Because the world needs more synths playing major sevenths.

And minor sevenths, too.

One Room Schoolhouse is about emerging from our shared lockdown, drag-out drama to blend the aesthetics of the past with the production of today.

We’ve deliberately tracked down gear from yesteryear – a couple of things we used back when we were kids, and also great pieces gear we always wanted but never could afford.

And when we say “yesteryear,” we mean our own yesteryear. And for us, that isn’t the Golden Age of Analog. ARPs, four tracks, and reel-to-reels were a bit before our time.

For us, we’re talking about early digital. Let’s say, 1982 to 1992. Or maybe, 1980 to 1995. 12-bit grunge. 22 kHz sampling rates. Early MIDI. Floppy disks. Digital oscillators and analog filters. 64 patches. ROMplers when 2 MB was an absurd amount of wave memory. Even menu-diving. That kind of thing. Lovely machines that present lots of creative boundaries. Hardware we used to stare at in magazines. Instruments that now find their way onto eBay selling for ridiculously low prices.

For us, that amazing period as music was just getting digitized holds so much romance. There’s just something about working with physical instruments. There’s something about introducing air in between the bits that is a lot more satisfying than recording entirely in a computer with plug-ins and 4 terabytes of samples.

But we love modern computers too. After all, the First Era of Digital was still digital. So we’ve been picking and choosing from the ridiculously huge assortment of software available now to match with some great hardware.

Ultimately, we’re about mixing approaches. New wave meets jazz pop might not be a thing. One of our early reviewers wrote that the styles “cannot dialogue fluently”! We’ll see. Gotta keep trying we guess…