Wire to the Ear takes you on a visit to Jomox.


Wire to the Ear takes you to Jomox. from wiretotheear on Vimeo.

Last week I decided to buy a Jomox Mbase 01. It’s a 100% analog kick drum module. It gives you kicks that range from a small click to complete bass insanity. It can convincing do any 909 or 808 kick drums plus many more variations. Honestly it’s the best kick drum I ever heard. I will be doing another post with samples and a full review. Take it from someone who performs live every weekend: having a killer perfect kick drum is vital!

My first go to place for all things analog boutique is Schnieder’s Buero and since I already have a Vermona DRM1 MKIII on order with them I thought I would just add the Mbase onto the order. Unfortunately they said they were out of MBase’s and didn’t know when new ones were coming in. Next I walked over to Sound & Drumland and they told me it would be about a month. A month? Come on man! I have money there must be a way right?

So I did what any American born capitalist would do and emailed the manufacturer direct. Just a few minutes later Jürgen Michaelis the owner and producer of all the Jomox products emailed me back saying he had one left and I could pick it up from him. I knew if I was going to Jomox I had to bring my camera.

I got on my bicycle (it’s the best way to get around Berlin) and made my way to Neukolin to Jomox headquarters. What I did not expect was Jürgen being so open and friendly. He could see I was seriously interested in what was going on and he put aside a good hour of his day to show me his workshop and toys. I’m very pleased to be able to show you the video above.

Do you see that Mbase 01 he signed? That one is mine!

Here are a few bullet points I picked up from my conversation with Jurgen Michaelis:

  • He once worked at Sound & Drumland.
  • He repaired Roland TR-909s at a place called Xtended which still exists.
  • Because he did repairs for the Roland drum machine he had access to the papers and could design his own machines (the Xbase line) when Roland decided not to compete in the Analog space.
  • Roland has never shown any ill will to the Jomox line.
  • He personally took a trip to Taiwan to find a manufacturing plant for Jomox products.
  • He hand tests every Jomox product still.
  • The metal work comes from within Germany.
  • He doesn’t listen to much electronic music (I did give him my album though!).
  • He is thinking about moving to America someday.
  • He did tell me what he is working on next but I can’t tell you (sorry!).

Besides the video I took a few still photos. Check them out: click here

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This entry was written by Oliver Chesler, posted on April 28, 2008 at 11:44 pm, filed under hardware, interviews, synthesizer, video and tagged , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.