How Teenage Engineering Makes Cool Stuff!

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1:02What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode, a special episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. And I'm Adam. Hey, Adam. Hi. You're on this side of the table. Yeah, I'm over here. I graduated finally to the big boy table. Wait, but if you're here, then who's? Oh, hey. Oh, Andrew's at the producer table. It's so weird over here. can you hear yourself no no yeah we turned down it's a little different over here but we did we have a bit of a special episode because we thought uh this would be a really fun thing to sort of pull back the curtain on a little bit uh some conversations that we have around the studio have turned into podcast episodes for the longest time but we also have all kinds of other conversations with other people connected to the studio that are also sometimes really interesting.

1:48Yeah. And this is one where we figured, you know what, before we even get into this, let's just record it just to have it. And it turned out to be one of those really good, fun conversations that's actually worth sharing. Yeah. Like a lot of times for videos, which you guys listening or watching don't get to see is we talk with the people that make the products a lot, trying to better understand the products. And those conversations typically never see the light of day. They're usually secret or usually secret or yeah, like it's just like behind the scenes kind of thing you have a quick question hop on a call with someone yeah so i'm doing a video for studio channel and for that i reached out to some company and i was like hey i'm doing this video i would like to maybe speak to the person who was in charge of making these certain decisions that i want to know why they made those decisions and they were like sure yeah just talk to this guy this guy ended up being the co-founder of the company so last second David and I were like slacking each other that morning and we're like, hmm, maybe we make this into an episode and we can just like turn this into a thing where these conversations we have with people behind the scenes can just be brought more to the foreground so people can kind of see how this stuff comes together.

2:57Yeah. So this episode is with David Erickson, the co-founder of Teenage Engineering. Teenage Engineering is a company that makes a lot of my favorite gadgets like the OP-1, the OP-Z. They're like music synthesizers. This is what they've done most often over the years. Yeah, that's what they're most known for. But they've been in the headlines a lot more frequently lately for some other collaborations. You might recognize them from a lot of other places. Yeah. Nothing like the new Rabbit device that came out. They were the ones designing it. The Playdate, if you guys remember that, like a year or two ago, it was like a little Game Boy-esque thing.

3:30Like, they designed it. So we just thought we'd play the interview. And here you go. This is it.

3:40Can you say your full name and what exactly you do at Teenage Engineering? Okay, my full name is David Erickson, and I was part of founding Teenage with my dear friends, and my title here is Head of Hardware. Head of Hardware. And Hardware for us is basically, you know, the platforms that's inside the machines, it's electronics and yeah and around that sounds complicated yeah so you guys have a ton of different products so little backstory how this meeting came to be was i reached out asking to speak with someone about the ep133 the new sampler you guys released and then you're the guy they put me in contact with so you headed that product and that project yes and you had all the projects parts in all projects as in on the technology side if you look at our portfolio uh they are very different i mean we have from furniture to advanced digital mixers uh for everything that's that has electronics inside we try and at least build them in a way so they work together i mean it could be simple stuff like making sure that they all have a bluetooth le uh chip inside so So we can send, you know, MIDI data or sync signals between like a mixer and the synth and something else.

5:08Or it could be that the fact that the USB-C on most of our high range products are dual roles. You can actually take two synths and connect them with a cable. You don't need to go to a computer and back. So I would say my role is partly to ensure that that happens. so uh i mean to us it's not like we're trying to build like an ecosystem that's close to just te devices it's more that trying to avoid the need for for host computer in a in a setup i mean yeah part of the name of the field series that we have everything works standalone but you can use them together uh um and then usually the way we work here is that some product i mean we usually try and keep the teams very very small so so we have products that's been made out of basically a formation of two people like a software engineer and a e or me plus you know combination of you then of course you pick them pick some components from from previous projects whether it's like a physical component like a knob or it could be you know a chipset or a stack of code but then in terms of how the machine works there's usually one person that is like a product owner or lead for that and that can be an ME an ID person, a software person and for our most recent device is KO2 I did that because it was maybe read online but it was kind of a project we'd never planned to do we talked of course about making an upscaled pocket operator uh with real keys and a real case but we started it in the summertime when we were both on vacation me and one of our lead me's mechanical engineers so uh we at that point in time we didn't really know what the product would do but i've always been into like just the vintage samplers a lot and And we never really done that except for the KO one.

7:21So it was kind of, okay, but I'll manage this project. It's very, you know, we don't really have, you know, structure in that sense. So it made sense that I would do it. And then, of course, we've been a couple of software engineers and me. And, you know, in the beginning, we were like two, three people in the, you know, crunch of the project. we're maybe 10 momentarily and then we scale back wow that's not a lot of people it's very different but still it's important that the core group kind of has a passion for for the product and and so that's why but of course we still try and make them so so they have some elements that are recognizable from other te devices yeah yeah like how much of this was you guys pulling things from like the pocket operators and how much of it was a brand new problem that you guys had to solve like is there a particular story you have in mind where it was something unique to the ko2 that you guys had to figure out i mean the old ko is roughly uh let me think a third in processing power and and of course it didn't have any like built-in flash storage or it had a little bit but not not 64 megabytes so like comparing the two 64 megabytes is a lot comparing 64 megabytes with some other things on on that's out there now of course you can get gigabytes if you want but we felt that it was important to have this kind of quite you know limited feature set as in no menu diving not too much storage because you kind of get stressed out of having 30 versions of your latest song and here it's like, no make a new song bounce it or track it down to tape or into your DAO or whatever so but it also has to do with cost of course, because if you throw a big CPU in there and a lot of memory, it's going to be maybe a couple of hundred dollars more retail.

9:34And battery, of course. As soon as you hit the threshold, I mean, the pocket operators are extremely power efficient. You can have two AAAs and it can be on for a year, and when you hit play, it starts instantly and it still runs. That's what mine does. It just sits there until I hit play, and then it just starts doing things. Here we have a real power button, actually. We actually cut the power physically when you turn it off. Oh, wow. but it's also a very power efficient you know cpu or mcu whatever you want to call it yeah um so it was important for us not to throw in like a charger ic and the lithium battery so it's it's again like triple a in the ep and po series you run off triple a batteries plastic vintage yeah it's gonna be around i think for for many many years whereas as soon as you put a custom made cell like you have in your phones eventually that will dry out and you have to rely on you know an experienced service technician to swap it out yeah so like to that point there's i don't know how true this is because i feel like i've only heard it once or twice from random like youtube videos and stuff but i had heard that you guys had decided to like basically buy a bunch of like inexpensive components and you pull it all in a pile in front of you and then try to figure out what can you make with this is that kind of how the ep133 came to be yeah partly true the way that they made this product to my understanding is after the pandemic they were like okay there's obviously not a lot of chips and things that people can buy remember there was a chip shortage that whole thing so they went and looked at all these different companies that were making making chipsets and tried to find substitutes for what they were already using and after gathering a bunch of those things and making like signing those contracts whatever then they sat down they were like okay now we can make this thing and they like kind of designed it as they went along which was interesting to me and i was just wondering like one have you ever heard of something like this before no like i've heard of like companies using their old stock like we make that joke about iPads all the time.

11:49Like, oh, they just have been, yeah, parts been, they threw an iPad together. But like how many more cool gadgets could we have if everyone just took like the lowest common denominator from all these different like sources, it would be really something together. Yeah. It's interesting. I, I do feel like, you know, they're known for their designs. So I feel like in order to make something that is super uniquely designed, you do have to have a somewhat unique process. And I've, I guess this could only, these types of products could only come from a company that has a unique process. Like you would never get something as intricately or interestingly put together or thought out if you just did it the same way everyone else did.

12:25Yeah. I don't know if that's exactly how they did it. If so, that's crazy and super cool. But yeah, you do have to have something special. Yeah. I found that pretty cool. We spent a lot of time around 2011, 2021. Okay. I was like, wow.

12:47just finding substitutes of components in our existing portfolio so it's like really you know tiresome work and at the same time lead times to get something new it could be a chipset whether it's a power ic or a flash memory or mcu you know it was like lead times ranging from 64 to 99 weeks so it was like out of the question to pick anything like that so we basically what i did is that we have a lot of connections on the ship vendors so we just called every vendor like you know our favorites to random you know less known brands that make sense to use and we just had the same questions do you have you know this amount of chips in stock that we can get now or you know a couple of months from now and most didn't so we had to and eventually you know one company called back and we worked with them before uh cypress now they're acquired by infineal in germany and they were like oh yeah we we actually have a pile now of mcus do you need them uh so we was like okay it has kind of the specs we need low power 150 megahertz it's a dual core cpu where we actually don't use the other core yet and then so we committed to use that and then then we started ordering so as we went designing the schematic we we basically looked at distributors or even digi key it's like do they have enough stock it's like yes okay you buy it first you know enter your credit card order and then you add it to the schematic so of course that you know once we got into like board bring up and verifying the system there was some mistakes so we we of course ended up with some excess parts you know that you have to kind of find a good use of or sell but it was really fun to work like that usually you i mean just five years ago you could design the whole board you buy all the components like in you know quantities of 10 or 20 and then somewhere around the finish line you you place the orders some months later you can start to produce but now it's like then you would have to wait a year or two from you know design freeze to so it was both i mean it was a good good kind of way of working and and at the same time we set a lot of you know rules we we knew from start we really wanted it to be not a cent over 300 retail why that number specifically um i mean we started 100 lower but it was completely unrealistic no it's just like a balance of i mean we we have a lot of products that's in the high range like both feature-wise um and i mean it it's just there's so much stuff in in our other field products that you know they become quite expensive so we said that it's it's more important that it's an affordable machine that anyone will buy rather than just an experienced musician or like a you know it's kind of this we talked about it being like the nerf gun of synthesizers you know just just the way the plastic is built up really like it's good quality plastics but it's still it's it's it's kind of intended to not look too fancy but not too cheap it's uh was that always the design from the start did you guys always have like a dope ass calculator in mind or did it just come to be as you were making it it changed quite a bit along the way but we it was always kind of the form factor was pretty much defined um we i think we moved things around a little bit and and you know the way we did this kind of back printed uh i don't know what we call it on our website but it's it's just leds tuning up between behind like colored uh like a screen printed film it's like a light diffuser with a and then we made a little custom three segment display with a funky typeface we could have used an lcd but again as soon as you do it's you kind of it opens up for menus and you know hierarchies so it was kind of nice not having that option and honestly neither on the ep 133 or the ko2 or the pocket operators you don't really need the screen you don't it's fun at start and you can see the tempo but but once you get over like uh you know it's more into kind of muscle memory you don't really need to look at the screen Mm hmm.

17:48That's a good point. One thing, too, that I feel like is very obvious in something like the pocket operator or even the knockout, too, is I feel like you guys in general tend to like define a limitation and then work your way in and figure out what you can make in that space. is that something that's intentional or for something like this were you trying to keep it under a certain price so that was the limitation or was it always more like a functionality limitation i mean i think normally we wouldn't look at the price point when we do a product i mean it's it's it's rare but it's important sometimes it's also like we knew we wanted to do it in one year i mean basically finish it and then run production which takes another set of months uh in one year you guys are crazy yeah it was it was quite quick so you know we started in august 2022 it was we started soft ramping production in august 2023 and then then we had to it's always slow at start i mean it's not like you just call a number and they just replicate it for you yeah we we manage the production lines in a way that we we design it we we build the fixtures and the equipment needed and of course when you do a new product that breaks so some some days we could just make you know 20 units on a full day and a good day we could do a couple of hundreds yeah it's very like so we actually produce in in europe in Spain and that was also part of this trip that we we were all like let's make this in Europe so we started in like Sweden where we are located it's there's not many factories in that sense because we used to have like you know Ericsson and Sony Ericsson making phones here back in the day but those factories are gone so we had to look you know from Eastern Europe we went to like estonia latvia poland czech republic oh wow it's a leaf france we did 14 different you know contract manufacturers that we you know we made kind of an excel sheet and and we looked at everything from like uh you know the people you know the uh the environment do they have good like it back end machines you know could we shake did the cto or ceo come to us and shake hands you know yeah like a plus you know do they care or not that kind of parameter and you know door to door you know for us it's like a three and a half hour flight then 20 minutes by car to where we ended up.

20:43It's very convenient. Of course, being able to drive there would have been even better, but I think we found a good balance. It's kind of a very tech-driven contract manufacturer, but they only do circuit boards as a profession. This is probably the first box fill that they've done. Interesting. Meaning like a consumer product. so we have to kind of train them how to do it that that's also part of this ramp up process it's probably equal amount of hours spent on building a production line as building the synth and how many more how many prototypes did you guys go through is there like a number in your circuit boards i think we ship with revision five or six meaning uh that's not bad yes i'm not bad it was uh we had yeah um i don't remember what we changed but it's usually power related or you know stupid mistakes and stuff like that and then plastics we i think i don't remember exactly i think we we went quite fast into what you call hard tooling where you pay a lot of money to tool parts because it's a lot of plastic parts.

22:11Just a few iterations to hit the tolerances we need and then on top of that you iterate like colors and finishes and get the texturing right and all that stuff. But yeah, not too many honestly. I guess we were a little bit lucky but what took the most time again is to putting it together like just getting getting all of that like because we care still even if it's just just$300 retail we don't it we care a lot about the cosmetics and that's the hard part when when you move it around on the production line it's easy that you you know it gets scratched up or so we build a lot of like what do you say call it in in English, like cradles and linear actuators to plug in the USB.

23:06So it's not a human trying to plug in the Type-C because then they're going to scratch the back of it. So it's actually a little moving arm. You have to make sure, to minimize all the risks. But I think, yeah, obviously we did a lot of that work, but you heard about the fader problems. we ended up with at launch. Has that been a headache for you? Yeah, I mean, you don't remember previous projects, but it's always something like that. I think on some early ship, I mean, we have always had some problems. Even if you try and predict everything that can potentially go wrong, both in the factory side or shipping, you know there's there's always something so quick backstory there okay fader gates is this thing about this particular product and it comes with a small fader on the left side of the device that when people were first getting their initial orders they were finding that it was broken or wasn't working or you have to kind of like put it together yourself a little so there's little knobs that you have to push on to the little fader and people were doing that too hard and breaking it or it was getting messed up in shipping.

24:24So it turned into like this whole thing where now if you order one, it comes with like a little plastic hard piece on top to stop it from getting crushed in the packaging during shipping. Sure. But a couple of things. One, that reminded me of all the different gates that we've experienced over the years. Plenty of gates. Plenty. Do you know what's impressive too is he brought it up. Yeah. I'm just like trying to think like Like if we talk to any other like person at a company, they would just never talk about anything like that. And if you ask them questions, it'd be like. Yeah, I had that question a little bit further down the list and he just brought it up himself.

25:01And like this wasn't like I'm not I'm not doing any like journalism here. I wasn't trying to like press him for hard questions or anything. But he just like I was just doing background information and he kind of brought it up himself, which I found really interesting. but also the other thing that really caught me off guard was he said they shipped this on the fifth or sixth iteration do you remember how many iterations we went through for the shoe for the sneaker plenty more than five or six more than five or six and that's a sneaker like no digital components no like small little knobs and things it was to be fair i've never designed a shoe before so of course it took me a lot of provisions maybe he's just that uh dialed in to the type of hardware that they're working on.

25:40Yeah, what if we just got a bunch of pieces of other old shoes and then asked you to make a shoe? Right, yeah. That's basically what they did. So I found it pretty interesting. Yeah, process. I also feel like I'm getting a look into the way the gears are turning in his head. You can see him remembering things that are organically coming up as you ask me questions, which is, that's fun. Yeah, it's always fun to talk to people that are hands-on with their products. Like this guy actually was the lead. Like he's a co-founder, but he's the lead of this product just because of the way that the company is set up.

26:13It was really interesting. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. But after it, we'll be right back with more from David Erickson.

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27:54All right, now that we paid some bills, let's jump back in. Anything that sticks up will eventually break if you drop it. In our case, it was, you know, we were quite optimistic with the packaging and the way the actual, you know, shaft or the fader was... So basically, you could just take a hammer and hit it like, and it will break. But now we have a little spacer in the packaging. yeah mine came with that yeah but partly also we try to move way like many other companies from like using plastics or foam stuff like that that makes it easy to protect the device so as soon as you go with just cardboard and like molded paper pulp you know it's just going to be more sensitive yeah but it's all good now I think it was just the first first Yeah.

28:51And that's what ends up on the early reviews. I hope people understand. I was not expecting you personally to have taken such a big role in all of this, considering like your role at the company. Is that how every project gets worked on over there? Like the someone like you said earlier, someone takes ownership. But let's say there's only what, how many employees you guys have, like 100 maybe? uh well not really but i think we're 60 to 65. so like one or two people will just take ownership of something and see that from start to finish yeah it's easiest like that we don't have like a pm project manager for all projects or it's more like on the let's say out of the 65 let's say that works here half of it we call r &d meaning we actually group every discipline that goes into making the product under r &d so industrial design mechanical engineering electronic engineering software as well as like you know designing the operating system the foundation more support packages back and we have a lot of server you know systems obviously to run the production lines uh to run the you know our website but we do everything in-house that's always been important to us we don't really we don't go to a company that builds factories or builds factory test equipment we yeah i guess it's it's it's both when we started not knowing that of course you can buy it but it's always either too expensive or too slow so you end up building those primitives yourself and then eventually you have a quite good system that you can make use of in new projects.

30:48So we can have a junior team do a product based on experiences from previous things. But yeah, we try and it's hard to but yeah, back to the headcount. If you then divide by the disciplines we're very few i think we're like four ees in total five me like so so to do everything that we do including the factories we we jump around a lot like the projects so it's it's it's it's getting this uh so i mean for the ep i mean all the factory sounds like the content it comes in of course that's managed by i mean in this case it was managed by me usually the product owner does that too so going to studios recording we work with a lot of producers and sound designers around the globe but that's that's also the same we don't have a sound person to do that or yeah that's kind of what i'm getting at it's like it's weird that this was you personally doing yeah one day you draw schematics the other day you build like some sort of like factory test equipment the third day you you edit you know drum sounds in in logic and yeah and then you we all do a little bit of coding to build like pipelines and tools to to make life easier and but it's it's it's fun like that i think it's as soon as you start to build a hierarchical dev environment you just can slow down so it's like interesting okay so then one thing that someone asked me the other day on twitter or threads or something like that that i couldn't quite pin down is someone was asking what is the overall design like what's the name for the design of teenage engineering products what do you consider it because it's very unique it's very playful i guess but it's not really like i don't know it looks like nothing else i answered i said kind of minimal and like retro future but i don't even know if that's accurate like as someone inside the company as one of the co-founders what would you call it um I mean, first of all, I think, I mean, since we're not only doing musical instruments, I mean, we try and be much, you know.

33:11You're like a design firm almost at this point. Yeah, I mean, in the past, the way we found, I mean, when we started with Teenage and built the first product op1 we we kind of we did under you know stealth mode type consulting for other companies to kind of bring in money to pay the bills for the op1 development uh so it was you we've been doing a lot of stuff that in the past that people haven't seen from like software engineering to hardware to ID work but I think we're just maybe maybe other companies won't agree but I think we just spend a lot more time and effort on the design I mean from how it looks to the detailed work like I mean I think in a bigger organization there would be a fixed amount of money in the budget.

34:14So you have to ship the product here. Don't work on the finish of this plastic or the aluminum parts any longer because it doesn't make sense from a business standpoint. But since we're not... I think we're more in it for... It's passion-driven. So we don't, of course, we have a little feel for what might sell and how to pay our employees a salary every month. But sometimes we spend an, how do you pronounce it, an unproportional amount of hours on something that might sell, you know, in the thousands, you know. Yeah. So I think it's a combination of, you know, we have an extremely skilled industrial design boss, which is also co-founder with me, Jesper.

35:17yeah yes like you know really good at not only the id part but also the product feature set down to you know the graphics so we we don't i think in many companies there is an id team there is a ux team there's a ui team and then there's a product team and they try and figure out how to make the product i mean we we all have like studios at home trying to figure out how to build the optimal you know studio so so we we know so many you know products inside out and the limitations of current equipment on the market so we don't really as we design we kind of come up with the with the ideas of how it should look like or but sometimes it's driven by a form factor or a size i mean the field mini devices are very very small i mean to the point where it's almost hard to to you know turn the knobs on the mixer so so then it could be equal amounts of just you know we still want to do this small the world's smallest portable 12 channel digital mixer yeah you know that fits in your pocket so it could be that that's the driving factor combined with you know there's nothing like it on the market so it i think it's just driven by the the feature sets and the technologies that's out there combined with just a good good design eye for design yeah i mean even the product manuals for the ep133 are gorgeous like the website looks crazy and that also that actually reminds me the ep133 looks a little like the product manuals look different than the other ones is that then is that going to be like the new thing going forward?

37:03Or was that specific just for this? I think we were maybe I mean, the initial manuals that we did like, for the OP1 back in the day, they were very, very ambitious, to the point where it gets very complicated, you had to be like a very skilled graphic designer typographies, then to even update and add a chapter for a new feature. So, So, of course, eventually you move away to make the workflow easier to tweak the manuals over time. But now we're kind of tying that back. So for the field series, it comes with a thick booklet. It's a lot of work to do those because every page is unique and there's a lot of illustrations in there.

37:52And the same with EP where we try and do it more online. So we have this online sample tool to move things in and out from the synth. And we keep it a little bit more playful and graphical. So the idea was to try and communicate in a way that it works for someone that never owned a synth. So we don't talk in terms as, you know, we're trying to avoid like lingo, you know, synthesizer lingo. it's more like this is how you record a sample and then it has a footnote saying like a sample is a piece of audio that you can you know it takes but yeah we it's actually a big team working on the manual i mean from you know just drawing it might be me drawing on paper or it's one of our sales guys that's been he drew drew with uh what do you call it aquarell uh like with you know oh like, yeah, like a yeah.

38:51Yeah. So he did a lot of like all the waveforms, you know, he's drafted like, oh, wow. That's cool. Uh, and then our graphic design team took that, made it into vector graphics. And so it's, yeah, again, um, why, why, why spend that time on the manual, but I think it's important because sometimes you, I get a little bit turned off when I go to, to user manual for a product and it just looks terrible. but I don't feel like reading it. Yeah. When you go to the manual, maybe that's the first thing you do prior to buying the product. So it's like, at least when I was a kid, I was like checking the user manuals for like, Oh, Roland and I was like, Oh man.

39:34So I knew the product before I even, you know, had the money to buy it because I read the money 10 times. Yeah. That's kind of the intention to Interesting. Yeah. Okay, so then this also on the box, as I'm looking at mine here, it says EP Series. Are there gonna be more of these?

39:57Yeah, of course we want to do more. There's no stress, but yeah, it's... I mean, the EP format is the 10-inch packaging and I think the form factor, that's kind of where we reuse because we have a few dimensions that we stick to i mean the field mini has the you know the little cigarette pack shape and then the microphone too marquez has one i'm very jealous so you use the microphone in your most recent well not most recent now at this point but in one of your recent videos yeah how did you like it like first impressions like not a full review but like yeah you've had it for what a month now yes it's honestly it's very convenient so i don't have it on a stand i was holding it in my hands yeah and you can still hear some handling noise and i should probably like get a stand and put it on a stand but i found it very convenient that it's plug and play there's an on switch it's got a decent enough pop filter built in and it sounds good from various distances and angles and i just just from those fundamentals i like it yeah so yeah it was much better than the last time i tried that which i was holding a blue yeti so didn't didn't feel as good yeah but a blue yeti is also like 90 bucks or something yeah but it's a heavy microphone that's true yeah all right so that's been it so far we'll be back with david erickson for the rest of the interview but let's throw it to a quick break

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42:40Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EPCLIS. Before starting EPCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EPCLIS and visit ePCLIS.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Okay, now let's jump back into the interview. I don't think it's going to be like the pocket operators where they look exactly the same, but have different displays. It's more that, without saying too much, it's going to be different. It's not the KO2. Interesting.

43:18Okay, nice tease there. It's going to be in the periphery and more. But it's good to find a form factory. It's also fun now when you can, okay well what else can we build and but we can't add stuff we can't change the dimensions they have to kind of be the same of course we can move things around you know change the knobs to buttons and vice versa and but yeah you have to wait and see and but yeah we we see a long you know uh i think the point of radius has been out for nine years op1 is something like 12 13 years so it's uh so ep easier is my theme at least five if not more hopefully um okay so then the last question i had was about like updates and firmwares you guys are already updating and supporting the 133 with like new new things how does that come out of like your workday specifically like as someone that is also i'm assuming juggling other things and even collaborations like you guys are working with nothing you're working with rabbit like there's all kinds of other projects happening how do you plan to support these things in the long term i mean we use the machines ourselves uh so we the and we have a lot of musicians and and and you know beat makers in the building that's that's finding bugs and requesting features and then we have our kind of close group beta team that we always collaborate with they get all our products early on and so we have a pretty good ongoing discussion and then actually i i don't know if it's good or bad but sometimes i get you know a couple of hours a saturday night after you know kids went to sleep where i joined the forums you know that's dangerous man that's dangerous that's like making the comments on a youtube video yeah sometimes i go in and it's like should i yeah well so real quick yeah how often do you guys just like jump in the comments of youtube videos and not like the recent ones i know you're in there like immediately after it's published you're in there like for the next like two hours or whatever but like six months ago and just like read your comments oh um i actually do i kind of have my methods with sorting through comments because i've read so many that i know where to sort of find good comments honestly sometimes i'll go to an old video and instead of looking at the top comments i'll look at the most recent comments because those are people who are kind of just like showing up organically from a recommendation or something they just found it and i'll also spoiler some of my favorite comments are not on youtube they're from other sites that have their own comment sections that have embedded it so like a subreddit for example will have a video that i've made and the comments from the subreddit will be often way more informative and a little more zoomed out than just like the first 24 hours of people like i'm first here's some spam so i i found it fun to read comments for people who i know have never seen one of the videos yeah andrew i read way too many too many if it's my video like the keyboard one or the outdoor tech probably like for the first month i'll probably read every single comment every comment yeah it gets to the point sometimes with pod releasing where on friday night we're watching tv and claire won't hear me talk for a few minutes or like 20 minutes and be like put the phone put your phone down you shouldn't be reading these it's friday night like it's time to relax so i read too many maybe not for my own sake sometimes perfect so if you have anything you really want andrew to know he's just totally nice i need i need nice nice comments no mean ones but yeah there's been some good forums actually where sometimes we're just like lurking around to see what's out there but sometimes i you know i actually it's same with other product owners here for some some of our other sins if you feel that someone is actually both providing feedback on like this could have been you know done differently i mean a lot of people is missing out on a way to sample without holding your finger down because sometimes you want to like move away to piano and use people are solving that by putting like a weight on a key or something yeah bo beats did that he had a little camera battery.

47:51We know that, but it's good to join that discussion on the forum. Sometimes I might just reply and say, yep, we're going to do it. And up until this stage, it's just production and stability to get just to hire. There's always some glitches with power and stuff that we had to iron out. so we build a lot of what we call like automated automated test monkeys so we have eps in our server rack so one might just sample you know on and off 24 7 and we have like a thing that comes to power in the middle of a sample the other one is just doing patterns like really long ones stuff that would take hours to do manually i think the third one is just like randomizing keystrokes and just, you know, try to make it break.