The World of Modular Synthesizers (2013)
soundonsound.com
soundonsound.com
There is some extremely cool stuff coming out today. Buchla is still making insane gear like this rhythm generator [3, 4]. Some smart friends in London have made a programmable guitar pedal / module that can run Pure Data patches, they also have an Emscripten + Web Audio API powered sharing platform for same patches [5].
[1] http://www.idreamofwires.org/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3636334/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7IVvYWT69g
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OE8qHrRx-g
Edit: [5] is open source software, firmware and hardware
Edit re software vs. hardware: Besides as has been mentioned that comparing software and hardware is a bit silly, I think it's missing the point to argue in favour of one or the other. A few unordered reasons why:
> Learning through making and programming together complement each other in a way only those who've experienced it truly understand.
> It's never been cheaper to buy synth hardware, esp. for the sake of learning e.g. Arduino, MakeyMakey, littleBits. And, it's never been easier to go to a hack space and get taught how to put a synth together (see workshops on http://musichackspace.org, more springing up in Europe at least – where are you, US music hackers?)
> Just like in most fields, the boundaries between software and hardware are becoming less distinguishable, as the Hoxton Owl project [5] clearly shows. This makes it the most exciting time to be interested in both music software and hardware!
Freedom from traditional keyboards (I generally use a Makenoise Rene + Pressure Points, although occasionally will use a Moog Voyager as a controller) has really opened things up for me.
I know that I'll never get the same sound again, and everything feels very fresh and creative. While I don't think I ever made a 'original' sound on guitar, I think that many days I am hearing things that might actually be new, or at least relatively unexplored.
Its also overall slowed down my wants to buy additional synths, effects pedal, etc since I have nearly every possibility in this. The only significant purchase I've done in about a year aside from more modules has been an Eventide H3000.
Plus, it looks badass. I've even performed with it live a few times. I've wanted one since circa 2002, but only recently could afford it. Totally worth it.
Sounds at soundcloud.com/tibbon
What an absolutely legendary machine. This is a classic example of where the plugin version can't compete with hardware of what 30 years ago? Although the plugin is still good, it just doesn't come close to a real H3000.
I actually just bought UAD emulation of the first Eventide harmoizer (H910), and it's pretty amazing. But I haven't been able to compare it to the original like I have with the H3000, so can't say how close it is to the original.
This is my full set:
Eventide H910 Harmonizer
AMS RMX16 (reverb)
Oxford Inflator
Oxford EQ
Ampex ATR-102
Lexicon 224
Studer A800
Precision Enhancer Hz
Precision Enhancer KHz
Precision Maximizer
Precision Multiband Compressor
Precision Limiter
EMT140 reverb
EMT250 reverb
Moog Filter
SPL Transient Designer
Roland RE-201 Space Delay
Roland Dimension D
Teletronix LA-2A Compressor
1176LN limiter
1176SE limiter
Pultec EQ
Cambridge EQ
DreamVerb
RealVerbPro
A good friend of mine has a lot of the real gear listed above, and even has a Series B SSL desk, so that guided me to the purchases, but also allowed me to do direct comparisons. I like the way they essentially re-build the machine's components in code (so they'll measure the input and outputs of all of the real components at various energy levels and then emulate them and 'plug' them together as code modules, pretty impressive.
Some plugins really take a lot of juice though, especially some of the newer ones where they're being more ambitious (Eventide, Studer, Ampex, AMX). I am considering getting an Octo to go alongside the Quad. That should last me a few years.
Offloading the plugin processing is very very handy as well, I rarely get the audio glitches because of a lack of CPU like I used to before.
So yeah, I recommend them highly.
Not modular, but I've been really happy with my Sub 37. In retrospect I could have gone the fully digital route with a MIDI keyboard, it's a cheaper and safer way to start if you're not sure that's your cup of tea. Having an actual physical thingy to tweak can be pretty magical though, especially once you figure out what the dozens of knobs do and how things interact.
Would also recommend http://www.syntorial.com/ to get started in synths.
In terms of making electronic music, it's far easier to stick to a simple sample-driven workflow than to actually dive into synth programming, but there's a special joy in dialing in exactly the timbre you want.
Some resources for getting started down this path: [2] [3] [4]
If anybody wants to chat about audio synthesis on iOS, feel free to get in touch :)
[1] https://github.com/aclissold/twyst
[2] http://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/
[3] http://mkonrad.net/projects/ios_audio_synth.html
[4] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/MusicA...
Has it been easy working this way?
SuperCollider and Pure Data already come with an awful lot of the modules you can buy as analog hardware. You don't have to buy them. You can just use them.
Now, if we were talking about an electric guitar or something, this comment would be sort of out of order. But the whole point of modular synths is that you want to spend time fiddling around and plugging parts together. If you want to do that, come to the software side. We have WAY BETTER PARTS to plug together. You can make them sound like anything, including analog synth modules. And you can get inspired by how other people plugged them together because you can upload your patches to web sites. It's nothing less than a vastly improved substitute to analog modular synths.
Back in the 1970s, computers were too slow to do much in software. Even the famous Deep Note, from the 1980s, used hardware oscillators under computer control (although it's a fantastic example of the expressive power software gives you). A PC in the 1970s might be able to manage 300,000 instructions per second, and maybe 10,000 floating-point operations. Now you can do literally ten billion floating-point operations per second on an off-the-shelf CPU, a million times faster, or eight trillion on an off-the-shelf GPU, almost a billion times faster. This brings a lot of amazing stuff into reach that wasn't before, including even things like RF modulation and demodulation.
RF downconversion, though, still takes analog electronics. Computers still aren't fast enough.
I've done some work with Diego Alberti on real-time music synthesis on a microcontroller. Because the real-time audio synthesis wasn't taxing enough for the CPU, we decided to generate a composite video signal in software visualizing the waveform, too: https://github.com/kragen/ar_bytebeat
He carried this work forward, and it is currently on exhibit at the +CODE exhibit at the Centro Cultural General San Martín until the end of this week, if you're in Buenos Aires.
With that kind of thing, hopefully you won't have to spend US$300 on a netbook to experiment with software synthesis. Check out jarmitage's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10540209, which mentions running Pure Data patches on a computer embedded in a guitar pedal!
SuperCollider or Pure Data don't sound like analogue equipment and vice versa. One is not a substitute for the other.
Also you can build your own modular equipment it doesn't have to cost 300$ per module.
There's a huge DIY community for building/ modding synths.
As for the price. Modular isn't cheap but you hardly need to be a millionaire. You can get a fully functional starting setup for $500 and add from there as you can afford it.
And there's no standard display API for softsynths. (NI have tried to produce one called NKS, but it's early days.)
And softsynths can have hundreds of parameters. Showing them all at once is always going to be a challenge. So most controller products either show nothing at all, or show a handle of items - like eight or so. Which are different for every synth.
If a softsynth supports OSC you can fake the tactility on an iPad, but the small size is a problem; I expect the Pro will be better, but still limited.
Music certainly works better when it's tactile, but - as someone who used to design and build modular hardware, occasionally for cash - I now find modulars rather ridiculous, and certainly just as limiting in their own ways as any other technology.
They make great toys, but IMO the spirit of modulars - build completely new things to make new music - is a lot more alive in software than hardware now.
Novation have made automap systems for about ten years now. NI have made them for a couple of years.
But aside from touch panel toys like the iPad and the Lemur, and some high-end mixers, I still haven't seen a system with more than eight knobs/digital labels.
It wouldn't be hard to design one. Unfortunately in a market where $200 is a lot for a controller, it's hard to make a project like that profitable.
There's also the latency issue of controlling anything via MIDI, a tweak of a filter will have a slight delay, and that can be enough to throw you out of the creative space you'd otherwise be in.
That really isn't that much in the music hardware world. A decent non-modular synth is £1000+ (in UK pounds now). My Nord Lead A1 [1] was around that (and that's digital - even if they call it 'virtual analogue'). Even second hand analogues can be pretty expensive, I recently purchased a Juno 106 [2] built in 1985 for £700. A Jupiter 8 will set you back £5000+.
It's worth it for those that understand the incredible sound you can get from an analogue synth. Modulars take it that step further where you can get properly involved in creating amazing and crazy sounds and sequences, in a way that's difficult or impossible on a regular synth. Just the hands-on aspect of it can create results that you wouldn't do with a mouse and a VST.
As good as the digital stuff is, I am yet to hear anything in-the-box that sounds close to quality of an analogue synth. For me it's about a balance between the two worlds.
[1] http://www.nordkeyboards.com/products/nord-lead-a1
I'll also give a shout-out to Native Instruments' amazing Reaktor software, which is now in version 6.0, better than ever, and now costs only $199: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt...
(also, why are so few programming platforms this accessible? This would not be better for being typed out in CSound or ChucK)
But while virtual components are amazing in many ways, and better in some (eg for doing complex sequences or spectral/frequency modulation), I don't think there's a good comparison with a lot of analog gear. I love my Nord Modular and also use a bunch of Elektron gear, but my favorite things in my signal chain are my analog 303 clone, an Ensoniq DP/4 (digital FX but with very, um, characteristic input and output stages, plus it doesn't sound like any other digital FX unit ever designed), and a crunchy 16 channel Mackie mixer from the 90s that distorts wildly at high gain. It's very hard to get rich, musically expressive distortion and feedback textures in the digital rather than the analog domain. It's like an amazingly high resolution photo of a painting, full of detail, great color, you can see things you wouldn't see with the naked eye etc. etc., and yet it's fundamentally different from looking at or making your own actual painting with paint and brushes. My analog instruments and signal processors are much more limited than their digital equivalents, but within their range they are enormously pleasing to use - 'you can't get a bad sound out of it' as we say. It's hard for me to imagine using a software emulation of the 303 now, even though I spent many long hours crafting such on digital platforms, and still find those emulations enjoyable in their own right - but they simply don't deliver the same sort of sonic gratification as voltage-controlled stuff.
I've done stuff in CSound and Max/MSP (only touched SC and PD a little), but what I most enjoy about hardware isn't the sound or capabilities but that it frees me from my computer. I'm a software developer and all day I'm stuck at this infernal machine. Having a eurorack that requires none of that is a nice thing at the end of the day. I've thought of getting an 8-track 1" or 2" just so I can completely escape from the computer.
The feel is completely different to turn knobs vs writing code. Yes, I know midi controllers... but that really isn't the same and not so immediate.
All of my eurorack modules from different vendors mesh together; plus they play well with my Minimoog Voyager, Machinedrum, guitar pedals (some input/output CV). Yea, MIDI kinda allows for this, but really not still in the same instant way.
Even modern MIDI devices kinda suck at implementation (see the new Roland Boutique series, which don't output MIDI CC from their faders and knobs.. and even if it did, I couldn't route an LFO from there into a CV processor on a Korg via MIDI).
MIDI is more of a "I wonder if this works and has the bandwidth", whereas CV is more, "If you see it, you can do anything you want!"
Personally I use both hardware and software, and appreciate the strengths of both. It's nice that modern computers let you do so much so cheaply, but I don't want to use SuperCollider or PD to emulate an analog synth any more than I want to replace my upright piano with a digital keyboard.
By contrast, the user interface for modular synths is a bunch of knobs and cables. Going to physical knobs on a USB controller and virtual cables on a touchscreen is purely an improvement, and one that vastly expands your expressive capability.
So, guitars are on some axis more expressive than Pd, and less expensive; while analog synths are, in my view, less expressive than Pd, and more expensive. Why would you want to use a less expressive, more expensive instrument that works the same way? Maybe as a conspicuous-consumption status symbol or some kind of meta-level meditation on the nature of modern society, but not to make music.
Your digital keyboard will probably sound a lot better than your upright piano if you get a good set of samples for it and reasonable speakers and headphones. (Well, who knows, maybe you're patching bells and belt grinders into your upright piano. That's harder to do with a digital keyboard...)
Also, I hope you weren't reading any ill will into my "rich people" phrase. I have nothing against rich people. I used to be one. Many of my family and friends are rich people. I might be a rich person again myself someday. I just feel like this article is only relevant to rich people — for those of us for whom spending a few thousand dollars is a significant decision, modular analog synths are silly!
But that's bracketing out the issue of the sound. Digital synths just don't sound like analog synths, not yet. (The gap is closing every year, sure.) Modelling the subtle variations of an analog synth is a difficult, processor-intensive task, and there's a qualitative difference between the sound of the best digital emulations and the cheapest analog devices. I use both digital and analog synthesizers, and I find that creating usable sounds is much faster with analog. Which translates into more expressiveness, because it's much more possible to change sounds on the fly.
This is a huge part of it for me too. It's so much faster to make a noise that 'sounds right', sits in a mix without excessive EQing (or sometimes any EQing), and requires very little support from additional effects units and has a natural modulation. The fact that you have to let a lot of synths 'warm up' first kinda indicates the magic that holds them together.
This also translates to the mixing, I use an analogue mixer too, and the summing of the channels 'just works'. Everything sits in the mix better and I spend less time making it work like I used to in-the-box.
That removal of technical hurdles helps keep the creative juices flowing, where previously I'd walk away from a track in frustration because I couldn't 'quite get it right'.
Choice of instrument is a very personal decision, and of course there are practical considerations (I'm not going to be lugging an acoustic piano on stage any time soon). If you like virtual instruments and usb controllers best, more power to you.
For many modular synth enthusiasts the interface is actually primary, over other considerations such as the mechanism of synthesis and sound. A growing number of modules are digital, with only the control voltage I/O in the analog domain. For these the appeal is still the same; something you touch with your hands, immediacy, freedom from the tyrrany of endless options, something you can't check Facebook on, etc. Speaking for myself, I feel like I'm using a different part of my brain when I plug a cable into a physical jack as opposed to dragging a virtual cable across a plate of glass. That's not even to get into the question of how it sounds, which is still relevant. I disagree with your characterization of acoustic piano vs digital sampling, although it's not really worth getting into the nuances here.
Your arguments are quite aggressive in my humble opinion. Clearly those of us who are arguing from the point-of-view of experience are all entirely incorrect, and we should dump our synths because we can't possibly be expressive with them?
We all find our own preferred route to music composition - nobody is right or wrong, music is such an emotional pursuit that once you find something that works for you, do it. I also play the guitar (and I own three of them), but I much prefer the direct nature of being able to generate new sounds on my synths and interact with them live.
And although there are many very impressive software based music applications, they all work from the premise of approximating infinite sound-waves. There will always be artificats, no matter the resolution. Then there's the 'real world' effects on sound in analogue machines: heat, resistance, interference, impurities... these give the lauded analogue machines their 'character', and that is what the human ear likes.
There are myriad attempts at digital emulation of that character; some are very close, some close enough that you couldn't tell in a blind test, a lot are miles apart, especially when it comes to synth emulation (rather than outboard effects and mixing desks). I use a DSP from Universal Audio [1] that emulates a lot of outboard effects units and class channel-strips, and mostly they're very good, some are exact.
I think most people using analogue hardware knows that digital is improving at a very fast rate. However the improvements are primarily from trying to attempt to emulate classic analogue gear.
> Your digital keyboard will probably sound a lot better than your upright piano if you get a good set of samples for it and reasonable speakers and headphones.
How can any emulation sound better than the real thing? Surely the real thing sounds as close to itself as it can be?
> all work from the premise of approximating infinite sound-waves. There will always be artifacts, no matter the resolution.
I think this argument is kind of a red herring, and it leads to people dismissing analog enthusiasts as ignorant. With 24/192, the sampling artifacts are well below the level of Brownian noise from individual oxygen molecules bouncing off your eardrums at all frequencies up to three octaves above your hearing range (and nearly an octave above dogs' hearing range). Whatever artifacts you're hearing are coming from the analog part of your digital equipment, not from the digital approximation. You can do the math and verify this yourself.
The much more interesting part of the discussion for me has been about the other aspects of the subjective experience that people have brought up: of modules that you "can't get a bad sound out of", of the wabi-sabi beauty of slight unpredictability, of the continuity and low latency of analog-synth responsiveness, and of the destructiveness of the misguided application of Macintosh user interface guidelines in realms where they really, really don't work.
I wrote:
> Your digital keyboard will probably sound a lot better than your upright piano if you get a good set of samples for it and reasonable speakers and headphones.
And you quite reasonably asked:
> How can any emulation sound better than the real thing? Surely the real thing sounds as close to itself as it can be?
Well, yeah, if you load your digital keyboard with upright-piano samples, it won't sound any better than the upright piano. But upright pianos sound kind of terrible, especially down in the bottom octave and a half where they're almost missing the fundamental. Instead, you can load in a sample set from a Steinway concert grand. Maybe, with some digital waveguide synthesis, you can even simulate the change in tonality as the piano warms up. (My own poor attempts at digital waveguide synthesis of piano sound always come out sounding like, at best, a twelve-string guitar. But in DSP I'm just a dabbler, and there are people who dedicate their lives to this stuff.)
Their stuff looks interesting and you can even buy DIY kits. They even have modules for servo motors, solenoids and other stuff that you can interact with real world.
They are also my office neighbours.
They have some pretty far-out stuff. Woggle Bug and Waveform City are outstandingly weird in a very creative way.
Also in EDM most people don't use hardware synths.
[ 1 ] http://www.themarysue.com/women-gamers-spend-equal-on-games/
[ 2 ] http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/141/videoga...
[ 3 ] http://www.businessinsider.com/women-and-mobile-games-2014-8