of Europe, and Jean Michel Jarre on a shopping trip? Herr Schneider's carnival of wonders is our annual pilgrimage.

The bigger the rack, and the more experience you have, the longer and better will be your live set: but how do you measure that? SI's Phin Head, his great friend and dBs colleague, modular DJ, composer and lecturer Matt Ward, and WMD's Will Mathewson and Alex Anderson (both modular DJs and composers in their own right) derived a unit of "Eurorack skill", all while drinking together in a dingy Berlin bar... One 'Ward' is a derrived unit defined in min/hp where 1Wd = 1 minute of decent music per 1hp/3U of rack space. That is, the more skilled the player, the longer the set they can get out of a given rig size. 1 Ward is a big value (like a Farad!). Will and Alex reckoned a maximum set length of about 40mins was possible with two rows of 104hp, so thats 40/208 = 192 milliWards of 'skill' –– and those guys are world experts, playing live several times a week, week in week out. Matt and Phin managed a 2 hour set with two 65% full 4 row 126hp rigs = 120 / (65%*(2x4x126)) = 183mWd which they were actually pretty pleased with. Joking aside, it's worth considering this idea: these are musical instruments after all. The more you practice the better you get, and the more possibilities you see. In addition, think about ideas like the Three Module Challenge, the fact that all creativity comes from constraint, and that the nature of Eurorack is that as soon as you add another module to your rig, all the ones that were already in there can now do more too. So there it is, the milliWard––get practicing people! :-)

You damn straight. :-) Animal Agriculture––the Killing Industries of meat, fish, dairy & eggs––murders 3 trillion animals every year, 95,000 every second of every day, in agony and terror, for profit alone, at the destruction of our shared planet. The multidisciplinary science is clear: the animals feel and suffer, the environmental effects are devastating (it's the leading driver of the 4 main non-warfare existential threats to organised human survival, Climate Change, Antibiotic Resistance (AMR), Pandemic Zoonoses (like COVID19) and Pandemic Obesity), and its direct effects on human health are serious too. But the really great news is that the dietary science is also really clear and really positive: vegans thrive and enjoy significant health gains from birth, reduced heart disease, cancer, diabetes, infections and obesity...and the growth in delicious, cheap and healthy vegan options is sky-rocketing. So, here are a bunch of really amazing recipes for you! Save the world, be kind, love food, feel great and play modular. :-)

A: served! As of 1 September 2022, the entire waiting list was finally completed. From now on, SIGs and all subsequent future releases are available to order directly and instantly through the site. If you believe you joined the list but have not heard from us it's almost certain your invitation is in your email 'spam' folder. Please contact us immediately and we will sort out your SIG! For historical context the 'old' answer to the is question is retained below: Due to the serious issues with manufacturing and communications with omsonic there was a waiting list for the Stochastic Inspiration Generator. Happily, once Stochastic Instruments Ltd. was formed to take over the operation things started to move, and we have now cleared this initial list. :-) While we did this over 2021, thanks to the incredible positivity the Eurorack community is showing us, requests and demand directly to SI for SIG grew significantly. We feel the fairest way to handle this is to honour these enquiries in the (ongoing) order we receive/d them, so please visit our Contact Form to reserve your place in the list and guarantee you get your SIG as soon as we possibly can! SI is therefore contacting everyone on our ongoing list in the order we received your first approach. As long as you asked to be added and received our reply then we will be getting to you as soon as we possibly can. When we do, we will contact you again and arrange shipping to your destination. I'm afraid I cannot give an exact date for when this would be—however, progress through the list is going very well (thanks largely to our new UK manufacturing system) so it will be absolutely as soon as possible. Most important, rest assured your SIG is safe! All this means you are in one of three groups of people... 1) People who got an omsonic-made Stochastic from omsonic If you're in this group: thank you for being early adopters! You should already have received our special SI Return-And-Upgrade offer and had your units sent by us! Omsonic is not making omsonic-compatible expanders, so if you have an omsonic and for whatever reason were not offered this, the only way to get a full 4 channel system is to contact us and we'll sort you out. 2) People on omsonic's waiting list who never got one from them If you're in this group: the list is now cleared! You waited so long––thank you, genuinely, for your support and interest. We are very sorry things took so long with omsonic but creating SI solved the problems and you should all have your SI units now! If you have NOT yet heard from us then it means either we never got your email from omsonic or our email to you might be lost in your spam folder. Please contact us with proof of the first date you contacted omsonic and we'll sort you out with your SIG+EXP immediately! 3) People who have contacted us at SI for a unit since we took over If you're in this group: you may well already have your SIG and are raving about it on our Feedback Page! If you don't already have your SIG+EXP as long as you have asked to be added to the SI list, we are fast getting to you. [As of Sep 1 2022 we have got to you and you have your SIG!] As I say, the incredible support we continue to receive from the Eurorack community for SI and SIG means SIG is now much in demand. To manage this demand fairly we are emailing people in batches by the date of when they first emailed us. We are manufacturing in parallel so can send out units in the order we receive the replies, pending payment arranged and confirmed by email. However, the only way to guarantee your SIG is to be on the list via the Contact Form. Please bear with us: we are fulfilling the backlog as fast as we can and we will get to you. The more time we have to get our heads down and honour the list, the quicker everyone will have their module so please only contact us with really critical questions. We also completely appreciate you will be anxious to know where are on the list, and how fast we are progressing but again, please could we just ask that you let us work through and get to you as soon as we possibly can? We promise you will hear from us more quickly if you just let us get to you.

Jolly good of you to say! Thank you! Don't worry, we'll be sending out an email to everyone who bought their SIG before these were on offer, as a mass batch. This will be sometime in early spring 2022. Each set is £15. P&P will typically be under £5 anywhere in the world because they don't require a parcel-sized box and are not heavy.

To mark our first year in business, as of 1/1/22 all SIGs ship with our new-look black SI 'Manual-on-the-Panel faceplates' (thanks to SI customer Mark Harrop for that term!). Additional omsonic-style 'Classic' panel sets are offered while stocks last if you'd like to add the original SIG look to your rack––if you would like these please add £15 per set and specify the colour you'd like (Blue, Black or both). In addition, due to customer demand we now also offer Stealth Edition panels in small runs: these are Classic style but without the metal trim so more muted and are also £15. As of Sep 1, we started shipping SIG+ combined units. These are available only in black. If the demand is there we may offer a batch of blue SI panels, but there are no plans as yet.

A: now! As of 1 September 2022, the entire waiting list was finally completed. From now on, SIGs and all subsequent future releases are available to order directly and instantly through the site. If you believe you joined the list but have not heard from us it's almost certain your invitation is in your email 'spam' folder. Please contact us immediately and we will sort out your SIG! For historical context the 'old' answer to the is question is retained below: We had initially anticipated that public sales of Stochastics / Expanders would start as soon as the omsonic waiting list was cleared. While we have indeed now cleared the omsonic list, we had not realised the demand for SIG direct from us would be so high. This is a wonderful problem for us to have(!) and we are eternally grateful to you all in the Eurorack community for the incredible support you have shown, and continue to show us. We want fairness to lie at the heart of our customer policy and so we think the best solution for everyone is to serve everyone in the (ongoing) order they came to us. Please be assured that this actually means we will be getting to you just as quickly: it just means we can also guarantee the people how have waited the longest don't have to wait any longer than absolutely necessary for us to actually manufacture their SIG. We really hope you understand and ask you to be patient just while longer while we get to you. If you don't yet have one, the only way to guarantee one is to reserve your place in the list via the Contact Form. As soon as we get to you we will contact you and arrange shipping to your destination. I'm afraid I cannot give an exact date for when this would be—however, progress is going very well thanks largely to our new UK manufacturing system so it will be absolutely as soon as possible. Thanks for understanding.

The price of SIG+ is identical to the old Main Unit + Expander price. We also kept prices frozen from the original rates omsonic set for the Main unit and Expander back in 2019 for as long as we possible could given the subsequent price rises caused by Brexit, CoViD, semi-conductor, manufacturing, fuel and war crises. By spring 2022 these became untenable and we had, regrettably, to add £10 to SIG and £5 to the Expander, retained as £15 with SIG+. Please note that that represents a 3.8% rise in 3 years, vastly below inflation. At the time of writing it does not appear that our production/parts costs will rise dramatically, and we are absorbing the small increases at our cost for you but these are uncertain times so we cannot of course guarantee anything except that we will only ever increase this if external factors further raise costs significantly in the future and will always be transparent about this. However, Brexit has created import issues for the EU. SI is VAT Exempt so the sale price was/is the actual price: there is no VAT to remove at the point of sale. In turn, as with every other UK export following Brexit, EU customers are now charged VAT, Duty and processing fees in the same way as US customers (for example) would be. There is nothing we can do about this. It's not the way we wanted it. Please see our T&Cs for more information. It is important EU customers are aware of this.

In Eurorack (all modular synthesis in fact) there is no X volts = Y note standard. It's just that a change of X volts = a change of Y notes. SIG's CV outs operate on an Equally Tempered 1v/oct scale as standard but that doesn't reference any particular pitch or note to any particular voltage. Its lowest note happens to be 'C' so this causes a CV output of 'about' 0v but what you measure, and what your VCO will 'see' is not so easy to pin down exactly. The main point is that all you need to do is tune your VCO to the correct pitch to correspond to the right pitch on SIG. All VCOs have a central tuning knob to 'centre' its pitch as there will always be variation in 'centre' voltage from different voltage sources. Why is this? Because the frequency you hear from a given VCO is dependant not just on the source of the CV (be it SIG, a sequencer, or whatever) but also the VCO itself. The voltage the actual internal oscillator part of the VCO sees depends on the interaction between the sequencer's output impedance and the VCO's input impedance. So, the same sequencer, set to the same note, and even measured to the same output voltage on your multimeter may still result in a slightly different pitch if you change only the VCO even if both VCOs were tuned identically with no CV on their inputs! This is completely normal. SIG's blue trimmer pots are for scaling, not centre pitch. Testing on my own rig, SIG aligns perfectly with my Eloquencer and VariGate8, and scales perfectly with my VCOs (MI Plaits, Doepfer A111, JustFriends Mannequins, ES Disting, QuBit Chordv2, 4ms SMR, 4ms SWN, WMD BIA, and ADM17 Proton, so quite a range of both manufacturers and digital/analogue VCO architecture) but there are still tiny variations in absolute pitch (albeit well, well within the range of the fine tune knob on each). Remember that in the 1v/oct standard, an (equally tempered) semitone is 1/12v = 0.08333v. Pitch (not frequency) is measured in cents, where 1 cent = 1/100 of a semitone, and most people can just detect a pitch difference of about 5 cents (1 JND or Just Noticeable Difference). There isn't a direct absolute frequency equivalent (and thus voltage equivalent) of that because it's dependant on the absolute frequency of the starting note. That is, a given voltage offset undetectable on a high note might be noticeable on a lower one for the same reason that the difference of 1.64Hz between low A and A# on a piano is a full semitone (very detectible!), but completely undetectable by ear between top A and A#. However, absolute voltage offsets of a few mV (0.001v) are perfectly normal in Eurorack. Every CV chain and every VCO will vary slightly in input impedance. As long as SIG's is scaling correctly that's all that matters: again, there is no absolute volt-to-note reference. The voltage you measure depends on the characteristics of the voltage meter as well as the source. This is precisely why all VCOs have central course and fine tune knobs. Obviously if the scaling you are hearing is off and the blue trimmer pot calibration process hasn't corrected it then that is a (separate) issue we can look at. Please see the Calibration section of the manual for scaling calibration instructions.

We can't manufacture SIG with taller knobs without a considerable redesign and increase in price, but there's a simple solution for people wanting a longer shaft: with a bit of tweaking Thonk's Trimmer Toppers can work very well. There's an excellent discussion on the MW thread about adapting these to SIG (p.45). (Photo credit red and thanks also to walrtbstudios for finding the right MW thread page!)

First and foremost, our design ethos comes from a playing tradition, alloyed to a love of process within the modular ecosystem. Setting a process into motion and letting it run only holds so much interest so the SIG is about making something that exists in the hinterland between instrument, sequencer and dueting partner. It should respond to you, rather than either doing exactly what you trigger or entirely its own thing. Obviously there's a practical aspect to adding CVs: it would increase price, footprint and decrease ease of use (there are something like 73 separate parameters the SIG can control, and clearly 73 CV ins is not feasible). But much more important is the underlying concept: we want you to be able to play (or rather influence) these, in real time with your fingers. We aim to encourage muscular interaction with SIG rather than 'outsource' control to an LFO or secondary sequencer so all its controls and design is geared towards that: even its playable Loop manipulation where you can beat-repeat, reverse, and otherwise mangle it.

No! Even without reading the manual SIG's controls are completely intuative to both brain and fingers: everything is where it feels like it should be. But SIG is also deep. With 73 controllable parameters, a 1 knob 1 function approach would be counterproductive: the footprint would be huge and interface less (not more) intelligible. We follow a design philosophy of "intuitive intelligibility": everything you need, pitch, duration, octave, Loop, is under immediate primary control, and everything else is only a button hold away. You're neither compelled to use 2ry/3ry functions nor hunt for them with a screen, and SIG's note-specific functions are bound to each note so in performance the connection between finger and function remains absolutely obvious.

Stochastic and its Expander stopped being manufactured or sold by omsonic in 2020. While omsonic were the original manufacturing partner for the Stochastic Inspiration Generator they were unable to meet the demand for the module. In mid-October 2020, some concerns with omsonic's outgoing communications necessitated my personal involvement in the 'shop front' on this MufWiggler thread. Up to mid-November 2020 we were assured by omsonic that production would quickly increase, so we persevered on that basis. However, at the end of November 2020 we received an email from omsonic stating that production was on indefinite hold. At that point we made the decision to part company and take over production ourselves. It took December 2020 to accommodate the manufacturing changes, arrange the legal requirements of forming the new Stochastic Instruments company and negotiate the exit agreement with omsonic. Our complete redesign of the hardware is optimised for outsourced SMD fabrication and vastly expedites in-house completion. We are pleased the situation is now resolved and now manufacture and sell Stochastics exclusively under the SI name. Stochastic Instruments will never experience the issues that beset omsonic's handling of the project in 2020. We offer a panel option that retains with updates some of omsonic's SIG panel artwork, by licence agreement.

SI boards are expertly designed for reliability and performance. If you are one of the very few with an old omsonic unit we have already contacted you with our Replace-And-Upgrade offer (if you have one of these and we havn't contacted you, please get hold of us on the Contact Page). SI Stochastics are largely functionally identical in performance operation to the omsonic-made ones, but our SI hardware redesign (primarily intended to optimise scalable manufacture) brings several important upgrades: Only SI SIG/Expander units… have internal Flash Storage Memory to retain their settings after power-off use a faster MCU chip for optimised performance have a TRS ClkIn jack to set an Arbitrary Barline on an external trigger are 32mm Skiff Friendly have CV calibration trim pots use an Analogue Noise Source rather than a PRNG where available have Centre-Dented Sliders to better identify 50% probability point ‘home’ Individual Note Octave have full 16bit TrEG Outputs SI units ('Rev-E's) are easily differentiated from the omsonic Rev A-Ds: their finish is in shinier 'white gold', they show the Stochastic Instruments name and logo, have a dotted line connecting the Tempo and 1/16 controls (to indicate their special Control functions), and the PCBs have single rather than double expander headers on the back (see below).

No. But don't worry, we have everyone covered. The Expander brings Stochastic's track count from 1 to 4 probabilistically independent tracks, increasing the capability of the system dramatically into a completely self-sufficient multitrack sequencing ecosystem for only 4hp of extra footprint. With a careful selection of sound modules this can make a fully performably probabilistic track (e.g. stochastically performable melody, chords, bass and drums). Rev E and pre-Rev E main units must match their Expander versions: Rev E SI Stochastics can only be used with Rev E SI Expanders (also clearly identifiable from their panels) and Pre-Rev E (omsonic-made) Stochastics can only be used with pre-Rev E (omsonic-made) Expanders. Omsonic boards employed two small ribbon connections and SI ones use one large one: there is no mechanical way to cross-connect thus no risk of accidental damage. If you have an omsonic board and want an Expander, don't worry: SI will Replace-And-Upgrade your omsonic unit for a superior SI unit at a very considerable discount and offer the compatible SI Expander at no additional cost to the standard price. We will handle this directly by email to avoid confusion (i.e. there is no product page listing for a pre-Rev-E Expander). We have the list of everyone (we believe) sold an omsonic model and have mailed them already. If this applies to you but have NOT heard from us, please contact us we'll sort you out. If you don't yet have a Stochastic you'll be getting a Rev E from us so just request an Expander when we email (see below) or add one to your basket when they become available on the products page of the site: because we ship them together, you’ll save £10 on P&P if you buy them together!

omsonic should continue to provide support to all the Stochastics they sold. However, we have Replaced-And-Upgraded the vast majority of these, and so of course at that point we will take over responsibility. Obviously all SI Stochastics fall under SI's ongoing support. Please see our Policy page for more details.