The Origins of Circuit Happy
Circuit Happy was founded in 2017 by Ed Guild to create electronic music tools to make it simpler to connect and jam.
Before Circuit Happy existed, Ed worked at iZotope, a renowned music software company that produces award-winning software such as RX, Ozone, and Trash. While at iZotope Ed worked on BreakTweaker, Iris 2, Vocal Synth, and RX.
At iZotope Ed made many new synth-enthusiast friends. Every four months or so co-workers would drag in modular synths, drum machines, and esoteric gear. They would spend 45 minutes trying to figure out how to sync it all together. This would be the first spark of inspiration that would eventually lead to the creation of The Missing Link.
During his tenure at iZotope Ed also met two influential people: Nick Donaldson and Matt Campbell. Matt worked on the hardware team that would produce Spire Studio. Nick worked on the app development team that would pair with Spire Studio.
Ed hoped to work with both Matt and Nick on internal projects at iZotope, but sadly never did. After they had both left iZotope a chance meeting between Ed and Nick at a friend's barbecue led to a discussion about making a project with Ableton Link that would sync Eurorack modular gear.
The first prototype of The Missing Link was born a few months later. Ed designed the enclosure, web config editor, and all the packaging. Both Nick and Ed collaborated on the circuit design. Nick wrote the first pass at the software. Unfortunately Nick had to move away and started a new job that took all of his time. Nick blessed Ed as a C++ developer and Ed started his journey writing code. He was now the proud owner of his first Git repository, entitled Missing Link.
After the success of the original Missing Link, Ed started designing a Eurorack version. Matt Campbell joined on as a consultant to help make a hardware design that was ready for contract manufacturing.
In 2025, Matt became an official member of Circuit Happy as a co-owner. The two are working hard on building a bigger hardware platform to take The Missing Link to the next level!
About Ed
Ed's background in electronic music, live performance, and graphic design gives him a visual and musical perspective when approaching the design of electronics.
Ed has performed in bands and DJ'd since 2001. He first got involved with bands to explore live video projecting, aka, being a Video Jockey (VJ). From there he got more and more interested in live and studio sound technology. He is especially interested in groups that bring the studio to the stage, using unorthodox gear that is normally not used on stage.
The natural progression for Ed was to create his own hardware to help people create in the studio and on stage.
About Matt
Matt originally started helping Circuit Happy in 2020 when we started working with our first contract manufacturer. Matt re-designed the PCB layout for the original ML:2 eurorack module to make it easier to manufacture. He then helped communicate the design to our contract manufacturer.
Matt went above and beyond to design a system to test and flash the firmware on the final assembled hardware. Matt also gave lots of guidance on coding on FreeRTOS architecture within the ESP32 platform. He now heads up our technical designs and makes things ever so much more professional and qualty [sic] than Ed is capable of doing on his own.
Collaborators
Circuit Happy gets by with a little help from our friends.
Nick Donaldson
Nick is the technical consultant on The Missing Link project. But that title falls short of describing how crucial Nick was to this project. Nick took on writing most of the C++ code base for the original Missing Link Desktop along with aiding and guiding me through the circuit board design for Missing Link. During the development of The Missing Link Junior we hired Nick to rewrite the codebase to have a tighter architecture that gave us a great foundation upon which to write new features.
Matt Hodson
Matt, aka MATTHS, is our marketing consultant. We first knew Matt as an artist who created great synth-oriented videos and recorded and performed cool music. We first met in person at Machina Bristronica in 2023 where we talked about how we could work together. Since then Matt has whipped our social media presence in to shape and has connected us to his network of other artists and creators to help us promote our products further out in to the wide world.
Karl Majer
Karl is a Unix ninja who showed me the ways of bash scripting, cool file system tricks, and system optimizations. Without him, the original Missing Link Desktop would not have a Software Update tool, and it would have taken me ten times longer to set up each system to be ready for sale.
Mikey Maker
Mikey Maker is a talented screen printer in the Boston area. He printed my product boxes and faceplates for the original Missing link Desktop. Most recently Mikey printed our t-shirts.
