Is anyone else completely disillusioned with all this modular wankery obsession lately...

Is anyone else completely disillusioned with all this modular wankery obsession lately? It's just another fad to posture as a mysterious knob twiddler when really you're just making unlistenable loops or some bullshit no one wants to hear. 99% of it is shit, you will never be aphex twin. Just because you can buy some modules doesn't mean you're a fucking synth head. Most people just aren't smart enough to do anything good with it. It takes a programmer's mind or something. Most people who adopt it are just bandwaggonners who have no innate musical talent. Go buy a guitar or a Nord or something, Jesus.

fastER JONNY

honestly, i only trust modular geeks if they use reaktor

I like playing with knobs so stfu

I love modular. Eat shit and never fucking post on here again. You are worthless and modular is the future. Digital is talentless fad and modular is the real deal. How's it any different from these fucking green day faggots with guitars? It's all in how you use it, and modular is of the most potential of them all. Fuck the fuck off. I am sick of this shit. Go fuck yourself you piece of shit

tfw no modular gf

here here, seems stupid for gear heads that can't play an instrument. You watch a video and starts with artificial synth tone, knob twirl it glides up in pitch and down, like a dr who episode, whoopdee doo

first of all, your attitude sucks.
second, you're probably a
>rings into clouds
type of motherfucker, so relax and stop taking yourself so seriously. also i just bit the bait didn't i?
as long as synth nerds continue being shitty, insular, and protective about their arcane knowledge, that aint about to change my dude.

>protective about their arcane knowledge
What is this really about? Who keeping that knowledge from you?

This. Reaktor is all you need

t. softsynths user

>modular is the future
>even thought modular synths have existed before the first compact systems arrived and basically nobody buys modular except some elitist faggots that wank with their patch cables

wew

>synth nerds continue being shitty, insular, and protective about their arcane knowledge
I have a friend like this, I had no idea it was a thing.

nerdy men who are have esoteric knowledge about geeky shit are often just pretty condescending about people who don't "get" it or have way too much ego about something that most people could roll their eyes at. guys thinking they're the hottest shit around and know everything better than everyone else and have dick-waving.measuing contests about every piece of gear, production trivia, and mixing skills is shitty and toxic and what really keeps women from feeling welcome in the field. of course it's not /just/ in relation to excluding women, it's a shitty trait that really makes it unpleasant to be a noob.
softsynths are great lol
i mean, i would still argue that modular is the future in the sense that so much creativity and work goes into designing fascinating new devices. it's the end users and their output that is lacking the whole revolutionary, forward-thinking vibe.

or Max/MSP

lol

>i mean, i would still argue that modular is the future in the sense that so much creativity and work goes into designing fascinating new devices.
eh, software is still more innovative, most modular stuff is still rehashing shit from 40 years ago, and the more forward thinking ones are rehashing shit that's already been done in software

>it's the end users and their output that is lacking the whole revolutionary, forward-thinking vibe.
there's too much emphasis on "fun" over craft; too much improvised jamming with no editing. that has its place, sort of, but it's way, way too limiting

while i haven't explored it much, max just doesn't seem to have the ease of patching fun modules like reaktor blocks. while max is really powerful and flexible, i dont really think it is entirely comparable to the blocks format which really does emulate and interact with eurorack really well

(also i realize you're probably referring to the reaktor platform rather than exclusively to blocks in which case the comparison makes more sense)

I think Max is generally a lot more interesting if you want to make things like elaborate sequencers or do frequency domain stuff; it's not directly comparable to eurorack but you can do the same stuff and go a lot further

Im quite tired of the "eurorack ambient" fad, which is pretty much rings into clouds as someone said. But I quite like the format honestly

i broadly speaking agree with all of that, but i do really love some eurorack modules for being genuinely unique devices. also the fact that they are hardware means you do interact with them a bit differently in the modular environment, in ways that software devices just can't really do. i do see the appeal of the inter-relation of modules (i mean this mainly in the modulation and logic stuff, but also in plain things like patching an effect into the feedback path of a delay - something you can't do with effect plugins)

but really unique and clever devices like the MN morphagene and MI frames are bretty cool.

ftr, i own no modular gear, but i'm fascinated but musical tech. i get my patching fix with reaktor blocks.

>also the fact that they are hardware means you do interact with them a bit differently in the modular environment, in ways that software devices just can't really do.
you can have those kinds of experiences much more cheaply by putting cheap effect processors in feedback loops, etc.

>i do see the appeal of the inter-relation of modules (i mean this mainly in the modulation and logic stuff, but also in plain things like patching an effect into the feedback path of a delay - something you can't do with effect plugins)
There's more to software than VSTs

serious question: how much of aphex twin's work is done with modular gear versus weird sequencing of esoteric non-modular synths?

I totally get the appeal, but it's often shit that could be done in a software setting with more flexibility and about a quarter of the budget. and even if it is a bit dismissive to say "rings into clouds" it's pretty much 80+% of what that stuff is. for being based in such an expansive format, eurorack ambient actually has an extremely limited sound palette. still, i'm sure it's really fun, if also the musical equivalent of bokeh lol

It's a thing

>There's more to software than VSTs
yeah, but i think it's a wildly different approach to music if you're also programming/patching shit in environments like max etc and so on (which is what I assume you're referring to).

a lot of that stuff i think kills the immediacy of working with a complete product like a VST or a hardware module, which is part of the appeal. not saying you're wrong, but i think the comparison starts to drift there

>you can have those kinds of experiences much more cheaply by putting cheap effect processors in feedback loops, etc.
for sure, but it's still not quiiiite the same. what do you have in mind when you say that? just curious to what your approach would be

The GAS is real. Most hipster faggots won't ever crack open some scores and literature and learn how to expand their inner vocabulary. It's much easier to buy a piece of equipment to make it SEEM like there's some sort of personal growth going on. That's what the muh analog thing was always about, and it was always beside the point. See; deadmau5. His millions of dollars in analog equipment hasn't generated a single memorable thing since Strobe, and that was made in-the-box anyway. Steve sets it all up for him any damn way.

Modular synths are fool's gold. No one gives a shit. German techno sucks balls, but it's easy to do on a modular rack so people are gonna keep churning out that garbage.

>serious question: how much of aphex twin's work is done with modular gear versus weird sequencing of esoteric non-modular synths?
depends on what you're talking about; the earlier stuff just used totally standard crappy gear

exotic and expensive gear is more of a hobby than a necessity

>I totally get the appeal, but it's often shit that could be done in a software setting with more flexibility and about a quarter of the budget.
depending on your workflow preferences

>for being based in such an expansive format, eurorack ambient actually has an extremely limited sound palette.
I find most of the small and mid-sized systems don't offer a lot that you can't do with the original desktop Evolver

Im thinking of starting with eurorack. Please rate my modulargrid.

not to mention, technically, guitarists have been doing modular for ages with effects pedals, and compare any pedalboard to a eurorack and tell me which one looks tidier.

i preferred your reverbs'n'rats pedalboard desu.

whats your point? modular synths have existed since the 60s

My point was that guitarists are notoriously clueless about anything other than the practicalities of picking and fretting, so why is it that they can manage a tidier set-up of modules than people whose sole focus and expertise is modular synths?

>musical equivalent of bokeh

Hahahaha yes.

I just love the idea of a bunch of people wasting a huge amount of money on modules when they could just do it with a lot more freedom and know-how by using Audulus, Reaktor, etc or even the pulse code Modular app for iOS, (love that app, made some crazy sounding stuff with it)

The bottom line is that these are a bunch of people who think that they're going to build some groundbreaking work with modular gear when reallly you can make groundbreaking stuff using one daw and one piece of gear. You don't need some huge modular system because your knowledge of straight synthesis is pretty limited anyway. Unless you're really really into experimental music and transforming basic waveforms in a musical way I just don't see the point. It's a bunch of wankery and posturing. Just look at that Andrew Huang kid. He's extremely talented and recently can't wait to show everyone how much of a synth nerd he is by posting that modular video, and his musical quality has dropped a lot in recent times. He's too concerned with fads and cred than making actually good music.

Same for Red Means Recording, Cuckoo, Mylar Melodies, Bo Beats. Bunch of fucking hype machine bleep bloopers latching onto every latest thing yet making the most boring uninspired shit ever, all while fetishizing the shit out of gear and making it look really easy to make music. I know so many people who bought OP-1s because of their videos yet the music they make is SHIT. People just want to be cool and synths are the latest fashion accessory ATM. Don't get me wrong, I love the op-1 but I don't make lofi trap hop beatz like 90% of the people who own one.

ok. yeah, then I agree. Id rather prefer a whole system from a single manufacturer since then it feels like an actual instruments. all those modular grids with 20 modules from 20 different manufactures looks really silly

I couldn’t not agree more OP
*beep boop boop bop beep beep*

That’s every demo of every modular in history

LETS HEAR YOU MODULAR PHAGGOTS WRITE A FUCKING SONG THAT SOMEONE ACTUALLY WANTS TO BUY AND HEAR?

Pro tip—-you can’t do that with
* beep beep boop boop blop blop*

>LETS HEAR YOU MODULAR PHAGGOTS WRITE A FUCKING SONG THAT SOMEONE ACTUALLY WANTS TO BUY AND HEAR?

Honestly I think there is plenty out there, its just not advertised as "modular music".

It's not that, it's that guitar pedals, the jack ins/outs and patch cables are usually on the sides of the units, not the face. they're out of the way.
seeing people with massive euroracks, with all those patch cables getting in the way of the controls, on a really deep level it rustles me.

I hate the modular fad, not because I haven't tried it. It's how I got into synthesis. I still think in a modular way when it comes to synthesis in general but Jesus Christ the fad just needs to die. So much of it sounds like shit or is just cloudy foggy soup.

People just want to buy their talent. That's why GAS exists. It keeps their true potential always over the next horizon, something that is limited by their paycheck and not their hard work.

Although, I couldn't stand the white thrash fags who modded their hondas and went down the road with their mufflers sounding like a vuvuzela and now some of those dudes actually built some respectable cars. Modular is like that, I think. A lot of it is just posturing and bullshit, but those who are serious about it are going to end up building some pretty respectable synths and sounds, but it takes years. It's a long term investment.

Yes, there is that also. But he wrote
>set-up of modules
so I just assumed he meant the actual modules, not how they were connected

>everyone is obligated to pander to what I want to hear, because my preferences are the objective definition of quality
see this where "anti-modular" people turn completely retarded

Yeah, that's because they actually know how to arrange a song and actually record their music. Everyone else just records clips to YouTube of them tweaking a few knobs on a looped sequence and get hundreds of thousands of views for it. Social media is killing these people. They'd rather make videos and GEAR REVIEWS than make good music

>People just want to buy their talent. That's why GAS exists.
no different from any other musical pursuit in that respect

How so? Who buys hours and hours of scales practice?

Yeah but you see, I like popular music.
I don’t like nerd, basement-dwelling neck beard music.
You see the differeance there guy?

I'm saying there's no end of guitarists who collect amps and never really practice, or people who dick around in software but never finish anything or produce anything of value.

"making music" is overwhelmingly a consumer-oriented hobby, just buying new toys and occasionally messing with them on weekends

I like bleep bloops. I don't like a lot of modular bleep bloops because a lot of modular bleep bloops fail to do anything interesting with those bleep bleeps, ya dig?

so maybe tools that are primarily geared toward experimental music generally won't attract the sort of people who are inclined to make the music you like

kind of like how people who buy banjos will generally want to play bluegrass

that's not the fault of the tools, or the people using them, that's just you being confused and expecting something inappropriate

what could you even say to someone on how to use a synth. Just turn the knobs and add effects until it sounds good.

>not using Supercollider
lmao

out of curiosity, what sort of rig are you using?
also i have often thought about the parallels with motorheads, thanks for bringing that up lol
also do agree with regarding GAS. it's not just a modular thing. if anything, acquiring more stuff makes more sense in eurorack because the whole rack benefits from additions, versus with like, pedalboards where there are diminishing returns. regardless, people do still try to purchase their way to a breakthrough rather than using what they have more intelligently often.
in regards to the eurorack ambient and so on, i think that's a reasonably valid place for it, but you're right, the people who are great at making worthwhile music with their gear are a more rare breed.
yeah, so much of it is hype and posturing! the tools /are/ amazing, from musical and technical standpoints, but they have become more than just expensive creative tools and are status markers. the OP-1 is a really clever instrument and sounds good, but it has a fairly narrow use, and i think its primary virtue is portability. most of the people who use them are probably not performing with them and have extremely overpriced, hobbled workstations. i mean, whatever works, but it's little bits like this, where the status and image of having specific peices of kit that supercedes the creative value thereof, where i get grumpy.
lol this is just plain rude
gotta check out the evolver again.

what I think is funny is that modular people generally won't multitrack and edit and thoughtfully arrange things into actual compositions because it isn't any fun, even though the good stuff always took an eternity to put together and was done very carefully (Morton Subotnick, etc.)

the live jam thing is like an explicit rejection of actual work

rate my rack.
it's less of an instrument, and more of an interface so that plants can talk to us, although i think the only thing it would allow them to say is "why"

needs a maths, maybe clouds

Maybe there's another Edgard Froese or Tangerine Dream somewhere. Most likely wishful thinking on my part.

Is this the reason people suddenly act like Suzanne Ciani ever made good music?

sorry bro, this isn't going to become a copypasta. try harder next time

yeah you can tell i was only doing this to shitpost, and haven't a fucking clue where to start with modular.
i saw the clouds and considered putting it in. don't know what the maths is.
i basically wanted to include the bare minimum of units so what would everything do?
the Scion uses biometric feedback to control voltage, the grendel's a vocal formant, and i included the lfo to give something for those units to work with. there's a lack of consonants. would the maths allow consonant synthesis?
help, i'm out of my depth.

DESU, this is going to sound silly, but I'm just now learning ableton.

I bought an op-1 for the portability and before that a mother 32. But before that I was just taking different instruments, music apps, and other things and arranging them in audacity and making what I could with that. I'm thinking about selling the mother 32 because I'm realizing I don't like to make acid tracks that much. I like a lot of complex acid IDM stuff but I'm not that great at writing it. Honestly, I bought into the modular hype a little bit a while ago but realized that it's not for me. I like just making music, sometimes I get really interested in making a synth sound a very specific way and the modular helped that but I'm done with it. I don't need a big expensive rig to do the experiments I'm interested in. I also don't see the op-1 as anything but a portable workstation in place of a laptop. I try to push it hard and get out of the ruts that it's easy to get into with it (ie making boom bap chillwave shite.) its just a reasonable piece of gear to make tunes with. I love the wave synth because of the formant transitions. Pretty powerful little pad if you hook up an lfo to it to shift between #s of harmonics slowly and layer it via stereo. Otherwise it sounds pretty flat.

I'm not claiming to make good music, I just can't stand it when people buy a bunch of gear just to appear a certain way. Just make some fucking tunes and get out of everyone's faces about it.

except in relation to live sets, but i generally think eurorack doesn't lend itself super well to particularly inspiring live sets that aren't ambient soup or fairly rigid techno. (and i love techno, but it's hard to pull off a properly engaging set purely in a euro case)
this shit is hilarious. the scion module is actually pretty clever, but mostly for everything except what it is designed for lol
have you really never dealt with this type of person? i'm a dude and i've had plenty of negative, condescending interactions with synth nerds who think they know best. it's just a shitty attitude and sours the potential for constructive engagement

>i generally think eurorack doesn't lend itself super well to particularly inspiring live sets that aren't ambient soup or fairly rigid techno.
I like a couple of the things that Keith Fullerton Whitman has done. But in general you're confined to something really narrow and it's hard to find interesting territory there. It irritates me when people assume "knob per function" is somehow the ultimate user interface. You've still only got two hands. As the number of knobs increases, your ability to control things with any agility decreases. And at some point you're just going to be confused and unable to tell how your gestures relate to the sound. Then it just turns into a mess.

That's why they need modules that can hook up to some kind of axis based touch controller so that they can have multiple functions being affected in a chaos later style pad type of way, The only way to make these modular systems and actually useful seems to be hidden somewhere in that approach to things i.e. having a way to control huge amounts of modules at at once

kaossilator style pad**

you can do that kind of thing much more easily in Max/MSP or whatever

this is why i love things like MI Frames and the nifty X-Y joysticks that let you crossfade between signals. there totally are tools to do this kind of stuff! but it also depends on the music. for expressive textural things, that is a lot more useful. for percussive rhythmic things, you would want totally different devices, and it's harder to economize there.
strikes me as super reasonable.

Thanks, I started this thread because I've been in a shit mood all morning and need something to bitch about. Modular Doesn't bother me bother me that much, however, I can get really negative and go on stupid rants online that mean nothing to anyone and really just amount to a waste of time on my part. I should be spending this time making music and learning ableton.

Really I just hate the fact that as I'm getting into making electronic music while everyone else seems to be getting into electronic music too which makes it seem less worthwhile for some stupid reason. I just Need to get over the idea that making music somehow makes you special. I am genuinely interested in and how sound works and I love sound design, and also just making music in general so it's a genuine curiosity it's just there's this ego thing attached to it. It's just getting really popular now even though I was made fun of back in the day for listening to electronic music, lol

>I just Need to get over the idea that making music somehow makes you special.
and the idea that specific tools mean that your music is somehow serious or interesting, elevated by the shit you're buying