Synths/Modular/Analogue etc.

[thermal_treasure]

Figured I'd ask as there seems to be quite a few handy people on here, anybody here into modular synths, keys, eurorack etc? It looks to be quite the money pit but fascinating at the same time. Not really the right time for myself to be splurging as I might be off to uni in September, but I do quite fancy putting together a mini rack in the summer complete with some Mutable Instruments, Doepfer wasp etc.

Could always pick up an iPad and have a play around too, there seem to be plenty of apps, Fairlight, VCS3, various Korg units. Not quite the real deal but a lot of fun.

 

[grobda]

caustic is a nice wee app for android - variety of emulated synths, decent sequencer and iirc its only a couple of quid.

Ive got a few of the korg volcas an arturia minibrute and a cheap akai midi controller that came with ableton lite. good fun and not that hefty on the wallet.

no modular synths (yet) - missed out on a korg ms-20 recently. I'd spent my monthly allownace already but wish I'd bought it, it was only £120 (new smaller one). sometime bargains crop up on gumtree.

 

[thermal_treasure]

Wow, I'll keep an eye out on gumtree, thanks for the heads up. I was also looking at Microbrutes/Minibrutes the other day, they seem pretty nifty and relatively cheap.

 

[strykr]

caustic is a nice wee app for android - variety of emulated synths, decent sequencer and iirc its only a couple of quid.

Ive got a few of the korg volcas an arturia minibrute and a cheap akai midi controller that came with ableton lite. good fun and not that hefty on the wallet.

no modular synths (yet) - missed out on a korg ms-20 recently. I'd spent my monthly allownace already but wish I'd bought it, it was only £120 (new smaller one). sometime bargains crop up on gumtree.

damn good price on the ms 20! I'm mainly soft synths really, arturia bundle and UVI Vintage Vault are great, as is OPX Pro that I've just bought and think I'm gonna try and do my next album exclusively on that, lovely warm oberheim brass.

Id love to get a jupiter and a DX7 one day, and a ms20. A friend of mine started building his own modulars it quickly becomes a bit of a money pit time consumer though. But then we all know about that with our current hobby!

strykr2018-05-04 19:57:34

 

[thermal_treasure]

A friend of mine started building his own modulars it quickly becomes a bit of a money pit time consumer though. But then we all know about that with our current hobby!

On point

Love the sound of the DX7, will be picking up an app for that at some point. Considering an MS-20 Mini this summer, looking to learn the basics on something like that before leaping into modular. I see there are various programs for simulating racks but I would like to make my first foray a physical one.

 

[grobda]

volca keys is a mini dx-7 for not much money if you want hardware - although the velocity is set via a slider and isn't read directly from midi. this suits me as im not much cop on a keyboard and the keyboards i have dont have particularly good touch anyway so tend to use the velocity as an envelope modifier.

dexed plugin is free and pretty good for software DX7. I've been patching the volca from dexed, they're exactly the same format as a hardware DX7. beats trying to edit parameters on the volca.

 

[guddler]

There's a great free "DAW" (I think it's a full DAW, I forget) that is essentially a DX-7 emulator. It's called Dexed I think? I have it for Mac but I think it's available for other platforms.

I just started to learn some of this stuff eerier in the year as I was looking for something else to do. I bought an X-Key 37 midi keyboard and just this week received a Modal Craft synth for my birthday. That's a great little thing. The idea is to try to learn what all the knobs and dials do.