modular synthesis

[Salomo]

My Maths (after being on backorder for a month) came in today. Holy balls dude. I've only been playing with it for an hour and it's already my favorite module. It's made for the fuckin rotating clock divider. I've just been letting those two modulate off each other for the last 10 minutes and it keeps morphing.

Funny how one new edition to the set changes everything.

looks nice man. buchla the sequel . it sure has a tempting price, like many (dare i say all) other eurorack cuties. for me dangerous cause it's within hand-reach, and my hands don't take no for an answer hehe..

Definitely modular synthesis is in no way expensive as some insinuated earlier, cheap as hell would come closer for what you get, especially if compared to some (surely magnificent) non-eurorack modular gear.

so even in the lowbudget mindset theres arguments to find. to clarify for some bargain hunters: there's no evil force trying to make an easy buck profit, often the onboard components r infact quite valuable, and modules will often even be cheaper than the sum of it hypothetically seperate in consumersprices (or atleast close to). its useless to tax and judge modular synthesis as a whole, as useless as summing your complete studio. sure its a superconnected organism, but it's also individual quality that should be appreciated as such.

peace

[oblioblioblio]

small info for techno heads.

if you wanna do kick drum or general sub bass, Borg II filter is a good candidate for the job.

Depending on how you control it you probably will need another shaper after it, vca or highpass filter... something like that. so pretty expensive in terms of number of modules to sound ratio. But I think it's pretty perfect. Just need to beware of blowing up speakers (that's not a joke).

I think i prefer to do it like this than a dedicated kick module. Fits very nicely into other stuff. e.g. route the envelope you are using thru an inverter to apply elsewhere. Or put some audio before the Borg so you get kick/sub whatever plus filtering action.

[oblioblioblio]

Just need to beware of blowing up speakers (that's not a joke).

about that part. i'm not an expert about how to blow up speakers or not and how that whole thing works. i didn't blow up my own speakers doing it yet.

but it's a pretty strong filter and you have to be quite gentle with using it.

it kinda distorts as you gets higher resonance so I think there are some safegaurds.

but it goes all the way down to 0hz so definitely some care is required there as well.

it's been well designed for this function though. you can put envelope into 'control in' and another signal to 'key in'.

plus the lower half of the frequency knob works only in sub bass range so nice possiblities for fine tweaking there.

[oblioblioblio]

looks nice man. buchla the sequel . it sure has a tempting price, like many (dare i say all) other eurorack cuties. for me dangerous cause it's within hand-reach, and my hands don't take no for an answer hehe..

Definitely modular synthesis is in no way expensive as some insinuated earlier, cheap as hell would come closer for what you get, especially if compared to some (surely magnificent) non-eurorack modular gear.

so even in the lowbudget mindset theres arguments to find. to clarify for some bargain hunters: there's no evil force trying to make an easy buck profit, often the onboard components r infact quite valuable, and modules will often even be cheaper than the sum of it hypothetically seperate in consumersprices (or atleast close to). its useless to tax and judge modular synthesis as a whole, as useless as summing your complete studio. sure its a superconnected organism, but it's also individual quality that should be appreciated as such.

peace

agree with all this.

i think most of the price discussion centred around the fact that compared to a lot of stuff around, e.g. software or non specialised multi featured hardware gear, the prices can be high.

But yeah, for the possibilities, this modular stuff is as cheap as you are gonna find it. and like you say, compared to systems like Buchla, Serge, etc etc these are bargain prices.

Don't wait to get stuck in! Plan ahead for sure, and try to be as restrained as possible with some decisions, but there's definitely no major reason to wait around too much.

[oblioblioblio]

and Phase Ghost, hope you enjoy the Maths. It's a totally amazing module.

[oblioblioblio]

who said techno needs a kick drum?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhky-bzCO6Q

most beautiful modular demo i've heard. I mean you could have made it on anything really. Definitely modular isn't some magic toolkit for instant great tunes. But, anyway. Enjoy.

[oblioblioblio]

this video is great as well.

bit more fiddly modular style than the other one. but still awesome. The instrument being used only has 1 oscillator FMing another one as a sound source, yet it still feels like quite 'complete' music.

http://vimeo.com/902069

[oblioblioblio]

who said techno needs a kick drum?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhky-bzCO6Q

most beautiful modular demo i've heard. I mean you could have made it on anything really. Definitely modular isn't some magic toolkit for instant great tunes. But, anyway. Enjoy.

just to clarify. asking that kick question hypothetically and openly, not singling anybody out. i've recently been curious what forms techno can take. And these Buchla demos have confirmed it.

I would say that techno requires simple rhythmic patterns and interesting musical shapes/movements to draw people into the experience of the music. Classic techno is just one way to find this.

And about being able to make that peice without a modular. It would be possible but I think modular allows a very interesting method to explore this stuff. I don't know if I could find these tones or rhythms that easily or freely using other tools. But I don't want to say that modular is the only entryway to interesting music.