Our Story

Premium Eurorack modules, Engineered Under Feline Supervision

Stoel Music Systems was founded by Tim Stoel, a musician, electronics tinkerer, and lifelong synth obsessive. The company is built around a simple idea: make beautiful, long-lasting instruments with musically useful interfaces—things worth keeping, using, and eventually passing on to another generation of music makers. For Tim, a day spent soldering and prototyping in the workshop is just as satisfying as a day in the studio immersed in sound.

It Started With Taking Things Apart

Tim started tinkering with electronics and designing sound effects for school plays when he was a teenager. In high school, he worked hard to buy a Juno-106, an Oberheim Matrix 1000, and an Akai sampler, then went on to study electronic music and audio for film and video in college. Along the way, he started modifying organs and keyboards simply because he wanted to understand how they worked. That curiosity eventually grew into a musical instrument parts and repair business that he operated for more than ten years.

Twenty Years of Ideas

In the back of his mind, Tim always wanted to design synthesizers and effects of his own. Over the years, he accumulated notebooks, circuits, designs, and ideas—but there was always a reason to put them off until later.

After moving on from the parts and repair business, Tim was hospitalized with COVID and nearly lost his life. During his recovery, he found himself looking through twenty years of those ideas and decided he wasn't going to keep waiting for “someday.” Stoel Music Systems grew out of that decision.

Built in Arizona

Today, Tim designs and builds Stoel Music Systems Eurorack modules in our Arizona workshop, from vacuum tube effects and analog circuits to digital oscillators, filters, utilities, and the occasional oddball. The same things still inspire the work: primitive electronic music, strange acoustical spaces, unusual circuits, and taking apart anything that makes sound.

What's Next

As Eurorack continues to evolve, so does Stoel Music Systems. Tim is increasingly bringing his background in electronics and sound design into the digital realm, developing DSP-based instruments and effects and exploring VST plugin development.

It's a new set of tools, but the philosophy hasn't changed: understand how things work, experiment with them, and build instruments that are genuinely useful for making music. Whether it's a vacuum tube on the workbench, code on the screen, or a patch taking shape in the studio, we're still happiest somewhere between building instruments and making sound.