 Hello, OscillatorSync here. For a long time I've said that I shouldn't really get into the whole Eurorack thing. I know that modular appeals to the way that my brain works, but it seems like it'd be a rabbit hole from which I'd never escape. Uh oh. Over the last three months or so, and seemingly like a lot of synth enthusiasts during lockdown, I've been starting out in the world of modular and building my first system. I haven't exactly been doing this in secret, I've mentioned it in passing on a few live streams, and if you hang out in the same discord servers as me, you'll probably already be aware of my excitement. But I haven't properly mentioned it on the channel yet, mostly because I wanted to be sure that I actually had something to say before I did. So in this video, by way of an introduction, I'd like to share with you my very work in progress rack. I'd also like to share with you some of what I've learned in the course of getting to this point, how my plans evolved, some of the mistakes that have needed correcting, and some of the advice that I've taken advantage of. So the bit of advice that was probably the most important was that before you even start designing a system, you must have a plan. Mylar Melodies described a modular system without a plan to be primarily a money incinerator, and I can absolutely see how that would be the case. Eurorack could easily end up being a game of Pokemon for me. There's so much cool stuff out there, why wouldn't I just want all of it? So I set out some high level goals and rules early on, in terms of the sonics I wanted available, and the music I wanted to be able to make, and probably most crucially from a financial standpoint, the physical dimensions that I had to play with. My plan at a high level went something like. The main musical output would err on the side of electronic ambience with a generative slant if I wanted it. When completed, the system should be able to make music on its own. In the same vein as my beloved electron boxes, they're fun to add stuff to, but can definitely create a finished piece of music on their own. I definitely wanted some physical modeling sounds available, but other sound sources were up for discussion. It must allow for stereo movement. The system must fit in a single Artoria Rackbrute 3U, so that's 83 HP left over once the power supply is installed. It would not contain effects units. Space is limited and there are too many cool choices out there, so I wanted to focus in on the instrument part of the system for now. The Zoya would be providing effects, which it is more than capable of doing. I also made some concessions, which brings me to the next piece of useful advice I was given. Semi-modular synths are a great starting point. A semi-modular synth is going to give you a complete synth voice without any hassle, maybe more than one depending on how you patch it, and you'll still get the modular flexibility to interact with the individual elements of the synth. Even without buying any individual modules, you can explore the concepts of pushing signals, whether that's audio or control voltage, around the instrument in different ways. And when you do start augmenting the system with additional modules, you immediately have something to work with. With that in mind, to begin with at least, the system I'm building can be paired with my MiniBrute 2S. This gives me two oscillators with multiple wave shapes, a switched mode filter, two VCAs, a bunch of modulation sources, and as such it doesn't really matter what the first module I bought was, it would add something to an already complete instrument. So I guess it's time for me to start talking about what's actually in the system so far. So this is the system as it is on this day. I'm starting in the middle, I guess, here with nanorings, so this is a smaller clone of the Mutable Instruments rings, which is a physical modelled resonator, but can also be a synth voice on its own. I would love to have the full size one, but the Mutable Instruments modules are luxuriously proportioned, by which I mean large, which make them ergonomically a wonderful thing, but in a limited space here, it would probably be giving over too much space, I think. So I've gone with a smaller clone. So this is built by a guy called Big T Music, who's a fairly local builder. He's in Bristol, which is only 100 miles down the road or something for me, so it's nice to buy local if we are going to go with the clone, of course. Emily very kindly open sources the hardware and software for all of her modules, so that's why these things can exist. I guess we'll go to the start here. This was not in the original plan, but the more I looked at it, the more I had to have its Pamela's New Workout from ALM Busy Circuits. It is a clocked gate modulation source. It can be doing clock duties, it can do modulation duties, it can create random sources. All these things can have a chance applied to them, have Euclidean rhythms applied to them. So in terms of generative music, this is kind of like the heart of the system's heart, the system for lots of different types of patches, I think really if you're creating music that has some sort of pulse. But all of the stuff that this can do, you have eight channels of that clocked modulation. It's kind of mad how useful this is, incredible module. On the most recent firmware updates, they also added pitch quantization to all of the sources as well, so you can have all of the sources, whether they're LFOs or random sources, quantized to pitches. So when I saw that, that was the switch that made me go from I think I want this in my system to knowing that I have to have this, because in terms of generating random melodies, but within a particular system, that's incredible. And I guess more firmware updates will make it even better, who knows. Next up we have stages, which is a segment generator. It's basically another modulation station, so it can do LFOs and envelopes and sequences and sample and hold and a slew of other things, slew limiting. In fact, it's one of the other things it can do. So it's like all of your function generator type things, slew limiting. Basically any modulation, type of modulation that I can't do on PAM's stages will pretty much do it for me. So the way the case is currently organized is it's sort of modulation and clocking voices, more voices to come, and then towards our output. So this here is a TACARB, I think that's how it's pronounced. Two LPG, so it's a two channel low pass gate. Factual based, it's passive. The only thing that it needs to power it is control voltage. It has a three way switch, which gives you different responses in the middle. It actually acts as a factual based VCA as well, which is cool. I might do a demo video of this, just sort of going through the different sort of tones it can give you. Next, this is a new module that because the cliche is that you can't have, you can never have enough VCAs, here's eight VCAs in six HP, so really space efficient. And also you have mixed outputs here as well. It's kind of designed, I think, around the idea of working in stereo, which of course is really important to me in terms of the plan of my system. So you can have one to four be one side of the stereo and five to be the other side of the stereo, for example, that's one way you could patch it with the mixed outputs here. So next up I have two ADAC systems, 805s, which are cross faders and panners. So I can do voltage controlled panning or cross fading. So again, having that stereo movement, which was really important to me, and when I was thinking about what I wanted to get out of a system, this sort of gives me that. You could also kind of use them as a VCA, if you don't plug anything into the other side for the cross fading, if you needed another VCA, if it weren't enough, 910 with the vector ones. And then sort of straight over to the output side here, got a bifaco stir mix, stereo mixer, four channels, stereo mixing plus an aux in, which is the same as the other ones, but without volume controls, it's always at four. And then that's heading out into a bifaco out version three, which is sort of my final stage, either with the headphones out or more often the main outputs, which would then go into Zoya. So just speaking in terms of pure HP, the system I currently have, and the plan going forwards, differs pretty massively from the plan I initially sketched out months ago. Originally, my plan had many more small modules that did one thing. I had a separate clock source, a separate clock divider, a separate quantizer, more than one separate random voltage sources. I plan to have the individual modules that would allow me to replicate in some way a West Coast style voice, completely ignoring the fact that the mini-brute could basically already do that. Side note, you might have seen my recent video covering exactly that point, how to approximate a West Coasty vibe on the mini-brute 2S. I made that video as much for myself as it was a tutorial for everyone else. When I shared these original plans with people, they made suggestions for modules that would combine a number of these functions into a single module, saving space, adding utility and often costing less. These were all good things, but honestly, and I hope I didn't come across like this to these people trying to give me good advice, I was kind of defensive about all of that. Firstly, even when good advice is given in good faith by good people, if it contradicts what you already thought, it doesn't initially feel good. No one likes to be told that they're wrong, even if you know deep down that you are. But also, on reflection now, I can see that what I was trying to do was chase some idea of modular purity. I wanted each module to do a single job, and if I needed another thing doing, it needed to be a separate module. I had it in my head that it was important that I should be able to patch every little thing together, just in case I needed to account for edge cases that frankly, I was never going to encounter. And honestly, that's all rubbish. The modules I've ended up with do so much more than the individual modules I was planning. Require less setup and let me get to the music making faster. Perhaps in a system with infinite space, you could take that pure approach and it might be cool, but I do have to wonder how much of that purity would leave perpetually pre-patched. So the two lessons I learned there were, utility beats purity every single time. And for God's sake, swallow your pride and actually listen to people when they give you good advice. Initially, I actually bought a few modules over the course of a month, but because of work and childcare, I basically had no time to actually put anything into the rack. So when I first got to my rack, it was a few modules deep, and I could start actually making sounds with it, with or without the mini-root in the mix. At this point, I had already refined my plan into something that felt more sensible. And then I played it. And almost immediately, the limitations and gaps in my plan were revealed to me. Straight away, I could hear parts in my head that I couldn't possibly reproduce with the current plan. And I could see redundancy, luckily in modules I hadn't yet bought. But over the course of a couple of hours playing, I completely changed a great deal of the rest of my plan. So I guess the lesson here is, don't make a shopping list, make music with whatever you have so far. I mean, that's great advice in general, I think. But in a world where the purchasing decisions are so granular, there is simply no way to make reason decisions about what would be a useful or inspiring addition to your system without actually using it. I think the ultra-wise SynthWizard, Ben Divcott, encapsulated all of these lessons perfectly when he told me, just know that your plan isn't the right thing for you. Amen to that. So anyway, thanks for joining me, and I hope there was something useful or interesting to take away with you. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a like and make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you want more synthy goodness. Suffice to say, there will be more modular videos coming soon. A lot of them will probably take the form of live streams, so keep an eye out for those. I think you'll get notifications for them if you hit the bell button, but I fully understand if you'd rather reduce the number of times your phone vibrates in the day. Of course, if there's a module in my system you want me to take a closer look at, then let me know in the comments below. Either way, thanks as always for joining me. Take care, I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.