A techno performer’s instrument.

Verbos Electronics makes Eurorack synthesizer modules designed by Mark Verbos, and is run by him and Sonya Verbos. A 2018 Red Bull Music Academy video summary, quoted by Synthtopia, calls Mark Verbos a “Milwaukee native” who began performing improvised live shows in 1992 and releasing records in 1994, a self-described “product of the early Midwest US underground electronic music scene.” The company says he learned from Grant Richter of Wiard Modular and became known for servicing vintage Buchla instruments and building custom modules for them; he talked about learning from Richter and starting out repairing rare Buchla synthesizers in a 2016 Sonic State interview filmed at Superbooth in Berlin.

The company dates its debut to January 2014. In 2013, it says, Mark set out to design a Eurorack-compatible system built around interface design and live improvisation. It began with five modules, enough to work as a stand-alone instrument, launched at the NAMM show in 2014, and on 25 January 2014 he first performed with the system at an event held during NAMM. One of those first five, the Voltage Multistage sequencer, is still made in updated forms.

At first, the company says, production was outsourced to WMD in Denver, Colorado. In the summer of 2014, after about six months, it moved manufacturing into a 24-square-metre workshop in New York City, where the couple then lived; an archived 2014 copy of its website gives an address in Brooklyn. Sonya Verbos, who studied fashion design and production and worked in the fashion industry in Los Angeles and New York, organised that workshop and its local partners, drawing on her experience of managing fashion labels, the company says; the aim, in its words, was a brand that “could be truly local, hand crafted and fair trade.” The operation then moved to Berlin — “at the end of 2016,” according to the company’s biography page, and “in 2017,” according to its About page.

Design the interface first.

Verbos sets out its approach in plain terms: “Start with a blank page and design the interface, then make electronics work that way. One part improvised techno live performance, one part Buchla magic.” Its modules are meant to read as an instrument rather than a tool. Signals enter at the bottom and left of each module and leave at the top and right, the company says, and the same flow governs how modules sit in a cabinet; controls are labelled with musical terms, and the modules are thin enough for a case to lie flat on a table. It cites Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea of “human scale” and promises “No hidden controls, modes, memories or menus.”

The circuits lean on older techniques. The company describes Mark Verbos’s designs as focused on discrete transistor circuits and hardware CMOS logic, and its catalogue draws on the West Coast tradition: the Complex Oscillator; the Harmonic Oscillator, which the company says was the first Eurorack oscillator to output the first eight harmonics as separate sine waves; the Multi-Envelope; the Bark Filter Processor; a gold-plated Touchplate Keyboard; and the Random Sampling and Sequence Selector, both shown at Superbooth in Berlin in 2016, Synthtopia reported. The Sawtooth Stack, a bank of five discrete triangle-core oscillators, was presented with a film featuring interview footage of Barry Schrader. In September 2026 Synthtopia covered the Haas Zone Processor, a multi-tap delay bank largely influenced by vintage studio processors including the Marshall Time Modulator, at a street price of about $800.

Eurorack and its makers.

Two of the seven are British. ALM Busy Circuits dates its start to 2012 and its first module, Pamela’s Workout; its founder, Matthew Allum, is named by retailers and FACT magazine, and its press releases are datelined London. Instruō Limited of Glasgow, Scotland, was incorporated in 2016 with Jason Lim as its director, Companies House records show, and Lim has presented its instruments in public, including at the SchneidersLaden shop in Berlin in 2019.

Two have their roots in Barcelona. Befaco says it was created in February 2010 as an open-hardware platform, publishing its designs under a Creative Commons licence; an archived version of its website credits the support of Hangar, a Barcelona arts production centre. Endorphin.es says it was founded in 2010 by Andreas Zhukovsky in Kyiv, Ukraine, registered as a company there in 2013 with Julia Bondar, and moved to Barcelona in 2016.

Two are American. Pittsburgh Modular says it was established in 2012 by Richard Nicol, though archived pages show it selling modules by 2010; it is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it says its Structure cases are built, tested and shipped. Qu-Bit Electronix says Andrew Ikenberry founded it in 2013 while a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston; it is now based in San Clemente, California, and says it keeps as much manufacturing as possible in-house.

Verbos Electronics crossed the Atlantic. Mark and Sonya Verbos launched its first five modules at the NAMM show in 2014, moved production into a New York workspace after six months of outsourcing, and relocated to Berlin in 2017; the company, now Verbos Electronics GmbH, says its modules are designed and assembled there.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made in a Berlin shop.

Verbos Electronics is a family business: its imprint names Verbos Electronics GmbH, a Berlin company represented by Mark and Sonya Verbos. Worldwide distribution is handled by Alex4, also in Berlin, and the company says it now has more than 20 modules. Its Berlin team, it says, includes technicians from the United States, Australia and Argentina, and it has given workshops or presentations at Wesleyan University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Red Bull Music Academy, Superbooth and the HfG Offenbach design school.

Where its modules are made is the company’s central claim. It says every module is “designed, assembled, tested and packaged in our shop in Berlin, Germany.” Surface-mount parts are placed by its own pick-and-place machine, which it calls Bertha; front panels are “made in Europe”; boxes are made locally; and finished modules go by messenger to the distributor. It is open about the limits — “all electronic components are made far far away,” it says. Those are the company’s own descriptions. Independent coverage confirms the Berlin base: in 2018 Telekom Electronic Beats visited for its Inside video series, describing “Berlin-based Verbos Electronics,” Synthtopia reported. The company says its shop is open by appointment only.

For a design guide, Verbos Electronics shows how an interface-first philosophy and a single small workshop can define a brand. Compare Make Noise, another modular maker shaped by West Coast synthesis, and Doepfer, the German company whose A-100 system became the basis of Eurorack. For this guide we use aluminium, ink, a deep red and a brass tone with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Verbos Electronics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.