Nearly 50 years ago in the early 70s two Californian university graduates, Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge, set up a small company making a high quality modular synthesizer. The company they formed was called E-mu and from the humble beginnings of their modular system they went on to produce a whole host of innovative electronic instruments.

The E-mu Modular system is a classic and it was pioneering. The Exclusively Analogue modular system project was started to fulfil the need I had to re-house my original E-mu system submodules and developed from that. It was built as a tribute to the E-mu pioneers and hence it was called “The Pioneer Tribute” modular.

The primary modules, Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO), Sawtooth Pulse VCO (SPVCO), Voltage Controlled Low Pass Filter (VCLPF), Dual Transient Generator (DTG), and Voltage Controlled Amplifier (VCA) have been faithfully recreated, also as a tribute to the E-mu modular, to ensure the same sound.

There were only 5 complete systems built, including mine, but several original systems were repaired and enhanced with the new modules.  If required, replacement sub-modules, such as VCO and VCF, for most of the original E-mu modules can be produced to get a system working again.  I am extremely grateful to Dave Rossum and Rob Keeble for their help with completing this project.  I had the privilege to meet Dave, ‘Mr E-mu”, in California and to see some of his new Eurorack synthesizer modules.

The Pioneer Tribute contains the modules listed below. The modules that have web links are available in limited quantities as stand-alone modules.