Unidentified Dancing Objects. That is what the letters ‘UDO’ stand for— and here I was calling it ‘yew-dough’ all this time. “It was my brother Magnus who came up with the name,” laughs company founder George Hearn, speaking from his base in Bristol. “We wanted a name that was quite nice and simple, maybe an acronym. It has a playful meaning. Because we make playful instruments, essentially.”
That they do: since unveiling the Super 6 at Berlin’s Superbooth in 2019, the Hearn brothers’ company has risen at a dizzying pace to become one of the UK’s premier synthesiser developers. This spring, UDO brings us its fifth instrument: the DMNO. An eight-voice two-part multitimbral polysynth, the DMNO is as much a love letter to the music that started it all for Hearn as it is a bold foray into brand new territory.
With two independent four-voice analogue-hybrid synths, each equipped with UDO’s new Dynamic Multi-Core Stereo VCF, its eight different Play Modes facilitate all sorts of dynamic interactions between the synth’s two layers— or halves, if you like. There’s a slew of onboard effects and performance features, a formidable Binaural Mode for immersive stereo imaging and a rather gorgeous keyboard to boot.
It might seem like a daunting array of functions, but UDO’s design philosophy is as much about limitation as it is about freedom. With the sheer amount of possibilities available to synth developers in 2026, there has never been more emphasis on the decision-making of the designer.
“That is UDO!” exclaims Hearn. “That is why we exist as a company. Our whole idea is that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It’s about having something that says: ‘Do you really need this? Do you really need that?’”
“Very rarely do you need all of everything, all at once,” he argues. “Most of the time, you just want a lot of something to do a particular thing. Making a game out of that ‘resource-puzzle’ is, I think, enjoyable. But I also think it leads to more creativity.”
Hearn comes from an impressive design background. Over the course of his career, he’s worked on high-stakes designs for surgical, industrial and aerospace equipment. “I also had a stint working for a Formula One team,” he recalls breezily. Looking at UDO’s catalogue and its somewhat off-kilter approach to design, such a varied resume comes as little surprise. It follows that throughout our conversation, Hearn is far keener to talk about his favourite music than he is about his favourite synths.
“UDO’s whole idea is that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”
He pinpoints the period of 1991 to 2005 as his “musical upbringing”. “I was really into bands like The Prodigy, but also listening to lots of psy-trance, acid techno and indie dance music. When I was making the DMNO, I wanted to make an instrument that captured some of that rawness and that roughness of 90s dance music and indie dance music. I wanted to make something that could make squealing guitar noises and feedback and some of those classic Prodigy, Apollo 440, Chemical Brothers-type sounds of the era, which was just so massive.”
As for the song that got him into electronic music and into synthesisers, he recalls hearing John Peel spin On The Wires Of Our Nerves by the band Add N To (X). “That’s still in my head— the organic niceness of it!” he exclaims. “I’m desperately trying to get to the sounds that are in my head, and I still haven’t quite got there. But every time I get a little bit closer or try a different angle, it’s a little bit better. And something interesting happens.”
It’s no wonder that the DMNO has the distinctive feel of a synth from another era, not least helped by its deployment of an electroluminescent glass vacuum fluorescent display in its screen— a technology that is, by many standards, rather dated.
“It’s like the screens you see in Alien,” Hearn agrees, nodding to the cathode ray tube (CRT) screens which he calls a “big version” of what’s in the DMNO. “Phosphor glows a very particular colour, so even though it’s a digital display, it has an analogue feel to it. The brightness isn’t completely uniform and it shimmers slightly. It has a sort of imperfect-ness to it, while also being really crisp and and long-lasting, and having a really high viewing angle. And it works at absurd temperature ranges. Not that that’s any use, of course, because the rest of the synth probably wouldn’t work at minus 60 degrees. But the screen would!”
It didn’t take long after its announcement for the DMNO’s aesthetic design to garner comparisons across the blogosphere and in forums to Oberheim’s early polyphony-adopter, 1975’s iconic Two-Voice. Like the DMNO’s twin-synth design, the Two-Voice comprised two of Oberheim’s monophonic Synthesiser Expansion Modules to achieve its polyphony, much like the Four-Voice and Eight-Voice that followed it. What was it about the Two-Voice that provided such inspiration for the DMNO?
“I wanted to look at the evolutionary ‘dead branches’ of polyphonic synthesis— before the [Sequential] Prophet-5 came along— to find the new gold standard of how to do it,” answers Hearn. “People tried all sorts of things. There was the Two-Voice, there was the Four-Voice and Eight-Voice from Oberheim… There were various sorts of paraphonic technology types. There was your Korg PS-series synths, which had a complete synth for every key on the keyboard… All these different approaches. And I wanted to see if there was a dead branch that had died just because the Prophet-5 killed it. Because the Prophet-5 set the standard for how it’s still done today…But there were other ways of doing it.”
It was while foraging for said dead branches that the Hearns realised the Two-Voice “just seemed like the logical one to look at…Here is a synth that was made like that simply because they had the SEM, and it was possible to get two voices out of a keyboard and then a digital scanned version, and you could put them together,” explains George. “It was quite groundbreaking, but it wasn’t necessarily designed to be like that, and there are lots of frustrations trying to set up individual SEMs to follow the same voice if you want to play a traditional polyphonic sound. So the DMNO comes along and says, ‘Right: let’s take some of those curiosities and that fun, and let’s make that central to it.’ So it looks like a Two-Voice— but it’s nothing like it!”
“The job of hardware, in my estimation, is not to compete on features with software…. It’s to give you that immediacy and sense of play”
Indeed, the DMNO might have a distinctly Oberheim-ish look on first impression (and one can’t but assume UDO have consciously leant further into this with the DMNO’s cream finish) but from the moment you switch it on it’s clear that this is a different beast entirely. Creative and playful, yet deadly serious; it’s an instrument, explains Hearn, that trades in immediacy and tactility.
“That’s really that’s where the fun comes from– and the muscle memory,” says Hearn. “You can make a really great sound without doing too much.”
Where the DMNO really shines– and I daresay cements its monumental contribution to the synth landscape in 2026– is in its unwavering commitment to the hardware format as an approach to making music. The DMNO doesn’t promise everything. But nor is anything missing.
“The job of hardware, in my estimation, is not to compete on features with software— which will always have more features,” says Hearn “It’s to give you that immediacy and sense of play. To allow you to get into that kind of flow state.”
Hearn remains shrewd as he reflects on the DMNO’s journey from conception to completion. A synth is, after all, a mosaic of components whose true form is almost impossible to discern until a relatively late stage in its development.
“At the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of parts,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s a bunch of oscillators and it’s a bunch of circuits and capacitors and filters, and you stick them all together and hope that all of these thousands of little decisions you’ve made throughout the course of designing something will gel together and work. Because they might not!”
It’s clear to see, though, that UDO’s first step beyond the Super range is a confident one that has paid off. Instead of trying to outperform its predecessors, the DMNO brings a new set of capabilities and— just as importantly— a new set of limitations to the UDO catalogue. “The DMNO has a different sonic character to all of the Super instruments,” explains Hearn. “Does it sound better or worse? Well, you can’t make a DMNO have that really pleasing, warm and clean sound that you can get from a Super 6. But you can’t make a Gemini or a Super 6 squeal and distort, the way you can with the DMNO. They’re different.”
Certainly the immediacy, playfulness and tactility of the DMNO is enough to set it apart from the rest of the UDO catalogue– if not from many other synths we’re likely to see this year. Moreover, those qualities are clearly foundational to Hearn’s overarching philosophy of synthesis in general.
“I think music technology has a problem with admitting to itself what it’s all about,” he says. “And it’s about enjoyment, isn’t it? And play. And enjoying music. Enjoying creativity!”
Words: Vincent Joseph
Photography: Simon Vinall
The post “The Prophet-5 set the standard for how it’s done today… but there are other ways”: Why the UDO DMNO might just change the polyphonic landscape as we know it appeared first on MusicTech.
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