I keep trying to understand, but all the demos that I hear are either just random blips and bleeps, simple arpeggios, or boring minimal drones. Never anything particularly musical, and even when I have heard musical ones it's never anything I don't think could be more easily done with any basic VST or hardware synth. I had a play with Reaktor and it's ok but seems overly complex in the back for the sounds I'm hearing out of it.
I've generally heard more compelling sounds from "normal" synths (Serum/Pigments/Omnisphere/whatever hardware). Modular just seems to add complicated wires and extra complexity between the items for no real gain. Maybe it's just the kind of music I like is not suited to it, I love dancey electronic music, but not the more experimental stuff.
Some people seem irrationally obsessed with modular and I can't help but wonder if it's just like people collecting mechanical keyboards for the sake of getting a good feeling from buying stuff. I have mechanical keyboards, am very particular about the type I like, and swear by them myself. But they're a tool for me and I don't see the attraction in having 100 very similar ones save different color keycaps.
It just seems ridiculous to spend thousands of dollars, give up desk space and have a rats nest of messy wires for what ends up being a basic dual oscillator synth.
Having said that, I'd much rather use VCV rack than the mess, hassle and expense of hardware modular.
Not having a go at people, I like tinkering with stuff as much as anyone, but I just don't see what I have to gain from modular. Please educate me.
- It's helped me learn more about how synthesizers work. When I first started using synthesizers, I relied so much on presets that I never quite figured out how to design patches myself. Modular synthesis really forced me to learn what each module was doing and make strategic changes to get the sound I wanted. This was a somewhat steep learning curve, but it has been wildly beneficial.
- Generally synths have some kind of limit on what you can do somewhere. With VCV Rack specifically, I can add as many oscillators as I want. I can modulate whatever I want. I haven't found a limit yet. I'll admit that most of the time I don't need to go to such extremes and a normal synth is good enough, but when I do want to go crazy I go for VCV Rack.
- On the flipside of that, sometimes it's fun to limit yourself. There are challenges that people do to make a patch with only 3 specific modules (for example). It stretches your creativity to learn how you can make an interesting sound with such harsh limitations.
- Sometimes I have writer's block. In those moments, it feels great to just stick a sequencer on a random setting and put it through a quantizer to generate some ideas that I can build on.
Overall, if you don't feel like you would benefit from modular synthesis I don't think you should have any FOMO about it. Making music is all about what works for you, because most listeners on the other side don't really care about what tools you used to make it.
But I think I'll stick with more standard synths for the moment, at least until I feel I've hit some limit that I think I could overcome with modular.
Thanks for the reply.
Releasing a paid VST version is huge! The way Rack interacts with your DAW is (figuratively) limitless thanks to automation. This also opens up a way for your hardware modular synth to interact more easily with your DAW via Rack. I'm really excited to continue using at, and to see what amazing things the community comes up with.
Last year I released a couple VCV modules under the Hampton Harmonics plugin name. I haven't done anything near as spectacular as some of the other developers contributing to the VCV library, but my experience developing with the API has been great. The update to version 2 for my modules was fairly straightforward (though I know others have had to put a lot more work into it than I have). I wish the documentation were a little more clear and thorough, but the community support is great for anyone interested in diving in. You don't have to have DSP experience either - I don't.
Anyway, congrats to Andrew on the release! I know he's had to put up with a lot of people complaining that it wasn't released earlier, but it's truly amazing what he's accomplished.
