I am pleased to inform you that in one week from today I will have my dream Eurorack system almost completely assembled
It's a "Mostly Mutable" system, which I've been trying to put together since forever ago. Now that Emilie is getting out of the game, I've decided it's now or never, so I've sourced 208hp (in two rows) of Mutable and XAOC gear.
It'll be sequenced by Marbles and Frames, modulated by Peaks, Tides, and Batumi (with Poti), voiced by Plaits, Braids, and Rings, and effected by Beads, Clouds*, and Kamieniec, with Maths, O/A/x2, and Out v3 assisting with various functions.
This is a big milestone for me, because I sold off _all_ my Mutable modules and most of my modular gear when my father died last year. I lost my ability to create and blamed it on my gear when, well, there's a much more obvious reason.
But I'm back, baby!
It's a pretty "modey" system; Batumi, Clouds, Rings, Plaits, and Braids are all very much N-in-1 modules, which means that it's sort of meta-modular. Each patch will involve selecting which instruments I want to use, both by patching and by setting modules' modes.
Lots of fun secrets hidden in these modules, too, like Kamieniec's built-in LFO stage which can just be used as a normal LFO.
Oh, also worth mentioning Ripples! It's my favorite filter of all time, and I'm going to have _both_ v1 and v2. Ripples is a gorgeous synth all by itself - you can self-patch FM, play it like an oscillator, and more - but with two of them and a phase rotator in Kamieniec, I'm going to have tons of fun just building self-playing all-analog patches.
The best part of Eurorack is that it teaches you just how wacky things can get with two filters and an oscillator - which is fundamentally a necessary intuition if you're going to do any kind of analog electronics.
... huh. some simple arithmetic says that this instrument has around 154 billion distinct modes, prior to patching, and disregarding the many althernate firmwares that are available
that's pretty fucking wild
I will freely admit that I don't really understand how the phase rotator works :/
"Finished Product" except that I _do_ want to swap out Maths for Veils and Warps, because Warps is gorgeous and I definitely need more mixing.
Heck, I had a two-Veils "mixer core" in my previous rack and it was like 20% smaller than this.
Update: I figured it out. The phase rotator puts the signal through several stages of very short delays, mixing it back with the dry signal each time, which leads to interference at particular frequencies but not others. Cool!
audio kranch module. put a signal into the input and it kranches it (amount of kranch is voltage controlled of course) before sending it to the output
(this is basically just Clouds)
@tindall sounds like a fun system. Do you go for a particular genre?
@tendigits thanks! I'm mostly into ambient and drone; I have an EP up at https://daughter-of-eris.bandcamp.com
@tindall excellent! 🎧
@tindall Wait until the day you realize why they made triple resonant filters...
@tindall ooh that's pretty!
@tindall That is very pretty.
@tindall i feel like i get a lot of what maths does for people from my stages
they're not comparable apples to apples, but they both have that fun design that rewards creative patching
@gaeel yeah, I really miss my stages...
@tindall i'm currently working on swapping out a bunch of modules, and the stages is definitely staying right where it is, it plays a crucial role in every patch i make
@tindall that looks awesome.
@tindall
Ooh, pretty buttons. 🤩
@tindall looks great!
@tindall modular cabinets are so cool
a constellation of knobs, sliders, switches, and patch points
- 🎒 ✨
@packbat that's such a lovely way to put it, gosh. and like a constellation it's meaningless until you actually connect things!
@tindall That looks incredible!
@tindall Super true! I accidentally got into the overlapping world of DIY synths when I was doing 8bit circuits and running into signal integrity issues. Looking into ways to fix my signals, I stumbled upon a bunch of DIY synth stuff. Being able to match my ears to what I saw on my oscilloscope and was SO critical to me in learning signal processing.
@tindall what kind of things can you do with just those? is there a good super simple summary of shenanigans?
@hillexed well, each one of them can be a sine oscillator, and they can both be AM'd and FM'd at audio rates, so you can make a heck of a complex oscillator !
@tindall oh yes, i also have both a v1 and a v2 ripples and they’re super super fantastic!
@prin I'm so glad to hear that!
@tindall i also have an attenuverter between them (a befaco one) to play them ‘linked’, which is super fun, and i am absolutely gonna rebuild it - or build a new one - someday with a big smooth fancy rheostat knob ^__^
those filters, esp the old one, do just fantastic FM too, i think i use them way more often as creative audio sources than for ‘filtering’
also your rack sounds faboo!! super excited for you!! 💙💙💙
@prin holy shit that's such a good idea! I'm gonna rearrange stuff to do that I think
And, thank you!
@tindall I don't know what any of those are because I'm still in the "I should get into modular synths" stage but also I hope you share many pictures
@lmorchard will do! Here's what it looks like now, with just what I managed to get locally.
@tindall Well that looks neato! I know just a tiny bit about how that stuff goes together with the bus board and power supply in back. Looks like fun noisy Lego
@lmorchard that's a phenomenal description, yeah 😂
@tindall ooookay. it sounds just like when pro gamers talk: you understand something, but one is not quite sure, what it means xD
@ginsterbusch Heh. Yeah, it's a bit of a rabbit hole.
On a basic level, here's the gist: there's a brilliant woman named Emilie Gillet who makes gorgeous aluminum-panel instrument modules for the Eurorack electronic musical instrument standard. I love her work, and she's leaving the industry, so I want to build my dream system, using mostly her instruments, before they're impossible to get.
From her, I'm getting composition tools, sound sources, effects modules, and some utility tools; I'm combining that with some very powerful and unique instrument modules from other manufacturers to make a single, workable system in a box about half a meter wide and a third of a meter tall.
@tindall ok, that sounds much more comprehensable :D
Kinda what I'm doing with my SFF mATX research :)
https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/matx-sff-research-prep-work-mesh-matx.17383/
@tindall I just discovered self-patching Ripples and it's great. Also jealous you're grabbing Kamieniec, the demos sound so good
@dried Yeah! My coworker helped me out with that and Frames, and a few others. I'm so excited.
*It's actually Monsoon, because Clouds' UX is wack