Welcome to a new 20 Questions interview! This time with Morgan from WORNG Electronics. I first heard of WORNG when the original v1 red panelled LRMSMSLR module appeared at Thonk years back. I ended up grabbing one and going on a journey or learning about mid side processing, something at the time I hadn’t even considered part of sound synthesis. Multiple great modules have followed from WORNG since, lets get right into it!
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?
Hello I’m Morgan and I like riding bikes and making things I can use to play around with sound. I have a chihuahua named Reggie and I’m from Melbourne in Australia.
02 How would you introduce yourself to someone who is aware of modular, synth & music tech worlds?
Hello I’m Morgan and WORNG Electronics is my fault.
03 What were your early influences for getting into what you do now?
As a kid I was always taking things to pieces and then putting them back together to see how they worked. As an adult I joined a band some friends of mine had (thanks Milo, Daina, and Dan!) where my role in the band was to kind of figure out sound stuff like how to use a mixing desk to make an all-electronic band work in venues that usually had rock bands. I got kind of good at figuring that stuff out and then ended up working as a sound engineer as well as playing in synth bands, then started building DIY modular stuff and eventually designing my own modules.
04 What was the first thing you created either as WORNG or something for yourself?
WORNG started out as my solo side project and I played live quite a lot, so I started building things to make the live experience more interesting than just some guy pressing unknown buttons on a stage. I started making ridiculous stage props like a pyramid made from bubble wrap that inflated on stage while I played (on the floor so I could hear the PA properly) and a bubble wrap suit with inflatable arms attached to it. You can make pretty much anything with some bubble wrap and sticky tape, and if it’s inflatable it packs down easily for taking to gigs in a taxi.
To give people something to look at I built a little video synth thing which was an Arduino with an 8 bit game engine shield on it and a thing I made that could take the voltages from my synth and feed them to the Arduino which I programmed to make visuals that reacted to the CV that was making the music I was playing, that was the first WORNG Electronics thing but I didn’t realise it at the time. There’s a little bit of video of it from me playing a set in my friend Pat’s house that I’ll link here.
I talk about it a bit in this interview I did with Vice magazine (remember Vice?).
05 What was the first product you brought to market and how was that received?
I had been wanting a euro midside processor for ages so one afternoon I built the circuit that became the LRMSMSLR on protoboard for fun, then a little while later I made a PCB and panel for it so I could put it in my rack. There was a minimum of ten at the PCB place I ordered it from and I only wanted two, so I put a post up on Muffwiggler (as it was called at the time) to see if I could sell the other eight and I had a whole lot of people want them, so I had more made and then more and then eventually started building them for people who didn’t want to DIY them themselves, then all of a sudden I realised that it was a real module that people wanted.
06 How did making that first product influence the next one? Any lessons learned to pass onto others?
The next thing I designed was another thing I wanted for myself, a buffered mult with a cable tester built in. I wanted to try designing something with SMD parts, and I was playing around with the spacing of things and made the mistake of putting two jacks side by side in a 4hp module so they were too close together to easily use. I think that’s a trap that a lot of people fall into, trying to make things as small as possible and ending up making them difficult to use. That was the one and only time I sacrificed ergonomics for size and it’s been the least popular thing I’ve designed.
07 Would you say you make things for yourself? How much community influence comes into play with new ideas?
I make things entirely for myself, I’ve been very into synths for a long long time so I assume that something that I want will be popular with other advanced modular users, and I haven’t been wrong about that very often. As well as studying electronic engineering I worked as an interaction design researcher at a university here, I’ve been performing live with electronic and modular gear for 20+ years and I’ve been a professional sound engineer for almost as long, so I’m uniquely qualified to cover all aspects of electronic instrument design.
Market research is fine for people who don’t have any ideas of their own but probably those people shouldn’t be the ones designing things anyway. I take on community feedback for some things, for example in that picture above the LRMSMSLR has a black and gold panel because there were a lot of people who didn’t want a red panel like the original design. You can also see there’s a shrouded power header on the Buff Test which was something that people were interested in as an additional level of security against power cable reversing mishaps. (All WORNG modules are protected against reverse power, but the shrouded header means you have to be extra crafty to work out how you can apply power incorrectly)
At the same time everybody is a product of the community around them, and I’ve been influenced by countless musicians, performers, techs, designers and just straight up synth nerds so maybe all my ideas come from the community in some way.
08 How do you decide on the value ranges for the controls or CV inputs on your modules?
Firstly all my modules are analogue so I make sure they always can accept any signal within the eurorack power rails gracefully. Audio signals can be up to +-12V and they won’t exhibit phase reversal clipping, they’ll just move into hard clipping. Depending on what they’re controlling, CVs will initially move parameters a bit wider than the controls can or they’ll gracefully stop at a point where I’ve decided they should. For example both the Vertex and SideCar VCAs will accept a CV above the level that gives unity gain, but they won’t push the VCA output into clipping. Eurorack has such an insanely low amount of headroom the last thing a VCA needs is positive gain, if there’s positive gain it should be sold as a distortion module that distorts your whole mix.
Control ranges I set by playing with prototypes and working out what I want to happen when a control is turned all the way up or down and what’s a good point for in the middle. It’s a little bit of a balancing act to get a good range so you can dial in precisely but also modulate nicely with CV.
It costs a little more and is harder to design a module to behave nicely outside of the “normal” range of values and CVs but it’s worth it when you’re using it.
09 Generally speaking, what do your products offer that others don’t?
They sound really good, they have great ergonomics, and they look cool. And the SoundStage will make anyone finish more tracks because it takes raw mixes where everything gets swamped by everything else and gives each element its own space in the mix. But the main thing is just sound quality.
10 What are some of the challenges in manufacturing, any tips to share?
Everything is a challenge in some way, but really it’s so easy to manufacture modules these days we don’t know how easy we’ve got it. You don’t need massive amounts of capital to do a production run, the parts are fairly standardised in a way that they weren’t even fifteen years ago (it’s easy to fit jack sockets and pots to the same panel and PCB without needing daughter boards etc), the resources to design things are readily available online, we’ve got great companies like Sound Semiconductor Inc. and Alfa Rpar and others making great, well documented parts, PCB design software is free and easy to use. I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to say that in 2026 designing and manufacturing a eurorack module is as easy as putting together a modular synth and recording an album with it was in 1996.
11 How do classic instruments and designs influence your own work?
I’m very influenced by the classic instruments I learned synths on and played when I’m designing things, particularly the clean and easy to use interfaces of synths like the Juno 6, Yamaha CS-15 and Oberheim Two Voice. Those all sound fantastic too, it’s simple to pull out great tones that sound good in a mix right away. Some eurorack designs are too fiddly to use or focus more on features than sound quality, I always keep in mind “this needs to be a great instrument to play on a stage or in a recording studio” when I’m designing something new.
12 Do you find inspiration in areas outside of the one you work within?
Yes I grew up skateboarding and that culture has had a lasting effect on me, I don’t think you ever stop being a skater. I take inspiration from the DIY spirit of skating, the art design, the way people just make things happen. I think there’s a lot of similarities between skate companies and eurorack brands, there are a few big ones but the majority of them are the vision of one or two people and they’ve just made it happen because they wanted to.
13 What would you do if you weren’t designing and making gear?
Before I was making modules full time I was working as a sound engineer, so I’d probably do that again. I was lucky to work with some great artists here in Melbourne as well as some amazing international artists when they came to Australia for shows (James Holden, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Iron Lung, Skream, etc). Or I’d like to do more interaction design research again, designing instruments is one part electronic circuit design, one part human interaction design, and one part industrial design.
14 Whose equipment besides your own inspires you and why?
I love Grant Richter’s Wiard modules; great concepts, excellent consistent vision, very cool looking, sound amazing. I would love to have a big Wiard 300 series system.
One of the first modules I designed, the Vector Space, was inspired by the Wiard JAG, but extended into three dimensions rather than two. At the time I wanted to get a JAG for my system but they weren’t available new and rarely came up second hand, so the Vector Space is based on what I thought the JAG would be like having read about it but never having used one. I eventually tracked down a second hand one after the Vector Space had come out and using it was quite different to what I expected, which was nice as it added something new, rather than just being an extension of something that already existed.
Also the Oberheim TVS-Pro and Echofix EF-X3 combination I’m lucky to own, two modern recreations of amazing vintage gear that capture the sonic magic of the originals but don’t have the maintenance issues of something 50 years old.
15 What was the last product you created?
The last one was the Glowing Orb stereo state-variable filter. It takes the 2140 filter core with its asymmetrical clipping and configures it as a stereo state-variable filter inspired by the Oberheim SEM filter design. I was inspired to create a filter that would complement my Parallax stereo filter, so I made it state-variable instead of lowpass only, I made it a compact 10hp instead of Parallax’s luxurious 16hp, I pared down the controls to the most essential functions instead of making everything CV controllable like Parallax. I also added a drive control to allow the filter to be driven harder without increasing the level too much on the output. The result is a filter with a great classic tone that’s capable of a wide range of sounds, but with modern conveniences like stereo operation.
16 Rather than ask “what’s next?” Where is your current inspiration and thinking for your future?
I’m pretty close to having a full range of modules that could be its own system with a clear and unified vision, that’s something I think about sometimes. I also have some thoughts on designs of things that could exist outside the eurorack world, it’s a great niche but it’s a small one, and there are some limitations of the format that could be interesting to not have to work around.
17 What’s a piece of music you’d like us to check out?
The Black Mill Tapes series of albums by Pye Corner Audio. Incredibly deep, dark, finely controlled synth with texture unlike anything anybody else is making.
https://pyecorneraudio.bandcamp.com/album/black-mill-tapes-10th-anniversary-box
18 What is something unrelated you’d like to mention for people to check out or be aware of?
Did you know Detective John Munch appears in more TV shows than any other fictional character, linking those shows together as happening in the same universe? Some of the shows are Homicide Life on the Street, Law and Order SVU, The X-Files, Luther, The Wire, and many more. I’d like to see a show about a young Munch growing up in Baltimore, someone should make that.
19 What’s a question you wish I had asked?
Maybe something about headroom, Eurorack’s (lack of) headroom (only ~6dB!!!) is a bit of a recurring topic of conversation for me, as it’s really not suitable for the kinds of uses that eurorack systems are put to these days. The 10Vpp signal level is great if you want to use audio signals as modulation and it means the signal to noise ratio can be good without having to get too fancy with the power supply, but it means that you need to do a 6dB cut every time you mix two signals together, which a lot of people don’t realise. You could just about get away with it when eurorack systems were being used as individual synth voices as they were when I got into it in 2009 or so, but now people are making systems which are basically mini studios and the headroom issue tends to come up a lot more. I design my modules in a way where the user is guided to make good mixing decisions through the interface, as well as things like limiting gain to unity to keep things from inadvertently clipping, but educating people about it can really help them pull better mixes without needing to mix externally.
20 To end the questions here’s one from the previous guest –
Jorge from NANO Modules asked – “Why did you start your business, and what made you feel you had something worth showing to the world?”
I didn’t go out trying to start my business, I just made a thing that I wanted to use and then asked if anyone else wanted the leftover circuit boards I had, then people kept asking to buy them so I made more for them, then eventually Thonk got in touch wanting to buy an amount that made it into a real business. I never had to worry about if what I made was worth showing the world because the world kept asking me to buy it. 🙂
And what’s a question you’d like me to ask the next guest?
What’s one change you’ve seen in the synth world since you’ve been part of it, and is it good or bad? Why?
Thanks to Morgan for answering our questions, it’s always a pleasure to learn more about the people behind the gear. Who would you like to see in the next interview? Let us know! Check out the other 20 Questions interviews you may have missed here.
