Vaccination, Gender Identity, Rolling Stones versus The Beatles – all flash points where sane human beings become nightmare beasts. Add to this infamy the cult of modular synthesis. I have no patience with LEGO bleep boxes, which to my mind are simply a means of avoiding music by endless fiddling. Cables! Cables everywhere – visual chaos – the opposite of every design imperative. A flowchart of a clown wig. You may of course disagree.
My friend Bradbury had the theory that when people buy a full synthesiser their spouse will complain, but if they sneak a little box each pay-check the marriage will endure. Plausible.
When I buy a synthesiser it’s like exploring a new city – Paris, London … Wagga Wagga – places where other minds have been at work. I love to meet them through their ideas. The unexpected. Sometimes grand, sometimes slums. But not my own design. Collecting modules is depressingly like building my own city – which ends up being the composition.
You’re reading the work of a modular luddite. I DID want a Roland System 100 back in the day. I even bid on a System 700 in The Trading Post. But that was when they were a unique solution to a musical idea, and that simply is no longer the case. You could get a clone of the 100 for quite cheap now… to put on the shelf like a trophy. Don’t want it.
This preamble was to prepare you for the amble. I’ve often bought things just to entertain you, but not hardware modules, not now. I WILL however cover the cost of a few of the software solutions making the rounds. Think of it as the theory part of the lecture.
Softube / Doepfer
It seems like the weakest offering – not free like VCV and not extensive like Cherry. But if you take the output of one module and blast the shit out of the next one in the chain it reacts in the way it’s supposed to. Like when I once got a MS20 and did this to an MS10 it responded with the sort of robot werewolf howl that you demand from such violence. Back off – and listen carefully – it’s there still, subtle, the sound of components.
Physical modelling or something like that – the Softube modular is the one that most resembles a real something. If somebody held a gun at my head I would choose this one because I can see some point to it. But it can also save my patches so not as bad as hardware.
Bad points – flowchart of a clown wig is still there. Some weird window size stuff. The CPU hit can be quite bad quite quickly so test it first.
VCV
You can get this one for free, and it has a candy store of modules. Unwieldy actually. Like I saw a series of videos once on YouTube where a guy bought all the old toys in a deceased estate unseen and kept finding more rooms with infinite piles of unopened boxes and realised he had died and gone to toy collector hell.
This one is the most authentic in that you can keep grabbing more and more modules and spend your days sorting your stamp collection and never make a melody worth a pinch of shit. I will sometimes dig it out for some freaky oscillator which I’ll sample into a real instrument. The community spirit is good, except when anyone wants to be paid for their labour then all the users start acting like bosses. Oh yeah it’s also polyphonic which makes purists cry.
Like chicken soup it can’t hurt to have VCV installed, you can see if modular is for you without the horrible sunk cost fallacy that goes with the hardware. If you really like it you go into battle prepared. Godspeed!
Cherry Voltage Modular
There is nothing very wrong about this and nothing very right. Test it, try it, everything is there. Then never use it for anything and forget you bought it. A certain lack of personality. The clown wig is a kind of grey. They advertise it as having exceptional sound quality, I think perhaps it does, but I have not managed the robot werewolf howl. My purse remains closed to the many expansions.
AAS Multiphonics
Kind of like Cherry Voltage Modular if they never expanded it. You might use that as an advantage – you can’t binge on added modules, the basic set is all you get and make the most of it. Solid. But then think about how most software synthesisers already include 3 or more complex oscillators, multiple filters, wavetables etc. A good modulation matrix is all you need to make a single interface equal many little interfaces with the clown wig all over it. What do you get from going modular other than more of this or that?
It feels like the sound quality is a bit more dynamic than Cherry if not quite Softube. AAS are capable of good things, but their Ultra Analogue is weak.
NI Reaktor Blocks
I’ve reviewed this one elsewhere. In summary Reaktor used to be the only way to get sounds which are now more common. As it suffered under the attack of Max For Live they added in a modular system called Blocks. This is helpful to the novice but you’re never too far away from needing the underlying visual coding. The CPU hit is also a bit of a problem. It’s not really comparable to the other titles listed here, it’s software that concedes an interface might be nice.
I haven’t included single interface synthesisers that just happen to have patch cables as part of their design – such as Bazille or Modular V. Other people have have worked out ways to patch things without the damn fake cables. It’s a metaphor that has been out of the fridge for too long.
I also acknowledge that physical modules may have a mixture of the Colonel’s Secret Recipe mixed with Unicorn Vomit and how dare I even write anything without owning a hardware Dexter Poop-O-Matic Filter Bridge Plonker. The way to change my mind is to ship me a whole modular system and I will gladly write the kind of glowing reviews you get from the same four guys that write all the patches for every damn software release.
Only people I know who make music with modular are Biggi Viera and deadmau5 and maybe Hans Zimmer? I love Bazille but it is only a time sink for me. A.C.E. is my current choice for analog and happens to be partially patchable. It’s got some Waldorf Pulse tones in it. Awhile ago I liked P-SOFT VOID.
One thing tho is that Moroder started the whole thing with modular.
Moroder shall be forever damned for inventing Disco. Was he actually popularizing modular before Keith Emerson? Really? I doubt that. Emerson worked with Bob Moog as the modules were being developed in the ’60s and ’70s. Disco killed Progressive and Punk killed Disco and then turned into New Wave that gave way to Grunge that was eclipsed by Rap and HipHop. The road to hell.
I have a small modular; it will remain small, because it does what I intended it to do. I have neither the time, money, space or inclination to expand it further, unlike many owners who are constantly chasing the shiny things and not making music.
You should check out Cardinal. It’s basically VCV Rack only open source and works as a VST. You don’t get the same cornucopia of modules you get from VCV, but you do get PLENTY.
https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal
Cardinal is a nice thing for the end user. I’m not sure it’s too helpful for VCV’s continued existence. I paid for VCV even after all the things I said because I want them to survive with their free/pay model. Same thing for Vital, paid even if I don’t really need the patches.
There is another https://xsrdo.blogspot.com/
I have a lot of modular.
One incarnation of NSV used it to record and perform live. But these days I’m finding it a bit tedious to pull out of storage and hookup into an order that sounds like something.
One thing I have been doing is trying to make little instruments out of the modules I have. Like I think of a patch problem and devise the simplest solution to that. So I can have smaller boxes with only a few modules.
That said I’ve never been able to achieve the same kind of logic based poly-rhythm and 3D timbre morphing results with anything else. It isn’t that discrete hardware oscillators are better, or that the filters and envelopes are more accurate to vintage specs than virtual ones. Rather it’s the breaking of the keyboard synth paradigm.
The synth plays itself. It’s an analog computer.
The modules are not in any type of order that suggests what comes first. When Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe showed me that a filter is just as much an osc and a modulation source as it is a timbre modifier that was the death knell for conventional synthesis coming out of my modular.
But these days I get my modular fix from Moog Model 15 App. It only has 3 oscs, 2 ENV and 2 filters (one is a filter bank). It is modular, but a fixed amount. You can’t add or remove anything like modular collector nerds do. But it also has a dozen little utilities sprinkled all over it. Attenuverters, amplifiers, hipass and lowpass filters, mults etc.
So it gives a little of that analog computer fun.
I bought it for iPad years ago, then Moog ported the app to MacOS and my purchase transferred as well. I spend hours on it some days trying to nail a sound in my head. It works much better for that then the virtual Minimoogs which seem coded to make Phat Bass and Epic Prog lead only. I can never get mine to sound like the one I used to have.