MAKEN0ISE and the Touch Tone Time Machine: Synthesising Nostalgia in Eurorack

The video opens with Pete, Make Noise’s resident Instagram wizard, introducing a series of patches inspired by the unmistakable sounds of the Touch Tone telephone. These tones, instantly recognisable to anyone who’s ever dialled a number, are presented as a musical matrix—each button on the phone corresponding to a unique frequency pair. Pete frames the act of dialling as a kind of performance, where playing a phone is akin to playing a song, and sets out to recreate these sounds using modular gear.

The initial patch uses the O-Control and O-Coast, with just a handful of patch cables and a focus on two oscillators. By cycling the slope section and carefully balancing oscillator settings, Pete demonstrates how to generate the dual-frequency tones at the heart of Touch Tone synthesis. The setup is straightforward, but the result is a convincing emulation of the classic phone keypad, laying the foundation for further sonic exploration.

Pete moves through the core sounds of the Touch Tone era, starting with the dial tone—a simple drone of 350 Hz and 440 Hz, played continuously. By tuning two oscillators to these frequencies and letting them run, the familiar pre-dial hum emerges. The video then shifts to the ringback tone, achieved by alternating 440 Hz and 480 Hz in a two-seconds-on, four-seconds-off pattern, capturing the anticipation of a call connecting. The busy tone follows, with 480 Hz and 620 Hz pulsed in half-second intervals, signalling a line already in use.

To add realism, Pete manipulates the dynamics control as a makeshift low-pass filter, tailoring the timbre to mimic different phone models. He also demonstrates patching variations, such as rerouting the touch gate to contour for subtle changes in envelope and articulation. The tutorial doesn’t stop at tones—Pete patches a microphone through a Doepfer A119 preamp and into a ring modulator, then filters the result with a fixed filter bank. This simulates the lo-fi, band-limited sound of a voice transmitted through a handset, using high-frequency oscillators and careful routing to achieve that classic, slightly metallic telephone quality.

For the grand finale, Pete tackles the dial-up modem—an iconic soundscape of the early internet. While he admits to not fully replicating its chaotic complexity, he offers a vibes-based patch using the O-Coast’s arpeggiator mode, clocked at audio rate. By feeding MIDI chords into the O-Coast and letting the arpeggiator cycle through them rapidly, he conjures a timbral swirl reminiscent of modem handshakes. The approach is more impressionistic than forensic, but it captures the spirit of the era’s digital cacophony.

A recurring theme in Pete’s demonstration is the importance of precise tuning. To authentically recreate Touch Tone sounds, matching the original frequencies is essential. Pete suggests using a DAW tuner—such as Ableton’s, set to display Hertz—to dial in the exact values for each oscillator. This attention to detail ensures that the resulting tones aren’t just reminiscent of phones, but are spot-on recreations.

The process is methodical: reference the frequency matrix, adjust oscillator pitches accordingly, and use the tuner to verify accuracy. This discipline in tuning not only anchors the patches in historical authenticity but also sharpens one’s ear for frequency relationships—a valuable skill for any modular enthusiast.