Thursday, June 14, 2007

My favorite thing about modulars

My favorite thing about playing with modular synths, wether they are analog or virtual (Reaktor, Nord G2, etc), is when you are sitting there with a patch and you think...

"I wish I could do..."

And then moments later realize...

"Whoa, wait, I CAN do that!"

What a joyous feeling.

As much as I love the Voyager, I hadn't had those moments very often since it had become my main (and really only) synth. Now that the modular is shaping up, I've very glad it's back.

.:end sappiness:.

What I do need though, is an oscilloscope. Just patching into a sine wave tone to try and hear exactly what the voltage waveform looks like isn't cutting it anymore. I don't think I'll be able to figure out exactly what the Dual Cyclotron is doing without one. I'll be hunting eBay the next few weeks for a good deal. Thankfully, it looks like their are plenty.

3 comments:

Zerosum Inertia said...

Yes I love those moments...
The moments i dont like are when I say: "I could do that If I had ____"

Thats ok cause Im still twisting right along..But yeah the cool thing about modulars is theres so many ways to hook it up to inspire new sounds in ways you cant do with hardwired signal path synths.

Osciloscope: Cool.
But shouldnt you get a sequencer first?

felix said...

Oh yeah, those moments are bummers...

An oscilloscope is something I've wanted for a long time. The wonderful Mac application Spectre from AudioFile Engineering has filled that void, however, because it requires an audio interface, signals lower than 20hz won't really work. It doesn't seem to be that much of a heavy investment either. Pretty modern well features ones are up on eBay right now for <$100.

Since you mentioned the sequencer, I've been mulling over that situation recently, but I'm going to save all my thoughts on that for the next post. :D

Zerosum Inertia said...

You know what else I love?
Everything is an oscilator
and every oscilator is an LFO.
Every LFO and ever oscilator is also a screwy sequence!!
Even the EG does modulations!

Fun day..
Damn, I need to blog this...later..:D