The shutdown has me spending a lot more time with my bass hooked up to my effects pedals, and I'm discovering new worlds of sounds, rythyms and melodies I didn't realize existed  as a result.

It now has me pondering modular/Eurorack/synth stuff..

Ordered a moog Mother 32 to play around with as a result

Anyone here into this stuff?

Not any more. I have looked but can not justify the cost. Back in the mid to late 80s I would spend DAYS playing with waveforms and filters. Great time!

It's all very tempting, but I don't have the space for it. I have a Mother 32 as well and am thinking about getting the Matriarch while it's on sale this month.

If you can't justify the expense and/or space, look at vcvrack.

that looks interesting...

Mother 32 showed up earlier this week and I spent two days wrapping my head around what exactly it does..its a blast getting those pink floyd type sounds out of it

https://soundcloud.com/bassgl/moog-jam

This is probably sparking an interest in synthesizers for me and I broke down and ordered a moog grandmother as well.  Not even really that much of piano or keyboard player aside from understanding the lay out and being able to play some scales and chord shapes, but synths open up a whole new world of sonic architecture for me.  I may never get back to playing bass!

I started with a Korg EM-1 and then ordered a Korg MS-20 mini. Then a

Casio CTK-6250. it's worse than BRD and I'm not a musician by any stretch.

Making odd sounds/tones and eventually " music" will pop out!

Too bad I can't recall from session to session what I was doing.

@phurba is a modular guy.


<--- Non player hack.

Archived thread on synths.  Synths

I went with the Source Audio C4.  Really great pedal once you go down the midi rabbit hole.

I was not at all familiar with the Eurorack system until I read your post and then started doing some research.

I'm not really much of a musician (yet, anyway), but I am an electronics hacker and gadget enthusiast, and it has really piqued my interest.

There's a lot to learn - I've been immersing myself in reading documentation from Modular Grid and Muff Wiggler to 4MS and other manufacturers and beyond.

So just to get my feet wet I have ordered some Eurorack 84HP rails with rack brackets and threaded nut strips, some other rails stuffed with nuts, and a few blank 1U and 3U panels from Synthrotek (I guess that the other alternative for DIY rails would have been Vector, but I think that I like the Synthrotek rails better). I'm not sure, but I think that Synthrotek uses the Pulplogic 1U tile format and size rather than the Intellijel format.

I will build my own flying bus cables and power supplies.

I'm going to do some experiments with my own electronics, but I may also look for one or two cheap kits (any recommendations?).

Keep us updated...

I'm not into the whole kit/build from scratch stuff but admire people who have that skill set.

The whole Eurorak/synth thing is fascinating.. I've since bought a couple of other synths to play around with and will admit there is a lot to learn and understand in terms of how oscillators function, how envelopes work, etc.. so there is somewhat of a learning curve.  Trying to balance it out with the bass stuff I do is hard, but it is fun to just sit down with one of these things and work on creating interesting sounds, and also play actual bass lines on the synths that have keys on them

I'm not ready to make sounds or music yet, but I've done a whole lot of reading, and have purchased a bunch of parts that I did not already have on hand in my home electronics lab (mostly potentiometers, knobs, 1/8-inch mono plugs and jacks, op-amps, and the like), as well as some Vector rails (to complement the Synthrotek rails that I bought earlier).

I'm building an enclosure out of aluminum sheet and plate (I may be making a mistake, since it's going to be pretty heavy - I am building in some handles on the sides to help me move it around - it is using two 8U-height rack rails, which will give me 2 sections of 3U and 2 sections of 1U (PulpLogic 1U). I've also built a power supply and a power distribution rail.

I'm going to start by cloning some of the designs at https://aisynthesis.com/, starting with a VCO, a mixer, and a VCF. I will also work on building a sequencer and some A-to-D sampling and some D-to-A outputs (possibly based on a Teensy microcontroller, including its well-regarded audio programming SDK) and will go from there.

I have also installed VCVRack on my Macbook, so that I can experiment with sounds and patches before I have any of my hardware working. So still a ways to go, but I'm finding it all very interesting...

My system has grown a bit since this thread started.

That is certainly something to aspire to!