Hello All!
Heads up: this is mostly me just wanting to share my creation with humans who care, with a few questions at the end. I've only had my wife to share my excitement with and I don't want to exhaust her anymore : )
I've been lurking for the last few months, pulled the trigger in March and started building my dream synth. I've been doing droning/ambient things with electric bass and an old Moog Taurus v2 for a long while, and previously played with some other friends, but COVID and life changes meant I was making a lot more music on my own. I did some research and thought that the modular route would open a lot of sonic capabilities to let me make more complete audio experiments by myself.
I've spent more money than I thought I would give myself permission to (oops!) but my oh my this is one of the best decisions I've made in quite a while : )
I mostly like to have slow moving drones, introducing some generative melodies here and there with some rhythmic pulses ebbing and flowing. I love harnessed randomness, and adapting to how things are moving on their own. I plan on eventually playing other instruments alongside evolving patches from the rack, mostly in droning/ambient/generative territories.
Inspired by Mylarmelodies' videos on small systems and generative strategies, I wanted the Turing machine as my main melody generator, running that through the uO_c for mainly quantizing duties. I have it running hemispheres so I can use half for quant and half for AD/burst/Bernoulli/extra sequencer/whatever else I'm in need of. I recently got the ALM O/A/x2 that I put before the quantizer to play around with scaling and transposing the Turing cv before the quantizer, makes for some fun sweeps and recontextualizing. I'm also using the Morcom (aka Pulses) to trigger the note holds in uO_c to make for a sort of sample and hold, making less parallel but still related note information to pass to the sound sources. My other main CV source for pitch is pressure points. Sometimes I'll run direct from the outs to muiltiple sound sources, sometimes I'll run the 3 outs to a the Pico SEQS to make a longer sequence. I just got Beast's Chalkboard to do octave switching out of the uO_c before sound sources, which has been a nice addition. My main voice usually comes out of Beehive, bass and some counterpoint out of the halves of Paradox (sometimes running them off the same CV), and nRings sometimes is a voice of its own but I've been exploring using the IN for the exciter a little more recently, avoiding the Insta-ambient tones when I can haha
Hexamix for some VCA/mixing duties, Doepfer Octal VCA for the rest. Ochd is my main modulation source, I love using the slowest LFOs and inverted copies of them to control the faster LFOs to make the timing a little less regular. Pam's is main clock as well as some extra modulation. Stages is my main envelope source, if I have extra channels there I'll use them for S&H or LFOs. 4tten and Shades for some hands-on fine tuning as well as offset/static CV generation, uBurst and Pico DSP for effects. I've mostly used the Clouds clone as reverb with a little of the Clouds flourish, and DSP for delay.
I have an outboard Mackie mixer that I send everything into that has Aux sends/returns for the effect modules.
So now for my questions:
1) Everything in the pic I have and have been using except for the Brains. I've mostly just been using Pico SEQS with some offset voltage to limit it to the first 3 channels to run through the Pressure Points channels, and then I manually pick which pad's CV is being sent, so I have 4 3-step sequences. I don't plan on expanding PP to have 8 steps, and I'm wondering if it's still worth it to add brains?
2) The other thing I feel like I'd like is something like the Malekko Invert Mix. I use shades to invert Ochd LFOs, and it seems like kind of a waste of a shades channel if I could invert it separately someplace else. Is that a good plan? I have a sneaking suspicion that between 4tten, Shades, and O/A/x2 I'm using more Attenuators/verters than I should, maybe a little high on VCA count too, but honestly I use them. Maybe that means I'm over-patching, I don't know
3) I had initially gotten the ADDAC T-Noiseworks, I like the rhythms you can get out of Pulses and Pam's with random skip, and I sort of miss it. Should I go down in VCAs/Attenuators to get that back in? or just get a small kick drum module and gate some noise in the VCAs?
Thanks for letting me rant, I've so appreciated the insights many of you have had on other racks, I really feel like it's helped me start off on the right foot and not make regrettable purchases. Good stuff : )
Edit: link to rack 