Meet Ernesto Romeo: The Architect of Analog Sound

July 8, 2026

Ernesto Romeo has been making electronic music in Buenos Aires for more than three decades, as a composer, a teacher and a restless explorer of synthesizers. Today we’re happy to welcome him to the MJP Audio Designs family.

He founded the electronic group Klauss and co-founded La Siesta del Fauno, a Buenos Aires studio full of vintage analog synths. Ernesto sees synthesizers as living instruments that keep changing as you play them.

For Ernesto, synthesizers aren’t just tools; they are living, evolving organisms.

From Vangelis Cassettes to a First Synth

Ernesto was born in Buenos Aires in 1968, into a family of poets and painters. The house was full of records, from classical to The Beatles, Janis Joplin and Santana, and from an early age he loved the long, sustained notes of organs and the echo and reverb on rock records. As a kid in the late ’70s, he saw Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it changed the way he heard atmosphere in sound.

The spark came around 1983, when high school friends lent him a few Vangelis cassettes. He thought you needed classical training to play synthesizers, so he started with piano. His first synth, a Siel DK80, came with a digital menu he found frustrating. Then came the Kawai 100F, with one knob for every function, and synthesis finally clicked. In 1989 he took private lessons with Jorge Haro, studying harmonic spectra, additive synthesis and modular design.

Klauss, La Siesta del Fauno and the Classroom

In 1988, about a year after getting his first synth, Ernesto formed Klauss, today with his brother Lucas Romeo and Pablo Gil. Their live shows mix analog and digital gear with plenty of room to improvise, and they’ve taken them to hundreds of stages across the Americas and Europe, including MUTEK, Sónar and Creamfields. On Planet E and WD Records they’ve released the albums Momentum, Repeat After Me and 921, plus a collaboration with Detroit techno legend Carl Craig.

In 2011, Ernesto and Pablo opened La Siesta del Fauno, named after Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Ernesto calls it a sound laboratory, and it’s easy to see why: Moog System 15 modulars, a Yamaha CS-80, an ARP 2600, a Minimoog, Prophet-5s, a Mellotron and Argentine modulars from Núcleo and Sebo-Synths. Artists like Diego Tuñón of Babasónicos, Marc Romboy and DJ Hell have all visited the studio.

Ernesto also loves to teach. He holds a Master’s in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, where he has taught for years, and he gives workshops and masterclasses on synthesis.

Immersive Synthesis: Shaping Sound with Constellation

We recently had the incredible privilege of stepping inside Ernesto’s studio laboratory to witness a brilliant convergence of eras: routing Constellation by MJP Audio Designs directly into his massive wall of legendary analog synthesizers.

By integrating the wearable Satellite wristbands and the Ground Central hub into his complex setup, Ernesto bypasses the typical rigid constraints of hardware tweaking. Instead of being physically tied down to turning single knobs, he uses fluid, natural hand gestures to manipulate organic CV/Gate and MIDI parameters in real-time. Watching a pioneer of pure analog synthesis use motion control to bend waveforms, sweep vintage filters, and modulate patches on the fly creates a deeply immersive performance where human motion and historic circuitry dialogue seamlessly.