Peter Grenader - The Man Behind Plan B

The paths which leads us to the places in our lives are often interesting. Such is the case with the series of events which led me to designing analog instruments.

In 1979 I found myself in an unusually knotty predicament. After my tenure as a music composition major at Cal Arts I was an electro-acoustic music composer without an axe. One must remember that in those halcyon days there weren't the as many options in the field of electronic music. You had analog synthesizers or tape and razor blades in which to produce music concrete and If your area of focus was more in electronically-generated sound, the acquisition of equipment in which to do your craft was quite daunting financially. To remedy this situation I did what many others in my position did at the time: Find a local synth manufacturer and negotiate a barter-employment trade contract (simply put 'will work for modules'). I was fortunate in that Serge Therepnin had set up his operation not seven miles from home and that's where my fellow CalArts colleagues Gary Chang, Kevin Braheny, Jill Frazer, Darrell Johansen, Chas Smith and I found ourselves, all doing the same thing.

While my stint at Serge's factory served it's immediate need of acquiring a music synthesizer, it also armed me with a curiosity of how these things worked and enough knowledge of DC electronics to make me "dangerous" and at my father's suggestion, putting my experiences to practical use filling another need (landing a Jay-Oh-Be) I went to work in the electronics field. I started in assembly and within two years had gleamed the knowledge and gall to land an engineering tech position. Within another couple of years I was designing test equipment which exercised war-game products against military specs and in 1988 I was the Manager of Quality Assurance for Western Digital's PCBA division in Irvine, CA.

Fast forward to the next millennium. in 2000, while working for speaker manufacturer Miller and Kriesel Sound, a fellow employee Barry Ober (who actually worked at the Moog plant back in the Trumansberg days) told me about a product I had been waiting to see: a computer-based music composing system which emulated a modular synthesizer. That evening I downloaded the Reaktor demo. Within twenty minutes I was hooked, bought the software and began writing music again. It wasn't long after this I realized that along with the digital alternative there was as well a rebirth of modular analog equipment and helping out at the the M&K Namm booth that winter I was able to spend some time with both Dieter Doepfer and Bob William's....and their equipment. An interesting thing had happened however in the Phoenix which was the analog renaissance: Based on the operational model used in these new instruments I noticed in the war against East and West, Moog v. Buchla (good v. evil ?), the Moog paradigm had won the decisive victory. Having cut my teeth on a Buchla, in order to get the functionality and timbres in the small Euro system I had collected I had to start making it myself. My first completed design was the Milton Sequencer. I released it in kit form which has done quite well over the years. From there I made triple Lowpass gate and then a VCO, which in fall of 2003 was the first pre-assembled product released under the Plan B banner.

Based on the fact that at heart of it all I was a composer who was drawn to the Eurorack system for the same reason many others were, the vast selection of products available which supported the system, I elected to go with Euro format for my own products. Starting off with only one device (the Model 15 Complex VCO), I felt it was the prudent thing to do. Aside the product selection (which in itself is a huge benefit), Eurorack offers other advantages - it's compact, it incorporates the relatively low-profile, electronically sound and visually non-obtrusive mini-phone patch system, it's easily transported for live performance and still relatively easy on the working musician's budget.

From it's birth in 2003, with a lot of luck along the way and the support of a fantastic customer base, slowly but surely Plan B has managed to release a small range on it's own which in most cases got their start just like the Model 15 - to fill a functional requirement for my own music. I look brightly into the future to new musical journeys and new Plan B products in which to realize them.