{"id":780,"date":"2021-10-10T06:58:42","date_gmt":"2021-10-10T06:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/?page_id=780"},"modified":"2025-03-17T05:14:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T05:14:19","slug":"modular-madness","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/modular-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Modular Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/strong>. You may of course disagree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I buy a synthesiser it’s like exploring a new city – Paris, London \u2026 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<\/em> design. Collecting modules is depressingly like building my own city – which ends up being the composition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You’re reading the work of a modular luddite.<\/strong> I DID want a Roland System 100 back in the day. I even bid on a System 700 in The Trading Post<\/em>. 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\u2026 to put on the shelf like a trophy. Don’t want it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This preamble was to prepare you for the amble.<\/strong> I’ve often bought things just to entertain you<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Softube \/ Doepfer<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Physical modelling or something like that – the Softube modular<\/a> is the one that most resembles a real something<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

VCV<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

You can get this one for free, and it has a candy store of modules<\/a>. Unwieldy actually. Like I saw a series of videos<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cherry Voltage Modular<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AAS Multiphonics<\/em> 3 (Updated)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Kind of like Cherry’s Voltage Modular<\/em> if they never expanded it. You might see that as an advantage – you can’t binge on added modules, the basic set is all you get and learn to 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New in version 3 you have polyphony – which would probably work on the very latest computers but not mine, so I tend to keep it mono, or luxuriate with two voices. You also get more of AAS’s physical modelling, which is good, and 3 operator FM which seems a little odd until you recall many DX-7 patches group 3 operator chains in their algorithms. At this point it roughly includes all their other one-task instruments … and strangely recalls AAS Tassman<\/em> from 2004<\/a>. Is this the longest upgrade ever?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It feels like the sound quality is a bit more dynamic than Cherry if not quite Softube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NI Reaktor Blocks<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I’ve reviewed this one elsewhere<\/a>. In summary Reaktor<\/em> used to be the only way to get sounds which are now more common. As it suffered under the attack of Max For Live<\/em> they added in a modular system called Blocks<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further Patching…<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I haven’t included single interface synthesisers that just happen to have patch cables as part of their design – such as Bazille<\/a><\/em> or Modular V<\/a><\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[8,4],"class_list":["post-780","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","tag-modular","tag-virtual-analogue"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2494,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/780\/revisions\/2494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}