So I was recently watching an old video on elektron history and heard someone from nine inch nails had a hand in creating the sid station. Anyone know who that person from NIN was?
I’ve never heard this nine inch nails bit so it’s an interesting question, NIN is basically Trent Reznor and the touring line up has changed a lot over the years.
Per the title: I don’t think sid station contributions is what you’re looking for, that reads like you want sounds or tracks made on the sid station. Asking something like “who were all the contributors in designing the sid station”, something like that will tell people specifically what you want to know.
You should probably also link the video where you heard this Elektron history so it’s easier to get on the same page with the source.
If you want to google whether or not any members or former members of NIN are Swedish, that’s probably a good start. My understanding was that Elektron’s founders (in Sweden) created and designed the sid station as a graduate project.
edit: from a random link:
"Initially, Elektron was nothing more than a company name established to shell the funds that a small group of friends were able to make from one of their university projects. Daniel Hansson, Anders Gärder and Mikael Räim all shared a computer science course together, and after finding all of the other options for one particular assessment too easy, they put their brains together to craft a synthesizer.
They developed this synth around the notorious SID chip, which could be found as the main sound processing unit in the Commodore 64 gaming console. Though it was a powerful piece of kit, it was relatively easy to develop an interface for, and the SidStation would award the trio great marks on their course.
Since the trio were young websurfers of the early internet age (around 1997), they were a part of many online music forums where they’d post progress reports, and answer questions from their online peers. Despite the somewhat difficult to navigate interface, the chiptune sound palette of the SID card was something that several forum-goers had a certain nostalgia around, which invited a large amount of interest onto the project after its completion.
The boys made a trial run of ten units, and once they sold out around the globe, they took their synth to the public under the Elektron name. The only issue was that whilst they were netting a profit from their uni experiment, SID chips had been out of production for almost a decade, meaning that the remaining stock was finite, and the gang would be damned if they ended up gutting a Commodore 64 just for the sound chip. Thus, they had no choice but to keep producing new pieces of hardware if they wanted to keep the Elektron brand afloat."
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1:26 mark
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https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.php?p=9157415&postcount=565
Charlie Clouser?
Edit: Or maybe he’s saying Trent already had it by The Fragile? I don’t know who other than Trent would’ve done the procurement, mysteries.
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Nice!!! Great line up back then. Thanks for the info!!!
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Yeah, he was my first guess, I follow that thread but missed that factoid so thanks for noting!
The interview says he bought one of the first ones, that’s all he did.
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Yeah, early adopter and I’m sure helped spread the virtues by word of mouth.
If it was someone actually helping development I would’ve guessed NIN alum Steve Duda (better known these days as the creator of Serum!)
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Excellent read there. Thanks again for sharing
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Yeah, if we can’t find the exacts, the original stories are still great! At least what made it intact beyond the blur of work and chaos…
No, no involvement from NIN as far as I know.
The Sidstation started as a project for a course at Chalmers technical university in Gothenburg – in the course you were supposed to do some sort of project using [chip name that I forgot].
Daniel Hansson, Anders Gärder and Mikael Räim were all in that class and after some deliberation settled on making a synthesizer using the SID chip, which Hansson was a big fan of. The other option was a MIDI-CV interface, I believe Anders’ synth band needed one for their Yamaha CS-10 (iirc) but the Sidstation idea won in the end, much to the band’s dismay… But lucky for the world. :–)
There were a few more students involved here and there, but I believe the majority of the work was done by Hansson, Gärder and Räim. I have this written down somewhere when Anders retold the story to me in detail, but I can’t find the text file at the moment.
Fun fact, they got a grant from Chalmers university because they used PayPal on their website which was a very modern concept at the time. This (and Sidstation sales) enabled them to work on the Machinedrum from what I understand.
Another fun fact is that the Sidstation firmware was programmed on an Amiga 3000, which is still probably sitting somewhere in the Elektron offices.
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Loved talking to Daniel back then! He was very encouraging of some of my projects (one of which was based around the SID Station PCB at the time). I had expected to be shot down with some of my questions. 