Here’s our third instalment of our 20 questions interview series, where we put the same questions to different makers within the modular, synth & music tech space. This time I have the pleasure of putting questions to Jon-Mark of Apollo View.
Apollo View started as a music production outfit that launched into hardware design with their first Eurorack module Rabbit Hole and multiple module release later they’ve now got into the software side of things too. Continuing reading for more!
01 How would you introduce yourself to someone who has no idea who you are and no idea of the modular, synth, & music tech spaces?
I’m Jon-Mark. I’m someone who needs to understand how things work and how to make them better; that’s just how I’m wired. For the last five years or so, that obsession has led me to designing and building tools and toys for electronic musicians and music-making hobbyists. The simplest way I can put it: the things I make either make sounds or make sounds sound better. Before that, I was a DJ, a physics graduate, a science teacher, and a surgical devices sales rep, so it’s been a bit of a scenic winding road to get here.
02 How would you introduce yourself to someone who is aware of modular, synth & music tech worlds?
I’m a DJ and producer turned electronics engineer turned software engineer. I single-handedly run Apollo View Modular. The name comes from a music project I share with my oldest friend Tom, which is still going. So far, everything I’ve released has been analogue Eurorack, and tubes have become a big part of both the sound and the visual identity. I’m the kind of person who will spend weeks swapping out resistor values, chasing a specific saturation character from a VCA stage. Tone and character are everything to me; that’s what got me into building my own modules in the first place, and it’s still what drives every design decision. I’ve been branching into digital modules and plugins too, though nothing on that side has been released yet.
03 What were your early influences for getting into what you do now?
I started DJing when I was 11 on a setup hashed together from my dad’s hi-fi deck, a Tandy mixer, and a huge self-contained school record player my mum brought home from the school she taught at. It had 16rpm and 78rpm alongside the usual 33 and 45, and thankfully an aux out I could feed into the mixer. I spent all my time blending whatever records of my dad’s I could find with early rave, acid house, and hardcore. This was around 1992.
My oldest friend Tom was getting into DJing at the same age independently. We met at secondary school, both aged 11, both already DJing. By 15 we had a regular gig together at a sweaty shoebox of a club under The Gun Shop in our local town. I still don’t know why the guy running it was employing two 15-year-olds for over-18s nights, but this was the 90s and we weren’t going to miss the opportunity. We started making music together from about 1997, and he’s gone on to huge success with projects like Psychemagik and Thomaas Banks.
By 18 I was earning good money and planning on DJing as a career. My parents thought that was ridiculous and pushed me towards university. I ended up on a Physics degree almost by accident, but the foundation year gave me my first taste of electronics. I found it fascinating, but to my naive 18-year-old DJ-obsessed mind, it felt “done.” Great decks existed. Great mixers existed. What more was there to make? So I stuck with physics.
Fast forward about 12 years of careers in teaching and surgical device sales, all the while still DJing and producing. The music I was making stayed rooted in where I started: deep, dark, bass-heavy stuff that traced a line back to those early rave and jungle records I grew up on. I’d built up a Eurorack system, mostly through DIY, chasing tone and character for my productions. I kept wondering how hard it could be to design my own modules. A chance encounter with Look Mum No Computer at a music industry event gave me the encouragement and direction I needed to actually put that curiosity into action.
04 What was the first thing you created either as Apollo View or something for yourself?
After my chat with LMNC, he told me to look up the CEM3340 VCO chip. I did, but it was a bit too much for me at first. So after lots of research I decided to start with a TR-808 kick voice board, based on a protoboard project by Eric Archer. Protoboard was messy though, a real ratsnest, so I remade it on veroboard (stripboard) which was a major upgrade.
Then, bit by bit, I added every voice from the TR-808 until I had them all. I added all the cool mods I could find and housed the whole thing in a big wooden box with an aluminium front panel. Each voice has a CV trigger input and an audio out. I still use it to this day. Every sound is huge, thick, and full of character.
Around the same time, I started building stomp boxes as presents for my dad and brother-in-law, who both play guitar. One of them was a tube-based distortion design. That was my first real hands-on experience with tubes, and looking back, it was the start of an obsession that would eventually define Apollo View.
05 What was the first product you brought to market and how was that received?
Rabbit Hole was my first product. I’d found that my Eurorack system wasn’t giving me the character or tone I wanted in my productions. Everything felt too pristine, too clean. I kept tracking sounds into my DAW and then reaching for tube distortion plugins to rough them up, and at some point that felt ridiculous: expensive outboard gear being processed by plugin emulations. Why even bother with Eurorack? I might as well stay in the box and use soft synths, unless there was a hardware alternative.
There seemed to be one solution: make a tube distortion module. Originally, the plan was purely personal, maybe one for me and a couple for friends. There were already a few tube modules on the market, but most were essentially “always on,” applying total destruction. I also wanted the other end of the spectrum: subtle saturation, just a bit of warmth and thickness. Years of producing and mixing had drilled into me how important controlled saturation is, and that felt like a missing tool in Eurorack.
This was early 2020, during COVID. I’d been furloughed and suddenly had the time to dive in properly. An honourable mention goes to LMNC here, as Rabbit Hole began life with me breadboarding his Safety Valve 2.0 design.
https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/valve-distorting-vca
At one point, Glasgow Make Some Noise had turned that design into a Eurorack DIY kit. If that kit had been readily available at the time, Rabbit Hole might never have existed.
But it wasn’t, and as I breadboarded the original I kept wanting more: the full range from subtle warmth to face-melting distortion. Over time it evolved into something quite different: a tube module that could subtly warm signals, sum and glue multiple sources, or go completely wild for sound design.
During development, I was sharing progress on the DivKid Discord. People seemed to really like what they were seeing and hearing, and that response was what tipped me into seriously thinking about a commercial product. So, how was it received? Well enough to convince me to start a company.
06 How did making that first product influence the next one? Any lessons learned to pass onto others?
While developing Rabbit Hole, I ran into a problem I’d created for myself. It’s a two-stack PCB design, and I’d got all the components on the second board facing outward. I realised it would be much better to have them on the inside, like the filling of a sandwich, rather than exposed on the back. Flipping them broke something, and it took me ages to reroute and figure out what had gone wrong.
That delay turned out to be a blessing. In the meantime, I’d started work on a VCO using the CEM3340 chip, which became Allscillator. I wanted the pitch to give some visual feedback, so I added LEDs running at two octaves below the core frequency. I needed them to shine through the front panel, so I cut reveals into the panel where there was no copper or solder mask. Space was tight in 10HP, so the reveals ended up as narrow lines. That happy accident became the entire visual identity of Apollo View.
Because Rabbit Hole still hadn’t been released, I could go back and redesign its front panel to match. The original design had a literal swirling graphic of looking down a rabbit hole.
The new abstract design with the LED reveals works so much better. I wouldn’t have come up with it if I hadn’t been forced to solve a practical problem on Allscillator first.
The lesson I’d pass on: don’t rush to release. The delay also gave me time to add features to Rabbit Hole that I now consider essential. Sometimes the setback is the product telling you it’s not ready yet.
07 Would you say you make things for yourself? How much community influence comes into play with new ideas?
So far, almost everything has come from a personal pain point or a creative need I had, balanced with where I saw an unfilled gap in the Eurorack space. Rabbit Hole exists because I needed tube saturation that wasn’t just full destruction. Allscillator exists because I wanted a VCO with specific flexibility I couldn’t find elsewhere. The spark always starts with something I want for my own music making.
That said, I don’t develop in a vacuum. Sharing progress on the DivKid Discord was a big part of Rabbit Hole’s journey, and conversations at Superbooth always plant seeds. But I’m not trying to pump out a module for every Eurorack function. I don’t see myself making a standard function generator anytime soon; that ground has been well covered. For me, a new module has to offer something I can’t already get, or do something familiar in a way that sounds or feels genuinely different.
08 How do you decide on the value ranges for the controls or CV inputs on your modules?
For all of my modules the standard CV range is 0-5V, unless it’s a 1V/Oct or exponential FM input. Every CV input has an attenuverter, so if you’ve got a module spitting out 0-10V you can bring it down to match, or conversely, you can deliberately push a hotter signal in for extra saturation or distortion. That flexibility was a conscious choice.
With Manic specifically, 0-5V maps to the full unity range of the VCA: at 0V it’s essentially closed, at 5V what goes in comes out unchanged, and if you push beyond that you get amplification, which could mean more clipping or more wavefolding. That was very much by design.
For knob ranges and anything musical, I start with what makes technical sense, making sure I’m not clipping signals or hitting limits. Then I dial things in by ear, swapping resistor and capacitor values until everything feels right across the full range. I use very low tolerance components because tolerances can stack up between resistors and potentiometers, and you end up in a mess. Getting that precision right at the component level is what makes the difference between a module that feels good and one that’s slightly off.
09 Generally speaking, what do your products offer that others don’t?
The obvious thing is the tubes. I’m not the only company using vacuum tubes in Eurorack, but they’re uncommon, and for Apollo View they’re central to both the sound and the visual identity. They’re not a gimmick; they’re there because I couldn’t get the saturation character I wanted any other way.
Beyond that, I think it’s the obsessive attention to detail. The design language of the panels gets a lot of comments, and I’m proud of that, but what matters more to me is what’s behind the panel. I use very tight tolerance components, I spend a long time dialling in ranges by ear, and I test extensively before anything ships. With Allscillator, for example, the tracking precision and the flexibility of the waveform outputs are things people consistently mention. That all comes down to how much time goes into getting things right before I’ll let a product out the door.
I’d rather have a small lineup where every module earns its place than pump out modules just to cover every Eurorack function.
10 What are some of the challenges in manufacturing, any tips to share?
Plenty of challenges over the years. The first one that jumps out is front panels. I use FR4 circuit board material for the panels so the LEDs can shine through, and getting manufacturers to consistently get things right has been an ongoing battle. Wrong drill hole sizes, glossy finishes turning up when I ordered matte, and manufacturers refusing to acknowledge their mistakes. I’ve switched suppliers several times and each one has brought its own set of issues. The tip there is simple: always check every delivery, because mistakes on their side will slip in.
The other big one was Manic. The sheer amount of functionality crammed into a 8HP module with a two-stack PCB meant I used every single millimetre of space. Routing the traces was an absolute nightmare and it ended up as a six-layer board. I spent weeks painting myself into corners and rerouting. If I could go back, I’d give myself more room.
Tips for others: watch out for feature creep, and always use the biggest possible surface mount solder pad area you can. I’ve had components fall off in transit because the pads were too small for a solid mechanical bond. It’s a small detail that can cause big headaches.
11 How do classic instruments and designs influence your own work?
I didn’t think classic designs had much influence on my work, but on reflection they’re all over it. Allscillator started with LMNC’s recommendation to use the CEM3340 chip. When I started researching designs around that chip, one of the best I found was the Digisound 80, a British modular synthesiser designed by Charles Blakey and published as construction articles in ETI magazine from 1980. You’d build it module by module from the magazine. It wasn’t a household name, but it was well regarded in DIY electronics circles, and its VCO was built around the CEM3340. Allscillator is essentially a modernised and expanded take on that design.
Manic has both a Serge-style and a Buchla-style wavefolder in it. Vamp’s topology is loosely based on the MS-20 filter, but I replaced the diode clipping circuit with a tube, which just sounds phenomenal. Rabbit Hole traces its lineage back through LMNC’s Safety Valve to Matsumin’s Valvecaster DIY pedal. So shout out to everyone who went before me.
But I’ve never wanted to make a direct clone of anything. The approach has always been to stand on the shoulders of those who came before and give it my own spin. And alongside those, several of my modules are completely original designs with no classic reference point at all.
12 Do you find inspiration in areas outside of the one you work within?
On the surface, I don’t think so. There’s no single outside field where I can point and say “that’s where the idea came from.” But when I think harder about it, everything feeds in subconsciously. My physics degree shows up in how I think about tolerances, signal behaviour, and precision. Years of producing and mix engineering completely shaped how I approach gain staging and saturation; those instincts are baked into every design decision I make. Even teaching, which I did for a while, trained me to think about how someone encounters something for the first time, which matters when you’re designing a user interface for a module.
I do have some unrealised ideas for modules inspired by physical phenomena, but I haven’t executed them yet. Maybe that’s the answer for next time someone asks me this question.
13 What would you do if you weren’t designing and making gear?
Hahaha! Definitely producing music! The irony isn’t lost on me: this whole journey began as me making tools for myself to make music with, and somehow the process of making those tools has become so all-consuming that I don’t have time to actually make music anymore. It’s funny and painful in equal measure. I’m hoping to find a way to rebalance that and carve out some time for music again.
14 Whose equipment besides your own inspires you and why?
In Eurorack, close to home, I really like and appreciate what Venus Instruments is doing. Adam has two modules out so far, both to the highest quality, and I love how much functionality he packs into them while keeping it pretty much one knob per function. It’s really well thought out.
Also a shout out to basically everybody in Beach Tent number four at Superbooth. TiNRS, Making Sound Machines, Knobula, Error Instruments, Schreibmaschine, Vaski Embedded, and others I’m inevitably forgetting. There are so many incredible engineers and creators in that tent, and every year I’m there I’m glad to call them friends. It blows my mind what everybody is doing.
I also have to mention Instruo. The quality of their products is exceptional, and the way they’re pushing boundaries with plugin connectivity really excites and inspires me. That crossover between hardware and software is an area I’m increasingly drawn to.
Outside of Eurorack, I’ve always loved pretty much everything Roland does. They clearly inspired my first ever build, the 808. I would still love to own the TR-1000. That thing is built like a tank and the amount of engineering they’ve packed in at that price point is incredible.
15 What was the last product you created?
Vamp, which came out around Halloween last year. It’s a filter with bite. The topology is loosely based on the MS-20, but with the diode clipping circuit replaced by a tube. There are actually two triodes in there: one on the input path and one where the original clipping circuit was. It sounds absolutely phenomenal.
It’s got a built-in VCA that can be switched pre or post filter, so you can boost gain into the input triode for more distortion before filtering, or place it after for cleaner dynamics. On the output there’s an additional clipping circuit switch called Fangs: off, soft clip, or hard clip. The CV routing is something I’m particularly proud of. The Gain CV is normalled to the Frequency Modulation CV, which is normalled to the Resonance CV, and they all have attenuverters so you can scale or invert at each stage. So with a single CV input you can control three parameters that aren’t normally connected on a typical filter. Break the normalling and send slightly different envelopes to the gain and frequency response and you can get close to low-pass gate behaviour. And the resonance was designed to go way beyond normal limits. It will genuinely scream. Push it further and it self-oscillates, so you can play it like a VCO.
I’ve actually been working on several filter designs over the years. This one jumped to the top of the pile the moment I started on it, and it’s been well-received by the community since release.
16 Rather than ask “what’s next?” Where is your current inspiration and thinking for your future?
For the last 14 months I’ve been studying software engineering with AI. I don’t have plans to inject AI into any products. I have pretty conservative, organic beliefs about the place of AI in the music-making process. But the focus on software engineering means I can finally finish some digital modules that have been in the pipeline for years, and it’s opened up a whole new direction, plugins.
I’m happy to say that after four years in the making, I have two audio plugins either available now or very soon at shop.apolloviewmusic.com/plugins. They’re an oscilloscope called Scope (free) and a premium version called DeltaScope with a plethora of extra features including a spectrum analyser. There have been some great free oscilloscope plugins over the years, but I’ve never found the perfect one, paid or otherwise. I’ve passionately believed for a long time that every music maker should have access to a good scope, so I’m happy to carry the freeware scope torch forward with Scope, and the premium DeltaScope is there for serious users at a reasonable price.
Check out both the free and paid for Deltascope HERE
I see the future of Apollo View being both hardware and software. On the module side, I currently have 13 prototypes at various stages of development. There’s a tube-based compressor in the works, I might turn the Scope into a digital module, and there’s another digital module I’ve been itching to finalise. I’ve also been setting up to create a lot more video content, including module demos and educational synthesis videos. I’m very curious to see what surfaces next.
17 What’s a piece of music you’d like us to check out?
The first vinyl record I ever bought: Nut-E-1, Off The Nut Vol 1 from 1993. I just saw it was actually remastered and repressed in 2020. The standout track, Underwater Fireworks, is one of those tunes that sits right at the moment jungle was splitting off from hardcore rave and becoming something darker and more cinematic. It opens with these haunting, submerged pads, and then the breakbeats erupt through them like, well, fireworks underwater. It’s a seriously underrated piece of early jungle that I keep coming back to. It shaped my ears more than I probably realised at the time.
Nosaj Thing, Coat of Arms from 2009. This was my phone ringtone for many, many years. It’s got these ghostly, almost choral pads floating over fractured Dilla-style beats that feel like they’re always about to explode but never quite do. Nosaj Thing himself has talked about being influenced by Chopin and Debussy, and once you know that, you can hear it. The whole thing feels like tripped-out monks chant rebuilt from glitchy hip-hop fragments. Even though it’s 16 years old it still sounds like it’s from the future.
Lie Down by Saya Gray from her album Saya from last year. This is the last song on the album, and for me, she saved the best for last. It pulls at my heart in a way no other song has. It has a strange, twisted, dreamy nostalgia of feelings I never had, or maybe that I’ll have in the future. The first time you hear it is like the echo of a memory from another life. I am totally addicted to it, I can’t stop listening to it.
And a couple of shameless plugs for my own older music. I can’t wait to have more time to make new stuff. // Valley Of The Shadows (Apollo View Dubplate) // Apollo View Delta V EP // Spiritual Aura (Apollo View Remix)
18 What is something unrelated you’d like to mention for people to check out or be aware of?
I love cooking. The kitchen is where I switch off and decompress. Even though it might look fast and furious from the outside, I find myself in a state of total flow in there. It’s almost meditative for me.
So with that in mind: Peruvian food. My mother-in-law is from Peru and it has completely changed the way I eat. If you haven’t tried ceviché, you’re missing out. It’s lime-cured fish and it’s insanely good. If you have a good fishmonger it’s also relatively easy to make at home, and you can make yourself a proper big portion rather than the tiny servings you tend to get in restaurants. And if you don’t like fish, don’t worry, there’s so much more to Peruvian cuisine. There’s a reason Peru has won the World’s Leading Culinary Destination award almost every year since 2012, and Lima currently has four restaurants in the World’s 50 Best. It’s a cuisine built on an incredible blend of indigenous, Spanish, African, and Asian influences, and it deserves way more attention than it gets outside foodie circles. Go try it. Oh, and pisco sours are hands down the world’s best cocktail.
19 What’s a question you wish I had asked?
Who’s in your corner? I said earlier that I single-handedly run Apollo View, and technically that’s true on the engineering side. But there are two incredibly important people without whom none of this would exist.
First and foremost, my wife. She is a legal partner in the company and does every job you can imagine. She listens to me rant about super technical things while smiling and nodding, and then somehow asks exactly the right question that helps me get unstuck. She stamps the boxes, packs orders, assembles modules, gives feedback on early designs, and looks after our daughter to give me the headspace and time to hit deadlines. She’s not a musician and she’s not into synths, but without her Apollo View simply wouldn’t function.
The second is Tom. I’ve already mentioned we go way back, but his role in Apollo View Modular goes well beyond lending me the name. Tom was instrumental in helping me refine the graphic design of Allscillator, which ended up defining the brand’s entire visual identity. He’s a genius musician with incredible instincts, and he’s an early tester on every product. He’s not technically involved in the electronics, but his ears and his creative guidance are woven into everything I make.
I’m incredibly lucky to have both of them in my corner. And I’d be remiss not to mention some bloke called Ben “DivKid” Wilson too. He gets involved with many of my ideas and designs, and his input has been valuable more times than I can count.
20 To end the questions here’s one from the previous guest (question from Ryan at Acid Rain Techology below) and what’s a question you’d like me to ask the next guest?
Question for the next guest from Ryan at Acid Rain Technology – If you had to make an entire 10 track album with one piece of hardware gear what would it be?
It would have to be an Akai S1000. I don’t have one, but that machine is the sound of the music I grew up on. It was the weapon of choice for the early jungle pioneers, and its primitive timestretching algorithm became one of the most iconic sounds in dance music. It was never meant to be pushed as far as those producers pushed it. But when you timestretched an amen break or a vocal way beyond the algorithm’s limits, the artefacts it produced, that shimmering, robotic, granular quality, became the defining texture of jungle and early drum and bass. You can hear it all over records like Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness” and Double 99’s “RipGroove.”
The workflow was brutal by today’s standards. 16-bit, 44.1kHz, just 2MB of RAM. You had to be ruthless about what you sampled and at what quality. Every chop, every edit, every arrangement decision carried real weight because you couldn’t just undo and try again. Producers would spend weeks on a set of drums that you could rough out in an afternoon in a modern DAW. Being forced into those constraints, the creative problem-solving, the happy accidents, the sounds that only exist because the machine couldn’t quite do what you asked of it, that’s the aesthetic I’d love to embrace.
FOR THE NEXT GUEST: What tool, resource, or piece of knowledge do you rely on now that you wish had existed when you were starting out? And is there something that still doesn’t exist that would help others on their journey into making synths?
All things Apollo View are HERE on their website. That’s it for this edition of 20 questions, who would you like to hear from in the next one? You can check out all 20 Questions interviews HERE.
