Bass Station II Thing Explainer

Making things easy, 1000 words at a time

You might have heard about Novation’s Making Things Easy Day, where staff from all departments at the company HQ — from accounts to R&D — come together to make or improve things, with the focus on making them ‘easy’. Twice a year, we spend a day thinking outside the box, throwing convention out the window, and most importantly, recording our results so we can share our successes and failures at a later recap session. One participant of October 2016’s M.T.E.D was Jerome Meunier, who decided to jump headfirst into the easy pool with one of our synths, and create what he’s called the Bass Station II Thing Explainer.

“In advance of Making Things Easy Day,” recalls Jerome, “I sought the help of Novation’s Head of Innovation Dave Hodder and our Product Design team lead Dan Clarke, to brainstorm a cool project for me to work on. They both know about my love of synths, and also that there’s nothing that makes me happier than helping people understand the amazing world of synthesis! So we came up with the idea to explain a synthesizer using simple words, based on the research of Randall Monroe, the author of the brilliant book Thing Explainer.

“Making things easy is surprisingly difficult” — Jerome Meunier, Novation

It was Dave Hodder who actually introduced me to the book, after he bought five copies to give to friends, colleagues and family members, including me. Basically, in Thing Explainer, Mr. Monroe explains complicated things using blueprint-style drawings and a vocabulary limited to the most common one thousand (ten hundred) words in the English language.”

Jerome’s end result, as you can see for yourself, is an amazingly straightforward explanation of the Bass Station II, stripped of complicated jargon and understandable (to a basic level, at least) to anyone with a decent comprehension of the English language.