Rack feedback & advice sought

I'm looking for some general thoughts, advice, and tips to improve on my rack evolution.

I posted awhile back and have looked back at that thread a few times and slowly the lightbulbs have come on, so hoped trying this again might provide me more to think about going forwards.

The last few years exploring eurorack has been very enjoyable for me, I've made a few mistakes along the way, but each of them has taught me something and I'd say that I've very few regrets. Something started to click recently and subtly I started to change the way I used my system, from a bit of a random playground where I wanted a bit of everything to try, into something a little more structured.

This is my current rack:

and my overflow rack:

The Metron and Arpitecht unlocked something in my brain, I swapped out my pico drums for the LXR and I now feel like I have something I can really work with as a foundation. I've had the same patch plumbed in for a month, and it has been really satisfying trying different things with it, making small adjustments and building out a couple of tracks that I can move between. The sl3kt is either driving the same melody to godspeed, twin waves and plaits, or splitting them up for the occasional variation.

Mixing however is a pain, in my current patch one veils I'm using just to mix dry & wet signals & sidechain on the non drum stereo mix, the other I'm using to control the level of the godspeed, twin waves and plaits before everything ends up in the jumble henge --> disting --> octatrack

The main things I want to change are to add in a matrix mixer (I'm happy to wait for the ritual electronics one) and a better pre-output mixer. I've looked at the performance mixer, and the cosmix pro, but really cant decide which would be the best fit / compromise.

Things I'd probably plan to take out to make space in order: Plaits (this was one of my first modules, but I've only recently started to enjoy it, so this is a tough one, but I do think I have too many sound sources in one case), bin seq, fractio solum, 2hp vca, freez, contour or tides, plog, ears and at a push the quad quantiser which isnt getting a lot of use right now.

One example would be like this, dropping the muxlicer if I were to go with the larger mixer:

Generally the choice of what mixer to get is baffling me no matter how much I look into it.

A final thought before I hit post... If I could find space for some kind of compressor / sidechain I think that could help simplify my end of chain too and relieve some pressure on an inverted envelope being multed to the vca for godspeed, twin waves, plaits and lubadh.

I think the wmd performance mixer might be difficult to get hold of now that they've closed...

& due to the large number of sound sources I'm not convinced the cosmix pro (only 6 channels iirc) will be big enough

I have a tesseract modular tex-mix - which is both expandable and reasonably priced... it also has vcas built in (on the mono channels) that could free up a lot of your vca channels for other purposes...

given my philosophy (see signature) I'd want more utilities & probably more modulation sources... the matrix mixer looks like a good addition towards this though - multing 5 modulation sources to this will give you up to 15 modulation outputs - something your other modules are screaming out for!!!

I'd spend some time researching different types of utility module and thinking about how they can add to your patching...

even without a maths, although personally I think everyone should have a maths, downloading and reading through the 'maths illustrated supplement' a few times, concentrating on the how, what and why of each patch, can massively add to your patching repertoire

Thanks Jim, I definitely agree and am quite happy to take out more of the sound sources from the case to make it into more of a useful instrument. I can always swap them in and out later if I want variation, and my old doepfer case isn't that far away on the desk in a pinch :)

There are still a small number of performance mixers out there in the wild, but at a premium which is making me cautious.
I've hovered over the buy button a few times in the last few weeks, it would only take some light encouragement and positive reviews in context of my case and I'll no doubt buy one. The temptation started due to the built in vca's, cv over panning and general rock solid playability of the other WMD modules I have which made it feel like I'd be able to get to grips with it quickly. I'd then also need to consider some mutes somewhere in the line, disabling triggers in metron will only do some of that work.

Yeah, the matrix mixer I think will do an awful lot for me, I'm curious to see how it combines with the sequenced voltages coming from the metron / mimetic and also seeing how the sumdif could get involved in that in some way :)
I have been using the zero2 for rectification, but its using up the switch (which I might benefit from something like switchblade to give me more but slightly different switching anyhow), so I've also been eyeing up the black noise dual rectifier to free this up again.
Tilt has been doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I can certainly see how Maths would be a good addition. for some reason I strayed from it early and have a blindspot for it even now, I'll reflect on that some more.

I've been trawling the utilities section, and there are some lovely xoac devices modules which catch my eye like minsk and kamieniec (or more of the Leibniz Binary Subsystem), but I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

Do you have any suggestions to narrow down my gaze?

Here is a version I put together recently to consider how I'd accommodate the bigger mixer:

a big part of the journey is the research and thought that goes into it, it's your custom synth not mine!!

sayng that - don't overlook doepfer for utilities - they are inexpensive and do the job perfectly well - their a-151 sequential switch is a bargain, for example! but if you're looking at xaoc devices then for utilities samara II is hard to beat - it's definitely on my want list the future!

with regard to mutes - it's often better to mute gates/envelopes that are opening vcas, than muting actual audio - as muting audio can cause unwanted 'clicking' sounds - so maybe carrying on how you are doing it

if you can find a reasonably priced wmd performance mixer, I'd jump on it and see how you get on... you'll probably not lose money if you come to resell it in the future! just remember that you'll probably want more envelopes and modulation sources to drive the vcas and vcpanning - a good idea is to use the built in vcas to control overall volume of the channel - using another vca before to control the shape of the note 1st

EDITED Jan 5th 2023, 18:01

Both the a-151 and Samara II look very interesting, and I can see their useful applications. I just read through the Samara manual, and hadn't appreciate quite how much it could do.

I've pulled the trigger on one of the last few wmd performance mixers I could find in stock, so we shall see how it goes!
I was mainly planning to use the vcas in it for volume control rather than shaping, my initial thoughts were to use either the Catalyst or Metron & Voltera to fade in and out channels potentially.