Tom Cosm – “It’s Going To Make Your Music More Melodic”

We talk to Tom Cosm, the technical director of Kevin Parker’s Telepathic Instruments, about how they made their uber-popular Orchid synthesizer.

Few recent synthesizers have had the success of Orchid, the debut release from Telepathic Instruments. It probably doesn’t hurt that the chord machine came from the mind of Kevin Parker of Tame Impala. It’s ended up in the hands of producers like Fred again.., Sara Landry, and Joy Anonymous, among many others, and after a few limited-edition drops, it’s now widely available. 

We spoke with Tom Cosm, the technical director for Telepathic Instruments, about how the Orchid went from an idea in the mind of Kevin Parker to a world-conquering physical instrument, and why it’s not just for indie musicians.

Attack: You actually have a techno background.

TC: I do. Techno is what I would tell the older generation when they asked me what kind of music I play. It’s kind of like techno trance. Usually, it’s four-to-the-floor stuff, but I pivot a lot with my genre choice.

What’s your coding and electronics background?

I’ve always been a self-taught computer person. I was into tracker stuff as an early teenager, and when I got my laptop, I moved on to BuzzTracker, and that’s when my life changed, because I started instantly making ambient chill out stuff. I got yoinked away from becoming a traditional jazz musician just because I love computers. Starting in tracking software is a really good precursor to doing anything with code or computer engineering with sound, because you learn how to think in hexadecimal.

Max for Live was a really good path, which allows you to use JavaScript. I realized I could get really deep and not just use objects and link them together, but I could actually do some code. So no formal training. I’ve just managed to grab what I can to put together a package that seems to be working. 

Techno is what I would tell the older generation when they asked me what kind of music I play. It’s kind of like techno trance. Usually, it’s four-to-the-floor stuff, but I pivot a lot with my genre choice.

As the technical director for Telepathic Instruments, how hands-on are you? Are you writing the code?

Originally, when the first prototype was made, that was 100 percent me, from circuitry through to the code through to some really shoddy mechanical engineering. I hadn’t touched a soldering iron much before then, but I think throughout a couple of years building that prototype, I severely advanced my skills in any sort of electrical engineering.

It wasn’t even a prototype. It was a one-off contract for Kevin because this is what he wanted as a personal thing. But then he came back and said, I would like to make thousands of these things. That’s the point where I started reaching out and finding developers who are very, very excellent at C++ or electrical engineering or product management.

You’ve done data sonification projects as well. Did any of that filter into Orchid? 

Data sonification is a huge passion of mine. That opened up an avenue for me. I got quite a surprising amount of work through that. That’s ultimately how Kevin found me because I put a lot of what I was doing online.

As far as bringing it into Orchid, I would say yes. The real key part about what makes Orchid great, in my opinion, is its algorithms. It’s not AI. We made it so that when you’re choosing chords, there’s a very human feeling to it. Rather than just C > G > A, like a kid would play on a piano, it’s doing more voicings that a jazz musician might do, and keeping things nice and compact into that little (single) octave (keyboard). That’s a very pattern-oriented thing to do, and very satisfying for me to try and figure out. That’s where I get the majority of my dopamine these days. 

[quote align=right text=”We wanted to keep things nice and simple (with Orchid) but we also wanted to give people the ability to go under the hood and design new sounds”]

When Kevin initially contacted you, had you spoken to him before?

There are a few variants of it online now, but the story goes that on a particular day, I got a bunch of random people who I didn’t know messaging me on Instagram. They were just like, who are you? How do you know Kevin? It was very confusing for me. I thought I was the target of a scam attack at first. My partner at the time was like, Maybe it’s Kevin Parker from Tame Impala. I went to the Tame Impala Instagram and saw that the account, which had millions, had just followed me on a very short list of people. They were all A-list music celebrities — and then there was Tom.

I initially reached out on Instagram and said, What’s up? The response was, “I’ve been following a few projects you’ve been building online. I have an idea and I think you’re the one person who would actually be able to take that and convert it properly into what my vision is.” I said a very strong, Fuck yes. We just took it from there.

The Tame Impala fandom seems like it could be kind of intense. From your position, the work that you need to do, does it get in your way? 

It doesn’t get in my way at all, really. The only time it really brings itself up is when I’m doing press and media, because people would like to know a lot about Kevin and his life. I don’t like to speak on behalf of the band. But as far as fans go, I don’t really come across that much.

I always forget the magnitude of just how wonderful a musician and performer he is. It’s just my mate Kevin, who I run a company with. But then seeing the arena pack up and everybody singing along and all these lights, I’m just like, Wow, this guy’s kind of a big deal. 

A lot of chord machines came out around the same time. There was the Omnichord re-release, for example. Orchid feels different, though. You said the chord engine is based on patterns. How is it so musical? 

Perhaps I could rephrase that slightly. It’s algorithmic, and it’s a mix. It’s a mix of keeping things simple. Look, you’ve got your chord types, you’ve got your 12 keys. Nothing’s new there. You look at a circle of fifths. There’s no reason for us to reinvent how that works. We couldn’t reinvent it. If you take a dominant, you take the fifth of a C and it’s a G, that’s the most mathematically pure way to squeeze two frequencies together. Humans understand that instinctually.

It’s the same with dissonance. If you play the tritone or you play a C and a C sharp, people are going to scrunch up. It doesn’t really matter if they know what’s going on or not. Those rules are there, but the way that you can navigate that is a pattern thing. It’s a way of surfing the patterns, if you like. We really didn’t want to create massively complicated things.

The idea is, you pull (Orchid) out, it’s got speakers, it’s got a battery, you turn it on, you do a thing, you put it back in your backpack and then you get off the bus and you go to your home studio. That’s the concept. How the notes are selected, how we scroll around with inversions, they’re like little hacks.

How involved was Kevin in this whole process?

Extremely. He had a very clear idea of what he wanted, which isn’t too far off what we’ve got now. He had put together the best he could do through using Ableton Live MIDI devices. He would send that to me and I would look at how he’d done it. There was some really clever stuff in there. I would take those blueprints, if you like, of the Ableton Live project files, and I would turn them into originally Max for Live patches, where I was able to get into the signal flow and change things that we couldn’t quite change with Ableton, and send it back to him as a device that he could play.

Then, when we started getting a bit more serious, I moved to Pure Data. For the very original prototypes, we were using a Raspberry Pi to run all the code.

So, to answer your question: heavily involved. It was his idea. It was his concept. And to this day, almost everything on the Orchid is a Kevin thing, from the concept to the sounds. 

How could a dance music producer use Orchid? 

It’s going to make your music more melodic and it’s going to make it more harmonic.

This is a really good way to kind of introduce that in there. Especially if you’re well into your DAW, you can plug it into MIDI and split everything out to different channels.

I would say that people who are in genres that are already melodic in nature, like house and UKG, and any of the trance genres, would probably find this a bit more fun to play with than, say, techno or drum & bass. I think a lot of the West Coast halftime-based stuff would be quite good for it as well.

Do you know of any dance music producers who are using it? 

The thing that really blew my mind was watching a live stream with Fred again.., Ca7rial and Paco Amoroso. I’ve got a fan thing going on for Fred again.., which I think a lot of people do, and there was this live stream of those three, and there’s a fucking Orchid on their table. We didn’t send them one. No one arranged this. It’s moments like those that blow me off my feet.

Kevin made the sounds in Orchid. Now there’s the separate editor and programmer, Pistil. How did the sound engine come about?

We always had to have a piece of software that had a GUI internally for designing the sounds. Kevin’s not a computer programmer. There are probably two or three of us at Telepathic who could create a preset by opening up the code and filling in numbers. And it wouldn’t sound very good either.

We’ve got our proprietary sound engine with all the things you need in the loads of oscillator types, FM, VA, effects, all you could ask for. We just needed a link so that somebody could control it. It originally looked like a very basic VST synth so Kevin could sit down and design sounds on it. The sound engine was compiled to play on his computer as well.

We wanted to keep things nice and simple (with Orchid) but we also wanted to give people the ability to go under the hood and design new sounds. We were like, we’ll invest and get this made into a professional thing that is easy to use and can also be used standalone. I mean, the world definitely doesn’t need more subtractive synthesizer plugins out there.

Ours is still a Kevin Parker-inspired thing, which has a particular mood. The oscillators have a particular mood to them.

Will there eventually be presets aimed at dance music producers too?

The ability to create the sounds is there. The ability to take those sounds and give them to friends or put them into packs is there. We’ve just used Kevin’s sounds because Kevin is there. That’s what we had the capacity to do as we moved to launching the product. But there’s nothing stopping us making a pack for it. This is on our scope, and it’s something we are currently thinking about a lot.

These are things we talk about around the coffee at the moment. There’s nothing stopping us apart from time. We’re still patching up little things that we’re finding wrong. You know, first product and all that. The main thing now, especially after this last (product) drop, is to really make existing Orchid owners happy. We want to make sure that this is the best it can possibly be.

Find out more about Telepathic Instruments here.

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Written by The DJ Sessions