The MMM Arrives

Snowstorm in New York City, modular synth in a plastic bag on the subway, just another normal day.



My Mattson Mini Modular arrived today. An entire year since I ordered it, taking a lot on faith, trading emails with George and getting pretty regular updates. And now it’s sitting in my living room with blinkenlights and a spaghetti of patch cords. It’s hard to even think of it as finished. It’s been a process for so long that it’s hard to think of it as a product. I’m not criticizing or anything, far from it. Some things simply take time to design, build and test.



It’s hard to describe how small it is. It’s shockingly small. The modules are half the size of my MOTM modules. The whole thing, all 22 modules, could fit in a large-ish backpack. I don’t mean a camping trip backpack, I’m talking about an on-one-shoulder book bag type of backpack. A Minimoog has 10 or 11 modules, more or less. My MMM has 22, with room for two more, and it’s smaller than my Mini. I could put together two more cabinets for a total of 48 modules and it would still be smaller than my Minimoog. And, it’s a modular. I can hook things up any which way I want. I have SKB popup mixer cases filled with MOTM modules. Each one holds maybe a dozen modules (if you get a bunch of small ones). I could fit the entire MMM modular with its 24 modules inside the SKB case and still have room for plenty of other gear.

I can see getting plenty more modules. I’ve had it for two hours, and I can already see needing more. I know, it’s a sickness. I haven’t even hooked it up to a keyboard yet, just patched together a pile of modules and flipped the envelope generator switches to make them cycle. It sounds great, too. I’ll post some mp3s over the weekend, but I can’t right now because all my gear is 1/4" and the MMM is 1/8" (sheepish grin). I’ll have to get some conversion cables before I can plug it into my audio interface.

George has shipped the first batch of MMM systems. I hope plenty more people order them and he can spend the next bunch of years making more and more modules. If you’ve been on the fence about getting one, get off the fence. It’s totally worth it. I’ve been the guinea pig so you don’t have to. Go for it.