{"id":18568,"date":"2017-04-19T23:32:37","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T03:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/?p=18568"},"modified":"2017-04-19T23:32:37","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T03:32:37","slug":"exploring-modular-audio-synthesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2017\/04\/19\/exploring-modular-audio-synthesis\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Modular Audio Synthesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For pretty much as long as I can remember I’ve been\u00a0interested in experimenting with sound. While I love great music, sounds themselves\u00a0are\u00a0most\u00a0interesting to me. I remember using the shaft of spinning electric motor pressed against the mic of a cheap cassette recorder to simulate chainsaw sounds, putting my ear against different parts of my sister’s Casio SK-1<\/a>\u00a0(where I also learned about\u00a0ADSR<\/a>) as the case vibrated and tone changed, and intently listening\u00a0to The Downward Spiral<\/a>\u00a0picking out samples (puffing a drinking straw, fingers brushing over metal grating).<\/p>\n

Over the years I’ve ended up\u00a0owning, and in many case building, a number of piece of music equipment. This ranged from the Electrix suite of effects, some drum and synth modules (Yamaha TX81Z, Alesis D4), self-built\u00a0x0xb0x<\/a>es, some MIDIbox SID-NUXX<\/a>s (where I learned the basics of PCB layout), but they all seemed too oriented around song composition and didn’t work well when I simply wanted to play with sound.<\/p>\n

With\u00a0some self-built gear sitting around on the shelf and a newfound empty space in my closet, I decided to\u00a0put much of it back together, but this time acquiring something\u00a0that’s much more hospitable to experimentation: a eurorack-format\u00a0modular synthesizer<\/a>. As of now I’ve mostly settled on a suite of modules, with just enough stuff that I’ve still got loads of learning to do and lots to explore. This setup also allowed me to connect some of my older DIY gear; stuff that I’d been longing to hear for a while. Conveniently I had an old analog oscilloscope and quality multimeter, things which are surprisingly useful when troubleshooting why a patch isn’t doing\u00a0what was hoped.<\/p>\n

All set up, it’s as seen above.<\/p>\n

When expanding I started out with the basic (but fantastic) Moog Mother-32<\/a>\u00a0and the cost effective Arturia BeatStep Pro<\/a>, but soon after realized that for the kind of experimenting I wanted to do a few discrete\u00a0modules would be really nice. While fairly low end (especially the speakers) it’s a good setup for experimenting and deciding how much further I want to take things. I believe I’m pretty well set up and have a lot to learn before I make any additional significant purchases. This setup\u00a0gives me option for everything from triggering drums and playing with sequencing music from synths to setting up drones and seeing how sound can be tweaked:<\/p>\n

Non-Eurorack:<\/p>\n