Twenty Years of
Audio Innovation
Since 2004, Roll Music Systems has been creating analog recording equipment to help professional recording engineers and musicians get the most from their recordings. Rugged, innovative gear with innovative features and high fidelity, without the boutique pricetag.
Co-founders Justin Ulysses Morse and John Sommer met at the University of Minnesota in 1993. They were both art majors and volunteers at Radio K, the new student-run reboot of the first radio station west of the Mississippi. Over the next four years they would produce around 500 in-studio musical performances broadcast live on air. They got very good at capturing the vibe and energy of live performances with the help of Studio K’s classic Neve console and vintage Altec and RCA microphones.
After college, Justin and Johnny bought a Tascam 8-track machine and a Ramsa console and started recording in the dank stone basement of their rented Seward house. Soon they moved into a sketchy storefront on East Hennepin Avenue they called The Old Flight Center, located on the cusp of Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis. They added an MCI JH24 2” 16-track machine, upgraded the Ramsa to an Amek BCII, and scoured internet auction sites and broadcast dumpsters for weird old tube preamps, equalizers, guitars, and everything else.
“When a client asked us to build him a summing device with the sound of his favorite Great River preamps, I told him we would do it the Roll Music way: top-quality components and robust construction in an elegant, slimmed-down design. He already had the preamps, so I realized we could leave out a huge piece of the build cost. This also allowed him the freedom to change his mind about which preamps to use - and the tone that would result.
As we followed that design principle, the passive summing device was born. I loved the simplicity and transparency of a passive circuit, which had the side benefit of just using fewer components, and therefore it cost less to build than an active design. We discovered a lot of engineers all over the world wanted what that first customer wanted: A way to easily integrate analog outboard gear into their DAW mixes, without messing up the automation and recall which their workflow depended on. Many users also found it helpful to bypass the harsh-sounding summing algorithms in their early-2000s DAW software.”
Justin and Johnny had their ear to the underground of the thriving Minneapolis music scene of the late 1990s, having recorded most of the prominent local bands at Radio K and then mixing their live shows at the legendary but short-lived Foxfire Coffee Lounge. They even released half a dozen albums on their Roll Music microlabel. No longer on the Pell Grant and Direct Loan gravy train of their college years, the reality of competing with much better-funded Minneapolis studios began to set in, and Justin began teaching himself how to repair and modify salvaged audio gear to equip the studio and give it some unique personality. Mentored by generous gearhead friends including Dan Kennedy of Great River Electronics, Eddie Ciletti of Tangible Technology, and Scott Dorsey of Kludge Audio, Justin and Johnny were soon building preamps and other gear - first with leftover modules from classic consoles and then from scratch with Justin’s original designs. Word got out both locally and through the usenet group rec.audio.pro, and other engineers started asking to buy Roll Music gear. The boys spent some late nights in the metal shop of a local high school, milling aluminum to build their first enclosures entirely from scratch.
“I love recording music, and I’ve worked on a lot of brilliant albums by some fantastic musicians. But designing and building audio gear allows me to satisfy both the sculptor and the math geek in me. And then I have the joy of using the gear I built on more great recordings!”
With the help of a few wonderfully supportive pro audio dealers - most notably Mercenary Audio, Atlas Pro Audio, Vintage King, and KMR Audio - Justin and Johnny were spending more of their time building and shipping Folcroms, and less time hustling to keep the studio booked. Eventually, Roll Music Systems moved into a new space a few blocks up East Hennepin Avenue that’s more suited for design and manufacturing. Their collection of gear lives at studios in Bloomington, MN and Frankfurt, Germany, where they can visit it when they feel the itch to do some recording. Justin shifted his focus more and more to circuit design. Johnny was appalled by the build quality of some very expensive mix bus compressors, so the team designed the RMS755 Super Stereo compressor which is built like a tank and costs less than half of its nearest competitors. They next took up the daunting challenge of designing a transformer-coupled, high-voltage, all-tube microphone preamplifier in a fully compliant 500-series module. This required some innovation with power management circuitry, as well as squeezing the maximum possible gain from a dual triode vacuum tube. The resulting RMS5A7 Tubule was inspiring, and led to a whole range of 500-series modules based on the same circuit.
Twenty years and thousands of product builds later, we are still dedicated engineers, a lean and nimble team that is passionate about building only rugged, great-sounding audio equipment at an accessible price. We aren’t the fastest to push out new products, but there are some things in the pipeline we think our customers will love.
When we opened our studio, we never dreamed twenty years later we’d be operating a full-fledged manufacturing business with global distribution from our little workshop in Minneapolis. Stay tuned, we aren’t done yet!