Show HN: I've built a tool for musicians using modular gear | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I've built a tool for musicians using modular gear

patcher.xyz

53 pointspolyterative15 comments

Hello HN, not many will know what this tool is about, but it's launch day and I always dreamed of posting on HN. Let's start!

This is a tool for people using eurorack gear. For synth people. What is cool about my tool is that I show the signal flow with a graph. Here's the official press text:

After a decade of stagnation in this space we are excited to present patcher.xyz: the modern way to manage everything modular.

It’s a tool for professionals, enthusiasts, and casual wigglers.

Novadays artists must develop their own means of taking notes, often on paper, since there is no common format for sharing ideas. Although there is nothing wrong with that, we believe we have found a better way.

We wanted our patch ideas to be searchable, editable and easily-shareable. We needed an easier way to plan our racks, without creating a mess. We needed to be able to find awesome modules fitting our style and feel, without being lost in the ocean of different options. We made it a reality.

patcher.xyz was built to provide a fast and enjoyable experience while bypassing the limitations of current offerings. Our vision is to build a platform to assist you in any part of your wiggling experience: from research, to planning, to buying or trading gear, to sharing your new ideas and music.

Open articleView on HN

One tip - I'm a "musician" (hobbyist), I play the guitar, keyboard, dab with some Cubase, LogicPro, so I'm not a complete stranger to digital music. However nothing in the landing page explains to me what on earth is a patch, module, eurorack etc. Yes, I can google all that, but you have me as a "wider audience" that has a good chance in trying out the product if I had a clue what I need to do to use it. Do I need to buy hardware? You can upsell me an entry level synth (?), do I need to download / buy some software (e.g. a software synth) - a link to get a trial. You can basically open this from just people who know immediately exactly what you do and how it solves them a pain point, to a much wider audience, of people who didn't even know this is a thing, and now that you added a convenient feature to it, maybe the barrier of entry into this sub-genre of music making is lowered, and you gained an unplanned new customer that didn't even know they need it.

The modular synth heads who might use this are a niche audience, and they definitely would know what a patch is. If you don't know what a patch is, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

Hope that doesn't sound rude, its just that this tool doesn't really have any utility for a wider audience.

>its just that

It's not just that. OP's title is "I've built a tool for musicians using mod..."

1. The title is highly inaccurate. It's not a tool for musicians, it's for a specific subset of musicians (like you say).

2. The OP got a front page listing on HN. He missed a golden opportunity explaining things. He probably got a lot of musician visitors that found it interesting, but just got confused and left.

Ok, can you please tell how you would have called this? I've been thinking about the tagline for a lot of time, wasn't able to come out with anything better than that.

"using modular gear" felt really concise to me

First, not rude at all, you make a good point, but my point is, if OP wants to monetize it / make it a business, my unsolicited tip (not that I am some startup guru or anything, just a armchair wannabe) is that even though you go for a niche, you can bring in verticals adjacent to your niche, instead of just fitting a product to the market, you can actually generate new demand by expanding the market. E.g. The chances to convert a keyboardist who can play into becoming a synth head and therefore potentially a paid user are higher than let's say a doctor, so if you already have a musician visit your niche synth website, give them a link, maybe they'll get hooked and you gained a new customer.

as a member of the target demographic, all you have to do is provide a version of Modular Grid that doesn't randomly reposition modules for no reason, or which can display a picture of a cat without moving my entire rack, and I'm in.

but you have to give us this for free. we have to see it and use it right away when we get to the page. I'm not making an account or providing my email address if I don't have to. you have to show me something worth my time to get something from me. other people may not feel that way, but that's where I'm coming from.

anyway — the signal flow feature looks nice, and if you were using pictures of the modules instead of colored circles, I'd be pretty into it. if you made those signal graphs easy to share via Twitter and Reddit, and easy to export to Instagram, I would definitely use them, and I think a lot of other people would too.

I built some pretty complex patches recently and abandoned a whole mini side project documenting them for YouTube because I didn't have a practical way to do the signal graph thing. your signal graph would be perfect for that, but it's got to look better.

I'm sorry to say that in this space the bar for interaction design is low. I love Modular Grid but everybody knows this is true. but Modular Grid shows you pictures of modules. that's where the bar is for the visual design. you have to at least show pictures of modules. people who are thinking about buying stuff like looking at pictures of the stuff that they're thinking about buying.

likewise, when it comes to the YouTube use case, most views on Eurorack videos come from people who are thinking about buying the modules in the videos. if I'm doing a YouTube video showing the signal flow with pictures of modules, I'm getting views, likes, comments, and subscribes — and the comments are saying "what is that app? how do I get it? where do I sign up?" but if it's just these colored circles, the response won't be as strong.

just my opinion.

after reading my own comment I decided to add: building stuff is hard and I respect the work you're putting into this. we in Eurorack definitely need better tools and what you've built looks really awesome.

Thank you for your detailed response.

Honestly I have never even thought about the email 'problem' because so far I have prioritized bigger problems but I understand your point perfectly, having a way to play with it without an account or mail data would be useful. It's not super hard given the current implementation too.

As of right now, I have no clue where to get the images. Several have advised me to steal data from modular, but I'm a bit reluctant to do so.

Honestly, the whole rack management was something I built after a couple of weeks of frustration with modulargrid's lacking abitity to sort modules.

Also lately I couldn't dedicate as much time as I would have liked, and my motivation was waning. As a result, I decided to launch it in a usable state, despite the fact that it lacked some features that I wanted to add.

That being said, the points you have raised are 100% valid, and I will certainly take into account what you have said in the future.

Thanks!

Just to clarify as it wasn't clear, this isn't an actual sound engine like VCVRack but more a way of creating schematics for your patches?

I'd highly recommend creating a demo sandbox so users can see what it is before giving up their email adress.

Yes exactly as you said. A demo page would be really nice to have as soon as I have some time. Thanks for the suggestion.

I found that 288 characters minimum for adding a new module is a little bit much. even the example is many less characters. perhaps that was supposed to be a maximum?

Yes thats a mistake. Sorry for that. Fixed it!

Heads up: Chrome's giving me an invalid cert error and refusing to load your site.

Same on Firefox.

Opera seems fine, though it may have been fixed.

The cert error is news to me. I use Vercel which should handle https with let's encrypt by itself. Can you please provide more info on this cert error by any chance?

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