The Hacker/Modular Overlap

Oooh, that could be a stage name. HMO.

I wanted to take a moment to digress a bit and go into what makes modular synthesis so rewarding to folks with a hacker mindset.

I’m not a musician. I have dabbled in bass, guitar, keys and drums, but as for formal training, I’ve had guitar and djembe lessons, and not a whole lot of them. But the thing about music is, if you LOVE music, it will find a way to move you in one direction or another.

I’ve had many thousands of dollars worth of equipment over the years from Korg, Kawai, Yamaha, Casio, Nord, Alesis, Peavey, PRS, Epiphone, Tascam, Moog, Ableton and many more. And they’ve all been very rewarding in their own way. But none of them has given me the sustained high that exploring modular synthesis has given me. My first exploration was a Moog Subharmonicon, which quickly grew into the entire Moog semi-modular trio of Subharmonicon, DFAM and Mother32. I realized that being able to tweak and modulate sounds and sequences on the fly on an intuitive basis would more than make up for the fact, for me anyway, that I have limited musical playing ability.

And when I expanded that setup to include specialized Eurorack modules like Clank Chaos, Castor & Pollux, and utility modules like mults and LFOs, I realized this was the space I needed to be in. The limiting factor for making music, for me, was always that without musical skill, there was only so much variety I was able to create in realtime. Sure, I could layer multiple track and create sonically rewarding pieces, but look — I work in tech all day long, and I pursue tech hobbies on the side as well. The last damn thing I want to do when I make music is drill down into menus and learn advanced software tools. I wanted something far more tactile, and something closer to magic. Rather than directly crafting a particular sound, I find value in combining functionalities and making the different components “influence” each other in unique and interesting ways. I find that when I start a session with modular equipment, it never ends up in the same place twice. Sometimes I’ll start with a keyboard CV value to start, and route it into one or five places. Sometimes I’ll take the audio from one component and throw it into another for further manipulation. I’m particularly drawn to the modules with an element of randomness or surprise, like the Clank Chaos or the QuBit Bloom.

I credit another DC540 member for triggering me to make some changes and fall even deeper down the modular rabbit hole. Now the semi-modulars are on their way out, and I got a new case to replace the non-portable homemade Ikea rack I was using before. I find myself imagining how this configuration could be taken completely portable, and actually considering replacing the brand new 24-channel mixer I just bought a few months back with something similar that fits in the box.

For a while I had a friend’s Minimoog Voyager. I loved how it combined the best of both worlds. You could easily choose presets, but you could make vast modifications to those presets by twiddling knobs, and then save those changes to your presets. A bit out of my league pricewise, though, unless I sacrificed much of my other gear.