I built my own analog drum machine (2020)
reverb.com
reverb.com
For the performance I built a software instrument in Max/MSP with some similar principles around free timing to those in this drum machine, but with a digital granular synth voicing.
At the pre-show critique, I performed a piece using this instrument, and explained that the synthesizer had 3 voices because I found that to be a sweet spot between a full-sounding texture and what I could manage live.
Alvin asked me if I had considered 5 voices. Confused, I said I had, but, and I repeated, I found it too much to manage. Cryptically, he replied something to the effect of ‘well, ok, but three is three but five is five.’ This was bizarrely hilarious to me but I kept it to myself.
Later, the student who designed the show poster elected to call it ‘Three is Three but Five is Five’.
If it’s at all interesting I’d add that the instrument was multichannel and I performed from a seat in the theater audience, with the outputs of the system variously directed to the quad-channel PA and to the battery-powered car stereo I had sewn into a nylon vest / jacket on my person.
What I love about making music with synths is you're essentially exploring a fractal overlaid on all possible audible frequencies, modulated by time. There is a kind of romanticism to the analog aspect of it that emphasises how it is a tangible event instead of a sampled representation, which is basically a fluffy idea now because physically humans are indifferent to whether it's one or the other, but the way it comes out in music is that on machines like this, the art of it is something discovered and shared moreso than reflected and produced. It doesn't really matter, but if there were an impulse-buy priced one akin to the stuff at teenage.engineering by this artist or another one, I could see a mini-craze for them.
That’s what microtonal harmonic structures feel like to me, in the present day. Exploration and sharing of a new but familiar frontier. Even when done digitally.
Another way to think of it is that every knob on the synth gives you a new dimension and each patch is a single point in that n-dimensional space. Sound design means exploring that volume by changing coordinates.
I look at synth usability (which is very similar to how a lot of game designers talk about fun) as in part a question of how that space is arranged. How much of that volume produces sounds users will like versus ones they won't? How continuous is it? If I like a sound at point X, how likely am I to like sounds near X, or will moving even a small distance radically change the sound? Can I intuit what neighboring regions will sound like based on the current sound?
I think a big part of why subtractive synthesis has been so successful is that it works well in that model. Most parameter changes are continuous and intuitive. The space feels like it smoothly changes in useful and predictable ways as you navigate.
FM synthesis is really cool, but it feels a lot more like a chaotic universe where there are tiny islands of brilliant sounds separated by empty volumes of noise, or indistinguishable FM bloops.
Man, particularly for drums that seems so cool. Obviously you can nudge things off the grid in Ableton or whatever DAW, but just to be able to move the sliders as it plays in real time and figure out where things feel right seems like a lovely way to work.
It's a (great) way to get started with modular synthesis.
Eurorack is specific term for a particular hardware format (physical dimensions, power supply specifications, electrical standards). In general, most of the modules are analog, though there's no requirement for this to be true. Hardware modular synthesis existed before the emergence of Eurorack (perhaps most famously the Moog modulars, but also Buchla and perhaps 6-12 other companies making modular systems). Eurorack is an industry-wide specification that allows many different module makers to create modules that will all fully interoperate with each other.
I don't think that it is accurate to call Rack an emulation of the hardware. Rack itself doesn't emulate anything at all. Some of the modules emulate specific hardware modules. Many do not. There's also no actual voltage in Rack, just a nomenclature consensus on "1V/Octave", despite there being no volts anywhere.
ps. I love Rack.
There are plenty of software modular synthesizers: Uhe's Zebra is a bit of a classic in that regard. It's a wholly original digital modular synthesizer, and bared very little resemblance to physical Eurorack.
> There's also no actual voltage in Rack, just a nomenclature consensus on "1V/Octave", despite there being no volts anywhere.
Sure, just like there isn't a cartridge reader in bsnes. That doesn't mean it's not an emulator: it's just arranging the data in a manner that makes it viable to compute. It's not outside the realm of possibility to also simulate those voltages, but what's the point? The same discussion has been had every time the phrase "virtual analog" was used, and nobody ever agrees on it. In any case, VCV Rack is still emulation, even if it's only HLE.
The hallmark of modular is the ability to connect any output to any input, plus the ability to modulate most controls via an input (there modules in both Rack and hardware that don't adhere to the second part).
You can't do that with Zebra. I would say that it's U-he that is using (slightly) misleading marketing by calling Zebra modular, which it is in only a rather weak sense. It's no more modular than an Oberheim Matrix (6 or 12), which nobody would have ever called "modular". "Highly modulatable" would be fair, but that's really a little different.
Eurorack is modular synthesis. Rack uses the term "eurorack" simply because it is more familiar to most people at this point in time.
I'm aware of two debates about the term "virtual analog". The most common one has to do with how (or if) to simulate the non-linearities present in actual analog circuits. The second has been created by a few synth companies that try to use "virtual analog" to describe their synths. What they really mean is "same workflow, same controls, same modulation options as you'd expect in an analog synth from the period 1980-1995".
I'm sure there are some VCV modules inspired to other systems like Buchla or Serge but they are not official software reproductions of hardware products, like the examples mentioned above.
I absolutely loved his first album. Even better when he teamed up with Conan Mockasin (who I’ve always kept an eye on because I went to school with him) to form Soft Hair. Their track, The Lying has to Stop, is a work of beauty.
Another very impressive thing they did was never stop.
I continued with experiments using vacuum tubes more so into this century although I slacked off without a bench in recent years due to serious losses from natural disasters as they have come along.
I really had my old vintage gear in shape and some new developments which sounded excessively tubular, and it had been a good reason to break out the old guitar even if just to test the amps numerous times per session as I was auditioning components and circuit possibilities. When I was at the bench I would spend about equal time soldering and playing.
I was playing the same old stuff so I could reference the underlying differences in the circuits, I'm not a songwriter to begin with and I definitely was playing worse than ever, but with just a few hours of soldering I could get better tone than I ever had in my life.
I needed all the help I could get anyway at that point and I guess I did have nothing to be ashamed of, but it was easy to admit that I was getting more progress out of spending two hours soldering than practicing music.
Ended up with the amps as my instruments and the guitar as the equipment, and did some fun gigs with talented musicians for a while there.
I never wanted to stop either.
http://rogernichols.com/wendel
Clocking in at ~$150K, it probably was a bit more expensive than this guy's project.
https://warp.net/editorial/richard-d-james-speaks-to-tatsuya...
I think RDJ was involved with other instruments' designs too.
I had some help, and some disappointments, but building your own hardware is pretty easy with the Arduino ecosystem.
Would a metronome count for that?