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pixel dust and ouch from omsonic come to mind

https://www.modulargrid.net/e/omsonic-omsonic-ouch
https://www.modulargrid.net/e/omsonic-pixel-dust

Hi,

Anyone is aware of any tr606 clones?

Thanks,
Ciao,
Matteo

thanks guys have both of these modules now added to my list

Hi Igor,

Great! Can't wait for your first solo album, please keep us updated about it :-) Kind regards, Garfield.
-- GarfieldModular

Hey, here it is: https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/still-life
Hope you will like it :)

Hi all!

My debut solo album is ready!
It is called "Still Life" and it will out in September on vinyl and digital via Polar Seas Recordings.
You can already listen two tracks and make a pre-order here:

Digital - https://yalivec.bandcamp.com
Vinyl - https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/still-life

Hi everybody,

I wanted to ask for a critique of my first attempt at planning a build. I ordered the case yesterday. I already own the subharmonicon and will be working on the bottom row first (Subharmonicon + effects). I am more likely to change around stuff on the top row. I was originally planning a morphagene, but am having trouble finding the space.

Goal of the system is recording experimental music, but live gigs would be great, too.

Some things I am considering getting last: the midi interface, since the subharmonicon and rample both have midi inputs and I have a Keystep Pro also. And Pam’s New Workout is cool, but I’ve already got several clocks. I am pairing the system with a Minibrute 2S, and sometimes use a Yahmaha Sy77 for things like chord progressions.

Link:

Cheers

Snarky

EDITED Sep 1st 2021, 06:42

@TumeniKnobs I wanna hear that!

Thanks @Gworn!

Beautiful! Really enjoyed this.

Really nice work! Enticing sounds. Awesome rig too

Thanks for sharing Garfield, I enjoy the spacey vibe. Nothing beats a good ping pong delay!

After getting the Mother 32 and DFAM for Christmas a few years ago, I've finally decided to delve deeper into modular synths. I got a few used modules, but I admittedly am lost on what else would work well with what I have. The Moog modules do so much of the heavy lifting that I kind of chose the other modules based on adding interesting elements on top of the Mother 32 and the DFAM. I enjoy creating experimental noise while still maintaining some rhythmic elements, which is why I thought Pamela's New Workout would be a nice option. I also use a few other synths as sound sources, so that's mostly covered (although suggestions are totally welcome!). I am open to literally anything that anyone thinks would beef up this rack

Hi Gworn,

Nice video! Great Werkstatt and modular jam, this gives me some appetite for the Werkstatt :-)
-- GarfieldModular

Great video! That thing does have that classic Moog tone. Mmmmm buttery!
-- TumeniKnobs

Thanks for listening! This is my first Moog and I was blown away by the sound in person. My behringer crave has the same filter design but a different oscillator, and the Werkstatt sounds much better for bass notes to my ear.

Lovely piece! The nature sounds and music blend really nicely

You guys have all been posting great tracks recently and I humbly submit some mellow ambient for your chill out time. This is the short version... ;-)

This was going to be just an ambient track with the sounds of a steamy, hot summer day as the base, however... a squadron of Warthogs (A-10 Thunderbolt) started doing laps over my house. It was race day in Indianapolis and they were getting ready to do their fly-by. I figured I'd just let the recording roll. There's almost no processing to that field recording, just a bit of reduced levels for the fly-bys because they were very loud.

There is a simple modular track with a slow sequence running into Plaits which is running into Bionic Lester using both filters, one is LPF and the other is the comb filter which makes cool glitchy sounds when freq is modulated. Beads is providing additional glitchiness with the Size knob being modulated. There's a track using a lovely pad on the Prophet Rev2 which, when the resonance is turned up, really does sound an awful lot like the sound of the cicadas, so I am riding the cutoff and resonance knobs for each pad swell. Since I'm slowly fading in the resonance you can barely tell it's not just more cicadas. There's also a track from the Subsequent37 adding some high end swells with fast warbling. Then there is a pulsing bass sequence provided by the Moog Taurus Pedals. I am using my foot to ride the cutoff up and down manually (pedally?). The chirping you hear is a Northern Cardinal . :-)

Cheers

I have this cranked in my studio right now and this section from about the 2:00 mark sounds fantastic. You know I love lots of delay and reverb (who doesn't?), and the effect is great between my monitors. :-)

Funky, would love to hear another acid line over the top of that :)
-- wishbonebrewery

I was just cranking a preset called Acid Wiggler on my Subsequent 37 over the top of this and it sounded awesome. Nice track!

Hi! This is V2 of my next potential build. The focus of this build is around ergonomics and a huge emphasis on analog synthesis. What can't be removed is primarily in the OSC section and the MIDI section

OSC requirements
- TZ VCO w/ wavefold
- dual syncable analog VCOs
Voice additions
- Ring Mod and polarized mixing (for multiple waveforms and subtractive/inverted mixing)
- Logic and Clock Division ( for sub octave creation and gate length PWM from unorthodox waveforms like folded TZFM )

I'm a huge fan of LPGs and creative mixing that doesn't require a standard format similar to the StereoMix or an external Mixer. However the end-point in my mixer set-up has a bluetooth option which I'm all about and am a huge proponent of the advancement of BT tech and the convenience it brings to music as a whole.

As for the MIDI requirement, the Michigan Synthworks mBranes is perfect cost-effective and size-effective arp and midi->CV conversion that can use the WIDI module format. I've talked directly with MSW on this mod and it's nice to know they use the same tools to sequence off their phones, or from their DAW, or any other BT sequencing solutions.

It's important to note that this build has been built from the suggestions of those in the forums and from the immensely helpful community here on Modulargrid. I'm sorry I can't name all of you, but I want to share my gratitude for you and the benevolence and philanthropy of this community. You all rock and help the world feel less like an obstacle and more like a home.

Great video! That thing does have that classic Moog tone. Mmmmm buttery!

You absolutely ROCK! I love your input and your revisions as they 1) introduced me to modules I wasn't aware of 2) you understood the applications of the modules I had previously used and the ergonomics suggested by their selection. Seriously thank you so much.

Hi Gworn,

Nice video! Great Werkstatt and modular jam, this gives me some appetite for the Werkstatt :-)

Thanks a lot for sharing this with us and kind regards, Garfield.

Hi Steve,

Great nice little track. I am going to hit the play button another 5 times to get me the 17+ minutes ;-)

It has a nice lively feeling to it, as if this was taking from a live jam, was it? Great work and kind regards, Garfield.

First revision:
3 Songs.

Nice! That was the exact perfect length to make me want to play it again. Well done.

I'm looking forward to hearing some of your more refined work too 🧐🧐 don't keep us waiting
-- troux

Don't hold your breath. Haha.
If I can stop being lazy and buying modules, maybe I'll finish something more substantial over the winter. I've been working on structure and songwriting, but I don't know that anything will ever see the light of day. :)

Funky, would love to hear another acid line over the top of that :)

Cheers :)

Agreed with @farkas, lovely journey here, if only I could get sounds like these out of my Chainsaw!

Thank you so much, Lugia! I am going to chuck the RML Fuzz into my original case and I can use it from there if I really need it. So if you have a suggested use for the space, I am all ears. I had gotten it so my daughter could pump her guitar into it and have some fun. I am not sure what will eventually fill that space. I appreciate your advice on all of this. A bunch of the Erica modules I picked up used early in my journey, someone sold them all as a group and the price was hard to pass up. I can sell them and not lose any money. I hadn't considered a bunch of the modules you have laid out, but I will be setting some alerts to pick most of them up. I have been looking for a Quadrax for some time. Damn chip shortages.
I am going to start rearranging things this week.
I love this case. I picked it up used, at basically half price. The utility row is very helpful and I am doing lots of experiments to learn how to best use it. The mixers with OR, AND and INV are super helpful as are the buffered mults.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to help me with this.

EDIT: Is there a risk to using TRS cables? Just curious, I hadn't really thought much about it. I was using the Cockpit 2 "mixer" to pull in a few stereo sources outside the rack and add them to mono modular voices.

EDITED Aug 31st 2021, 03:16

Nice to see some new music from you @farkas. It sounds totally different but I got some Studio - West Coast vibes on this around the middle, fun stuff. That said... I'm looking forward to hearing some of your more refined work too 🧐🧐 don't keep us waiting

@Lugia thanks for the input above.

QQ: what level Furmann conditioner do you consider good? I find their product literature nearly useless; seems to me nearly the same marketing speak is applied to their $200 units up to their $3600 units—I can barely discern a functional difference.

Here in my studio, EVERYTHING has to pull AC through Furman conditioners. I consider them 100% essential here in the Midwest, given the kind of insane storms we have here. They won't withstand a direct hit on my AC line, but they do well at stopping spike transients that really aren't good for electronics.

My other key here is grounding. The entire studio is set up to be "star grounded" at the mixing desk's star ground point, and I use 16ga stranded wire to connect ALL chassis of rack gear and, by them being connected at the racks that have their Furmans, I can also maintain that star ground through the synths and other devices.

I consider both of these to be totally essential. The conditioners lower your overall e-noise in the studio's audio, plus the grounding method makes ground looping pretty impossible.

OK...I did two variations of this. The first one is made up of nearly everything save for the swap of the Xaoc Warna for the original diode OR (the Warna can do what it does, PLUS it has a buffered mult in addition to the two ORs) and the Doepfer A-119 for the Erica INPUT (the INPUT has no envelope follower, so if you want to control something with the amplitude contour of an external instrument, the Erica module would be the wrong choice).

After removing the Tukra and rearranging things for a better workflow, you'll notice all of the open space in the second row as well as the big hole at the right end of row #4. Also, I did dump the Erica A-mixer and the OUTPUT, plus the 2hp delay and the Endorphin "stereo" mixer (which it's not...it mixes stereo signals, but if you want to pan a mono signal, you're screwed, and I also consider 3.5mm TRS cords to be a bad idea when in use amongst buttloads of 3.5mm TS ones). Top row is "voicing" (sources and filters, plus a quad VCA for amplitude control), second should be "modulators", third is randoms and FX, bottom is sequencing, for the most part. At this point I finally "snapped" and did some serious reworking. Not too much, because I was still working to keep as many of your modules in the build...but I DID pump up some needed things in all of this new space. So what eventually resulted was:

Row one stayed the same as my initial "open" build. But row two got some 'roids! From left to right, there's one of your mults, the Disting, and then there's a 4ms QPLFO, which is a quad LFO with tap tempi and RIDICULOUSLY long possible cycle times. The Maths follows this, then I did some swapping for the mix/att zone so that you now have three linear DC-coupled VCAs for amplitude control over mod signals, and a triple attenuverter/mixer from Tenderfoot for manual levels, inversion, etc. Then I dropped in a Quadrax/Qx pair for two-stage envelopes (and a lot of other screwy trickery!), a Xaoc Zadar/Nin pair for the four stage ones, and lastly, the other mult. MUCH better! This gives you four LFOs, eight EGs (with the ability to swap Quadrax EGs for LFOs via loop functions), plus a proper VCA/attenuverter complement along with the other things such as Maths).

Row three has all of your random sources on the left (along with a Konstant Labs PWRchekr) and FX on a rather long right end (I'd really like to chuck the RML fuzz...it's simply too damn big for a "one trick" module!) that now has an FX Aid at the end, which works with something in the next row. As for that fourth row, it's mainly "control"...clocking, MIDI, and sequencing...except down at the right end, where you now have a REAL stereo mixer (6 ins, 2 out, CV over either VCAs or panning) and a matching Happy Nerding OUT, which gives you your isolated 1/4" jacks (again...trying to avoid 3.5mm TRS plugs), 1/4" headphones, AND a second stereo input. Remember that FX Aid? This would allow you to fly the FX aid in in parallel (by using a couple of stackables to split the PanMix's output to the first OUT input and the FX Aid's inputs, then mixing the "paralleled" FX via the OUT's second input), which should give you a much better result at your output than you'd get with just thruputting the mixer through the FX and then futzing with the wet/dry balance. Much less fiddly!

Not a bad case choice, btw...I think Pitt's discontinued these, which is a shame. Sure, they were (are, if your can find a new one) spendy, but the "utility row" is a very useful addition that addresses a few needs. And I love the Buchla-esque curved design!

Thank you both! And @GarfieldModular we'll see about some 17 minute tunes, hopefully soon!

Updated the rack a bit, swapped the DUSG for a bunch of utilities including some lowpass gates (go Takaab go) and think it turned out pretty nice. More than most of my tunes this one might benefit from headphone listening if you have em handy. Hope you enjoy!

Made with:

EDITED Aug 31st 2021, 01:00

Thank you Steve!

This is lovely @GarfieldModular, looking forward to more!

The Disting could be used to do some mixing, I think, but, you're right, some kind of Turing machine would be good.

-- InvictaRed

Yeah but if you use the Disting for mixing Plaits, BIA and whatever mults, then you can't use the Disting for anything else. The only way I can think of maximizing the 40HP limitation is to throw in another Disting! You'll be reading menus throughout the vacation but you can pretty much do anything with 3 Distings + 2 SD cards full of samples etc (or 1 mk4 and the EX in single mode).

EDITED Aug 30th 2021, 23:17

Hi Farkas and Wishbonebrewery,

Thank you both very much :-)

Yeah, I love sweeping oscillator sounds and that here in combination with the mono input and stereo ping/pong output of the Grand Canyon delay from Electro-Harmonix.

Ha, ha, well recognised, the Dixie has been indeed "sequenced" by channel 1 from Sinfonion. I just used an old setting from one of my previous demos and used that for this demo, still being lazy ;-) I am writing here "sequenced" between double-quotes because it's actually not really sequencing... the Sinfonion only supports chord sequencing (that could be seen as channel 4) not the other channels (1 till 3) "normal" voice channels. I am using here a normal voice channel (channel 1). The input is from a slow LFO (E355 from Synthesis Technology, interesting dual LFO by the way) if I remember well, that LFO input uses Sinfonion then to control channel 1 or rather to "decide" which notes to play on channel 1 here just set to C major.

Indeed, the Ventris Dual Reverb has a serious and lovely sound and quality to it. In this demo I use it very strongly however you can use it in a much subtler way than here in this demo and actually it sounds then extremely good. You can check out this YouTube link:

Nick from Sonic Lab uses here the Arturia MiniBrute 2 in combination with Source Audio - Ventris Dual Reverb, here you really can hear the good sound of the Ventris. This video provided me weak knees and caused me to buy the Ventris. I am not regretting it at all! :-)

Kind regards, Garfield.

EDITED Aug 30th 2021, 22:40

The nifty case is 55mm but is also 84hp so a bit bigger, although that could be seen as a plus. I don't have any experience with these cases but seems to be a decent bargain with the included midi.
-- mog00

I started with a NiftyCase! I think they're great! If you're considering getting one, I would recommend doing so. But they don't offer the portability of 40HP, which was an important consideration for this system.

Yeah these shallow skiffs are challenging. Disting EX won't fit into a Intellijel Palette either, which would've opened up a 1U row also. I think the Make Noise skiff is deeper but dunno if that is taking the bus boards into consideration. Might have to go the custom route!
-- Manbearpignick

Thanks for your suggestions!

I'm going to have to do some careful measuring when I get the Disting for my A100!

@InvictaRed I do not, though it looks like the disting is 50mm deep and the 4MS pods are 50.8mm seems a bit tight and could be a problem if tolerances are not exact (often the case, I couldn't fit a standard 19inch rack patch bay in my desk because the tolerance was off by a fraction)
-- mog00

It does sound tight, doesn't it?

I have space for the Disting in the A100 so I'll be able to get a better idea of it when I can justify that purchase!

Thanks for your help!

This is my first comment on someone else's rack so maybe take it with a pinch of salt!

I think Pam's a a nice choice here because I'm assuming you intend to use it to modulate the BIA to extract all them sounds, right? Plus you can self-patch it for 2 layers of modulation. You could maybe shave a few HP with a more narrow 8HP Plaits clone and get a 2HP Turing and wouldn't you need the 2HP left over for a mixer?
-- Manbearpignick

Thanks for your thoughts.

The Disting could be used to do some mixing, I think, but, you're right, some kind of Turing machine would be good.

So many options!

I have Xaoc Kamieniec Phase Rotator, it sounds similar to the various Phaser VSTs I have, but of course is in eurorack. With rate and depth up, IMO it sounds rather similar to other phasers. With rate to minimum, I hear it as giving a static boost to whatever frequency you've set on the big dial, plus that kind of rubbery acid-y sound phasers make. I like that type of setting for a "quick acid" treatment to any sound I would want to apply. I like the unit, but in retrospect, consider it a bit expensive for what it is.

Wasp filter is one I will likely get at some point (if I wasn't already well stocked on filters). It gets so much praise and is a good deal.

As a kind of tangential question to this thread, I wonder what people consider their favorite "budget" VCFs to be, VCFs for under $200 that hit above their pricepoint in your opinion.
-- eexee

I'd say any of the Doepfer filters. I've had so many of them in my shopping cart, but haven't bought any of them yet. They all seem great and I just can't decide. The SEM and Wasp filters get a lot of praise, and the A-106-1 Xtreme filter looks great too.

Yeah, the Morgasmatron at the very least is definitely one I'd like to own at some point.

As I often seem to do, I went on Reverb the other day with the complete intention of getting a sequencer and a VCF, and ended up buying up something completely different. I somehow came away with a Xaoc Kamieniec Phase Rotator, Nonlinearcircuits Multi-Band Distortion, and Instruo Lubadh, none of which I'd remotely intended to buy.

While not exactly a filter, I'm hoping the Phase Rotator scratches a similar kind of itch for the time being, it seemed really interesting to me, price wasn't bad, they're hard to find right now, and I like the couple little Xaoc utility modules I have pretty well. The Multi-Band Distortion I just jumped on bc it seemed a good price, I don't see them often, and I love anything that allows me some control over EQ -- if it's distortion oriented, all the better. And the Lubadh, I have no idea really ... seemed a good price for one considering it was being sold with the expander, I've wanted one since I first started modular, and I'd just watched a demo of one that got me all juiced up.

As a kind of tangential question to this thread, I wonder what people consider their favorite "budget" VCFs to be, VCFs for under $200 that hit above their pricepoint in your opinion.

EDITED Aug 30th 2021, 20:20

The nifty case is 55mm but is also 84hp so a bit bigger, although that could be seen as a plus. I don't have any experience with these cases but seems to be a decent bargain with the included midi.

Yeah these shallow skiffs are challenging. Disting EX won't fit into a Intellijel Palette either, which would've opened up a 1U row also. I think the Make Noise skiff is deeper but dunno if that is taking the bus boards into consideration. Might have to go the custom route!

EDITED Aug 30th 2021, 19:03

@InvictaRed I do not, though it looks like the disting is 50mm deep and the 4MS pods are 50.8mm seems a bit tight and could be a problem if tolerances are not exact (often the case, I couldn't fit a standard 19inch rack patch bay in my desk because the tolerance was off by a fraction)