Meet Veno-Orbit, by Venus Instruments
Danny Turner · 7/14/26
Founded in Toronto and now based in London, UK, Venus Instruments was created by space engineer, musician, and DIY electronics designer Adam Fulford, who has been building musical instruments since 2005.
The company designs adaptable Eurorack tools for musicians and sound explorers, encouraging experimentation with sampling, looping, modulation, and sequencing through hands-on, menu-free interfaces.
Every module prioritizes sound quality, playability, and flexibility — growing alongside the user's creative process, whether for live performance or modular synthesis exploration.
VI’s latest module, the Veno-Orbit, is a dual-channel experimental sampler built for live recording, looping, and creative sound manipulation in Eurorack systems. Designed to make complex sampling techniques fast and inspiring, it adapts across a wide range of performance and sound design applications.
In this interview, we speak to Adam about Venus Instruments' design philosophy, development process, and use of the Daisy framework in their amazing new polyphonic sampler.
Interview
Hi Adam, tell us about your background as a space engineer and how that’s ended up translating to musical instruments and module design?
My background is actually in mechanical engineering. I’ve been working in the aerospace and space industry for the last 15 years or so, primarily focused on analysis and testing of satellite structures. Whilst that’s quite far removed from musical instrument design, there is some cross-over!
Much of the math behind structural vibration applies to audio DSP, and the general mindset of working in a production environment is hugely beneficial. You only get one shot at putting something into space, so I’m very used to designing products that can be reliably built and then thoroughly tested.
There are different challenges in designing consumer products, but optimizing a design and build process is still critical. However, unlike in engineering, the scope of a musical instrument is defined by the creative vision for its use, which often changes wildly through the development process!
What was the philosophy behind Venus Instruments when you first started the company?
I’m not sure I had much of a philosophy when I started out. I got into Eurorack during the pandemic and started designing a delay because I wasn’t happy with what else was being offered at the time. I was coming into synths from a guitar and pedal background and could immediately see the advantages of a patchable environment for creating custom routings and modulation, but was missing the immediacy and sound character of some of my favorite pedals. I needed a project and had been tinkering with some digital pedal designs before that, so I just jumped in! The idea of ordering a batch to sell only really came to mind after chatting to some interested synth friends.
Venus Instruments started in Toronto and is now based in London. What led to the move and how has that impacted the project?
I was living in Canada for work and can thank the incredibly passionate and friendly community that is Frequency Freaks in Toronto for giving me the modular synth bug. When I started the company, many of the group were very supportive. In fact, most of the first batch of our previous Veno-Echo module was sold directly from my porch in downtown Toronto!
I’m originally from London, so the move was a return to home for me, primarily for family reasons. However, the business has flourished here due to the relatively big modular scene, with frequent events, DIY workshops, and shows, as well as a number of other manufacturers in and around the city.
Also, it was much easier to justify our first trip to Superbooth in 2022 as it’s a short flight from London to Berlin. Probably the biggest impact was building a relationship with Signal Sounds in Glasgow, who have been incredibly supportive and now distribute my products worldwide.
Adam at Superbooth
What was the original vision behind the Veno-Orbit and how did it evolve into its current form?
So I’ve been a fan of looping for a while, using many iterations of loop pedals and Ableton with MIDI controllers for years. One of my favorite devices is actually an old ‘80s ‘toy’ keyboard, the Yamaha VSS-200, which has an incredible 8-bit sampler that lets you record a second or so of very lo-fi audio and then immediately maps it across the keyboard. You’re then able to play chords and apply some distortion/reverse/envelopes.
The concept is simple but remarkably inspiring, especially for creating evolving ambient pads, and that was something I really wanted to have to hand. So the initial concept focused on creating an easy-to-use looper with crossfading at the loop points and a Varispeed algorithm for re-pitching.
Of course, using the modern MCU on the Daisy with 64MB of SDRAM, I’m able to capture much longer, higher-definition samples. It was always the plan to have polyphony via MIDI too, but it took a while to get that working correctly, so it wasn’t present on the early prototypes. Its current form has emerged from a huge amount of beta testing, tuning, and debugging, and I think it’s in a great place. However, I’m not quite done; there are a few exciting new firmware features in the pipeline!
As mentioned, the Veno-Orbit combines sampling, looping, and real-time manipulation, but how did you make it feel so immediate to use?
I worked very hard to get the UI to be extremely intuitive, distilling the control set to what I determined to be essential and keeping the functionality quite modular. Therefore, I left out a number of peripheral extras such as FX and mixing/VCAs etc. in favor of a cleaner UI. I made the three play modes (poly one-shot, latch looping, and momentary looping) conceptually similar, with just the fundamental principle of the way they respond to the play button being the key difference.
A big part of its usability comes from the LED feedback, which gives immediate indication of start, end points, and playheads, the current layer selection, bank selection, and VU meter. I also focused on modulation, with responsive and smooth transitions, which encourages experimentation, for example, scrubbing or jumping the playhead, flipping the play direction, or dive-bombing the pitch.
Why was the one-knob-per-function, no-menu interface an important design decision?
I personally find it difficult to remember button-combos or exactly which menu to go into for a particular function, especially if I’m not using a device regularly enough, and shift functions can often be confusing if a knob doesn’t always visually indicate the parameter state. It can be a real inspiration killer if you have to stop and read the manual in the middle of creating a new musical idea!
The Veno-Orbit
Turning samples into playable instruments is a big feature. Was that part of the plan from the start?
Yes, definitely! I’m a keyboard player first and foremost, so I’m always looking for ways to add expression to voices in a modular environment. The ability to capture any wild or interesting sounds generated by your rack and then construct a playable instrument from them was always the goal.
Each channel has four layers that can be crossfaded. What creative possibilities does that open up for users?
To name a few ideas, the concept of layers opens up multi-timbral voices built from related samples, velocity/intensity layers, wavetable/drone crossfading, multi-voice one-shots (e.g. different percussion hits), phrase development, or basic song structures, as well as silently recording loops on new layers for transitions and asynchronous loops on each layer.
Adam showcasing his modules at Superbooth
Clock quantization and slicing seem central to the workflow. How did you approach timing and synchronization in the module?
This came out of some of the early beta testing, where some testers really wanted the ability to keep the loops synced to the rest of their system. The extension of this was to ensure the sample was spliced up into regular sections defined by an incoming clock - and all jumps happened on the clock, so, for example, moving around the start point always results in an in-tempo shuffling of the loop.
The basic concept is that the sample is trimmed to an exact number of clocks (dependent on the incoming clock frequency), rather than employing any time-stretching algorithm. This is true across all layers and both channels. As all the loops can be different lengths (albeit quantized to the same clock), and the module does not have a concept of measure length, this makes creating poly-meters easy.
So what other distinguishing features does the Veno-Orbit offer?
I think the fact that you can sample CV signals is quite unique, with DC-coupled inputs that track V/oct accurately, and rising and falling slew limiters. But essentially the module behaves the same, so you can link the two channels and record pitch and gate patterns, which can then be shuffled and spliced, sped up and slowed down, and alternative patterns can exist on each layer. Combined with the end-of-cycle gate outputs, the module can become quite an interesting sequencer.
The Veno-Orbit is built on the Daisy platform. What initially drew you to Daisy for this project?
I was already using the Daisy Patch SM for my first module, the Veno-Echo, so it was an obvious choice to stick with the platform. I originally chose Daisy as a quick way to start prototyping digital audio hardware, with much of the hard work of configuring the MCU, audio codec, RAM, and other peripherals already worked out, but in a very flexible framework.
What Daisy form factor are you using in the Veno-Orbit, and how did that choice influence the hardware design?
I’m using the Seed2 DFM for the Veno-Orbit, primarily because I needed access to as many of the STM32 pins as possible given the large amount of I/O required. Additionally, the smaller-format pin sockets were much easier to integrate into quite a busy 4-layer PCB design.
Veno-Orbit, powered by the Seed2 DFM
Were there specific features of Daisy, e.g. processing power/audio quality that directly enabled key aspects of the module?
Yes, many! Although, as ever, I find that the Daisy libraries are a fantastic starting point, getting to the final product required a lot of modifications and augmentations to get the performance I wanted. Of course, vital to the module concept are the high-definition audio input and output and generous SDRAM, allowing a full 10 minutes of samples to be loaded into memory for quick access. The SD card integration using FatFs works very well and I really appreciate the bootloader with built-in firmware updates simply by power cycling with a binary on the SD card.
Did using Daisy influence how you handled polyphony, multi-layer sampling, and real-time manipulation of both audio and CV?
So I had to be careful to work within the limitations of the Daisy, which was particularly relevant with respect to polyphony. The maximum note polyphony was dictated by the bottlenecks with simultaneous (and non-sequential) SDRAM reads and CPU overhead for processing all the play/write heads and associated control logic.
This required quite a lot of efficiency tweaks in the DSP code, and reaching for the MDMA to handle background transfers (such as for the undo feature). Otherwise, the Daisy’s impressive audio performance and built-in ADCs allowed me to create a high quality, responsive sampling engine that can be smoothly modulated.
Who do you imagine as the ideal user for this module?
I’d like to think the Veno-Orbit is flexible enough to suit a wide range of users. I’ve always tried not to make the modules too prescriptive: there’s no preset surfing or predetermined style settings or modes. It will reward someone who is willing to experiment, and hopefully inspire new ideas. A lot of people who have used the module came to it with a specific application in mind, be it ambient drones or synced sample splicing, but are now finding lots of alternative ways to use it as they get to know it.
In that respect, have you seen any surprising or unconventional uses of the Veno-Orbit from users?
One interesting concept floated was using it to sample a scale of DC voltages (V/Oct) and then modulate the start position to achieve a customizable pitch quantizer with alternative scales on the different layers. It kinda works!
What excites you most about the intersection of DSP platforms like Daisy and modular synthesis?
As embedded devices become ever more capable, the palette of achievable DSP gets bigger and bigger. Using a platform like Daisy makes turning creative concepts into real hardware much more accessible, as much of the hard work of configuring the hardware is done for you. The combination of this and the endlessly experimental nature of modular synths make for a very exciting sound design playground.
If someone’s encountering Venus Instruments for the first time, what do you hope they take away from the experience?
I hope they quickly gain confidence to experiment with the modules in creative ways, and feel inspired by the new sounds they discover to make more music!
