For me, the Panharmonium is its own thing. It has its own idea of harmonics and doesn't play well with others if you want things "in tune". The Doepfer frequency shifter is also kind of like that. I use the mini synth voice after the Pan to tame it and maybe chop up the output. That said, it makes sounds like nothing else and when I use it, it dominates: "this is a Panharmonium piece". I'm still learning it, but it's challenging.
It's such a cool concept and all of the videos I've seen sound really wild. I can kind of see why it might not be great at blending in with the crowd, though, as you say. I have the Assimil8or and the sound quality and intuitiveness of the interface is out of this world, so I'm very keen to experiment with a differnt piece of Rossum gear. The Doepfer frequency shifter I've also had my eye on (shame about the price); I can only imagine how much it helps in a patch.
Because the stuff I do is almost always auto-generated, the SIG is usually my starting point. I just love it. It's always good for making those moments where you have to stop and listen in wonder at what it's doing. I have the two sequential switches after it so I can use SIG as a selectable chord bank. I'm sort of slicing the four channels sideways into a single channel, then use the adder to transpose the key, the switches to select the bank. That CV/gate pair then gets split back into four pairs by the Shifty, envelopes are made and then it all goes up to the Mob of Emus, VCF'ed, VCA'ed, and out. Takes a lot of wires to set up the patch, but holy smokes, it sounds amazing.
That is an insanely neat patch. I'm still in the "trying to remember what button combo does what" phase of learning the SIG, but the potential is clear. I love the idea of essentually improvising a duet with the synth.
I’ve got nothing too exotic, very meat and potatoes compared to most setups I’ve seen here.
-- noodle_hut
It's the meat and potatoes that get the job done. The fancy garnishes can wait.