Vermona Perfourmer Mark II, from Vermona's Web site
A synthesizer manufacturer located in Markneukirchen, Germany (a town that has historically been a world center of musical instrument manufacture). Vermona is noted for its line of tabletop synths and effects units; it also manufactures a few modules for modular synths in Eurorack format.
The Vermona name has a long and complicated history, in part due to the Cold War and the partition of Germany after World War II. When the Soviet Union set up a puppet government in East Germany in 1946, it swept through many industries and forced the companies in each sector to consolidate, leaving the resulting conglomerate as the only authorized vendor in a given sector. This included musical instruments, and many instrument makers were consolidated into an entity known originally as "VEB Klingenthaler Harmonikawerke". Its first products included harmonicas and accordions, but by the mid-1950s, it had been chartered by the government to begin building electric organs and pianos, sold under the Vermona brand name. In the 1960s, the chief designer of these instruments, Bernd Haller, became keen to build a synthesizer. In the late '70s, he began working on the design for a polyphonic analog synthesizer. This was not approved for production, but Haller did eventually get permission to proceed with a monophonic analog synth. This synth, known simply as the "Vermona Synthesizer", had the misfortune of hitting the market in 1984, when polyphonic was all the rage, and the Yamaha DX7 was sweeping the analog synths aside. Nonetheless, Vermona managed to sell at least 1000 of them. (Thomas Haller, Bernd Haller's son, claimed in a 2017 interview that the total sales exceeded 1500, but about 1000 seems to be the most commonly accepted number.) Most went to the Soviet Union, but a few managed to find their way through the Iron Curtain to land in the hands of West German, British and American performers.
From that success, Haller received permission to proceed with the polyphonic design, which became the decades-long Mephisto project. However, that came to an end in 1991, when the Berlin Wall fell and VEB Electronik was left to fend for itself. Unable to compete with the Western and Japanese manufacturers, VEB Elektronic soon folded. Haller and two associates formed a new company, HDB. This originally sold telephone equipment, but then picked up the manufacture of some of the effects device designs that Haller had done for VEB. In 1995, the company introduced the DRM1, an analog drum synthesizer. This was a very successful product, and the Mark IV version is still being produced as of February 2023. Other successes soon followed, But HDB had a marketing problem: being an unknown name in the electronic music business, they had been marketing under other names, including MAM and Touched By Sound. But these partnerships all fell apart. Sometime in the 2010s (sources vary as to when), the company decided to inquire about the Vermona name. They found it had been abandoned, so they registered it. Since then, all of the company's products have been sold using the partition-era Vermona name and the "star" logo.
Current products (as of 2017) include:
- The Perfourmer, a four-voice polyphonic analog synth including some operational modes wherein one voice can be used to modulate another.
- The Mono Lancet, a small monophonic analog synth. A notable option is the Lancet Dock, which extends the synth's inputs and outputs, and some controls, to a Eurorack module panel.
- The DRM1, an analog drum synthesizer, containing eight voice circuits which are tuned to certain types of drum and percussion sounds.
- Other products in the Lancet series, including effects units and a dedicated kick drum synth.
- The '14 Analogsynththesizer, a comprehensive monophonic analog synth, and currently the only product Vermona produces having a keyboard. It is being produced in a limited edtion.
Vermona web site (English)