[1] https://imgur.com/a/chegsO5 (my setup)

DIY synth making will take up every bit of spare time you think you have left, and then some. Your hands will become a puzzle of soldering iron scars, and you'll slowly lose your hearing from accidental speaker pops. You have been warned.

Absolutely! There's a group on FB called 'Eurorack DIY' if anyone's interested in this. Thonk [1] is also the store for you. Lots of DIY kits (before you inevitably embark on the path of building your own modules from scratch!)

[1] https://www.thonk.co.uk/

Also, as much as I love the Thonk products, don't get put off by the price tags of some of their kits if you're intimidated! Some of my favourite synths have been made from penny parts I got from Alibaba, that totalled about £15 to make. They have a habit of sometimes spontaneously exploding, but that's all part of the fun.

So you lose your house anyway ;)

I spent this morning redoing the wiring on two stomp stiches- I had wired them rotated at a 90 degree angle!()

() at least I didn't have to resolder the center terminal...

https://littlebits.com/products/synth-kit

I enjoy the act of building. A person interested in writing software doesn't have to care about using the software. A person interested in fixing and building kit cars doesn't have to care about driving them. A person working out can be doing it because they enjoy it, not because they care about any end goal. A person baking bread doesn't always have to eat it. A person painting a picture doesn't have to adorn it on the wall when they're done.

There's a lot more to hobbies then just what you get at the finish line. The process is often much more fun than the result at the end of it, or what you can do with that end product.

Secondhand market is great for Eurorack

Every time I think about getting more into synths, I worry that I'll just end up endlessly noodling and never actually complete any songs. Years ago, I bought a copy of Reason and had tons of fun playing with it, but eventually I realized that after every session, I was rarely any closer to having a completed work I could share with others.

For me not being focused on finishing anything is what got me back into playing music (and eventually performing live sets).

Previously there was so much pressure to produce end results I couldn't even get started and lost all joy in the process. At some point I got some hardware to just play with and never really looked up how to save anything (was a Drumbrute, Meeblip and I borrowed a Beatstep). Was making odd acid tracks and silly sketches on my kitchen table every night that I'd lose as soon as I turned it all off. It was oddly freeing, and really fun.

A year later I was playing out gigs ranging from 20 mins to 3 hours. And one could even argue that I've still not finished any songs despite hours of recordings and performance as it's mostly improvisational.

Now I'm happily back in the noodling around and having fun stage again and loving it (though about to switch gears again).

Anyway - just figured I'd weigh in as there's often a lot of pressure to finish or record things when just playing around or building weird synths is in and of itself a really really fun (if expensive) hobby and maybe someone needs to hear that. :)

(also perfectly fine if your focus is on complete songs, of course)

I'm going through a sort of mini-midlife crisis right now and one of the things I'm thinking about is whether I can make music part of my life again. I used to be in a rock band and it was tons of fun, but I'm in my 40s with kids so the logistics of rehearsing with other people and playing shows at night make that unlikely.

Another path I'm considering is making electronic music. That's mostly what I listen to and I used to tinker with it before I started a band, so I have some experience with synthesizers, beats, etc. It's much more amenable to my life style now because I can do it after the kids go to bed. But also, back then, I had a lot of trouble getting anything done and often ended up feeling disappointed.

It's not enough for me to just noodle with a synth for a few hours. I want something I can share with other people, which implies to me that I need to be able to finish things. So I'm just trying to figure out strategies for that before I drop money on gear only to have it collect dust.

Even though the hardware people seem like the most outspoken on most forums, I enjoy doing everything in the box now and my hardware mostly just sits under its dust covers.

I have an Ableton Push2 and it's an amazing piece of kit, more like an instrument than a controller. The layout makes much more natural sense to me than a keyboard, I think because I used to play guitar.

I'm the same in that I would like to have something at the end that I can share with other people, but the finishing stuff part I haven't quite worked out.

So far that has required more discipline than I have been able to muster, but I do feel I'm making progress and my workflow is improving.

> Even though the hardware people seem like the most outspoken on most forums,

Good point!

Of course it's up to you, but if I were you I would just get a controller and just get started. It's never been easier, cheaper or better. If you want to save money you could just get something secondhand from ebay.

I am invested in and love Ableton but there are lots of good options out there.

Like I say, I don't think hardware is necessary these days. It is fun to have dedicated knobs for everything but if you get a good controller it's much more flexible overall.

I can put 10 instruments into a single instrument rack on a track in Ableton and immediately have 8 macro knobs to control whatever I want about all 10 instruments at once.

You can easily do crazy stuff like create mutant instruments that morph between completely different instruments or samples, and change effect settings according to how hard you play the notes, or what part of the bar you're in. The limit is really only your imagination!

Then if you want, you can just duplicate that whole complex track with a single keypress. It's crazy. You can't do that with hardware!

Getting it to sound musical is the hard part, and that's where hardware shines - because you're limited in options, you can usually just turn it on and get a good sound out if it immediately. But IMO that's not a real reason that hardware is better because of course you could limit yourself to that in software too.

You sound like you can afford it and have the desire. I would just buy something and get started. It's heaps of fun, as long as you don't put too much pressure on yourself!

This is basically my plan. Except that I'm deliberately putting it on hold until I'm done with the book I'm writing because I really don't have the time and definitely don't need the distraction.

> It's heaps of fun, as long as you don't put too much pressure on yourself!

But putting pressure on myself is like my #1 personality trait. :)

One interesting aspect of the modular thing that hasn't been discussed yet is limitation. With an in-the-box setup with all the plugins it's easy to get lost in the endless choice of what could be done. Each song sounds different because there's no consistency of setup.

With a hardware setup you're usually limited to a small number of devices/modules - this can be very powerful in focussing the mind. Each time you come back to your setup it's the same, but you'll dig a bit deeper to get something else out of it. Eventually you master it and produce the best of what that thing can do.

A lot of great early electronic music came out of limitations. Voodoo Ray was originally going to be called Voodoo Rage, but the sampler had a limited amount of memory left, so he cut off 'Rage' to make it 'Ray'.

It can be argued that the amazing amount of music that comes out of the 'standard band' setup is also a product of limitations.

Joining a band was a revelation because all I had to do was make my bass part sound good and there were relatively limited ways to do that. On top of that, a bass or guitar just sounds pretty nice right "out of the box". With electronic music, I found it took quite a bit of effort to even get to a single sound that sounded rich and satisfying. It felt a lot more like having to be a luthier when all I wanted to do was play. (At the same time, I didn't want to just use presets either, because I didn't want sounds that were too familiar...)

I have several albums worth of the first stage, doing the pollishing is my weakest stage, the rest is easy.

The hardware actually makes it easier for me to finish tracks because I can usually jam out a whole track on the modular and do a lot of modulation manually or with CV that I would normally find tedious in-the-box. I will sometimes jam out for an hour or so and then find interesting sections to lay out. It's remarkably creative.

Modular is especially good for programmers I think, it's a very systematic way of thinking and it's quite easy to lose yourself in the process of what-if. As soon as something starts sounding repetetive it's trivial to patch in something that modulates it away. Creating self generating patches is especially rewarding, where the system is self modulating and creating controlled randomness.

The sound design aspect of it is fun for its own sake. So, I don't always fire it up just to make music. It will often lead onto me making a track, but it's just fun to see what happens.

For what it's worth I have a few bits (in various stages of completeness) on soundcloud [1]

[1] https://soundcloud.com/paullouth

I'm listening to "Fusion" right now. The drum sounds are fantastic. Nice and tight and punchy. The swing on the hi hat adds a lot too. What are those coming out of?

I go through periods where I just get an okay sound going, and then play with it for 5-10 minutes, and record the stereo bus.

So after a period of this, I usually get 10-12 recordings.

I mean, it's not great. It's not the same as learning a bluegrass tune on banjo and polishing it till I can play it super fast, but I like the results enough to share them with people. So, in this context all the noodling _is_ the completed work.

Here's the result of the last period: https://westtexasjohn.com/category/synth-diary/

5 years after that I was releasing stuff that maybe, someone might want to listen to. Could have been a lot quicker with some training as opposed to just continually messing around with it.

I think in another few years I will have something that actually sounds good, sonically. Mastering is the hardest part so far.

I have managed to figure out a system for getting writing finished, so an option I'm considering is trying to apply that to music and see how it goes. But I promised myself I wouldn't do that until the current (giant) writing process is done.

I really noticed the difference when I started a band and played bass. With each of us having a single dedicated instrument and feedback from each other, it was a lot easier to make progress and get things done.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FW8QYt6bio

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUv9GtMlUwA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6agTPMwbL8A

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G0-Qvkr1UU

For me, the knobs are the most important part. It’s an expressive medium after all, you need to feel the movement.

I've sold off an Elektron Analog Four, Elektron Analog Rytm, Elektron Octatrack and an Access Virus Ti 2 less than a year ago and started working exclusivley in the box and using two ableton push 2 as midi controllers and I honestly do not miss my hardware at all.

Sure I lose out on some of that analog warmth but I've come pretty close by emulating it with various VSTs.

However, VSTs are vastly more convenient and eliminate the annoyances of tuning, physically powering and plugging in a large amount of bulky machines, losing previous specific sounds, and they give you the ability to easily tweak and edit previous recordings. However, you lose the immediate sense of close control over each aspect of the sound.

Ideally, what I would like is a physical MIDI controller with an exact map of my favorite analogue VSTs in terms of knobs and controls. My current keyboard does have a few a customization options, but it's rather awkward to map it to the VST each time, and it's not precisely 1:1 as there's not enough knobs, and they're not laid out or labeled in an intuitive manner.

On the other hand, physical synths take a lot of space, break down, are hard to setup if connected together, some require batteries to keep the settings and patches alive and the battery could sometimes be a pain to reach to and change. I had a Yamaha SY-77, which was amazing by the way, the battery failed and the screen was dim. I gave up attempting to replace it myself, it required taking apart most of the screws and the operation itself was a couple of hours.

I started on VSTs but I think i learned a lot more by playing with physical synths and it was way more fun too. I kept them always on and whenever I had an itch to play I didn't have to open a project, click click, choose the instruments, sometimes being phased by so many options that the itch went away. Also sticking with a synth that didn't seem promising at first proved to be very rewarding after all, I'd discover interesting setups that I didn't think were possible. With VSTs I had dozens but can't say I felt like exploring in depth, I had no favorite VST, they all seemed to sound very similar.

VSTS have advantages though. You come back to an old project and want to modify something and bam, everything is setup the way it was when recorded. You make a mistake and you easily go and edit out the mistake without re-recording. All in all I'd say to look at VSTs when you are more production inclined. If you just want to be creative and play and learn at the same time without so many stops to make choices, physical synths are a good investment. Physical synths and a physical mixer!

The boxes you've sold off are good equipment, but they don't really have all the knobs that I'd want, even if they are powerful boxes.

There's a dedicated button for almost everything (except for browsing samples, which is something that it would be impossible to have dedicated buttons for).

The great thing about Push is that you sort of make your own UI. If you put an instrument rack on a track then you assign your own macro knobs for whatever you want. It's only if you need to access the devices within that that you need to start navigating around using the (dedicated) buttons.

Without the on screen menu the function of the buttons/knobs across the top are not clear.

As opposed to having one button/knob per function.

Those are some pricey synths you’ve rocked, not really a learner’s set-up, especially the Elektron sequencer.

For me, the ms-20 and the feel of tweaking those knobs is what made the feel of really playing a synth come together. Jamming with a friend on drums.

These days, yeah, I actually do most my noodling using the IOS Korg Gadget with my analog keys as a controller/filter bank.

As I understand it, it is not possible to separate them, ie both will be showing the same track/device.

Is it possible to have one in note mode while the other is in session mode?

How do you use them together?

And so I tried the same thing with the "Monark" VST thinking "yeah analog still wins" and nope, Monark does the exact same thing. But I never discovered it until I actually had the knobs in front of me.

I've since gotten a BCR-2000 and tried mapping all my soft synths but none of them map completely and it's just... not the same somehow. It is better though.

Is it possible to go from first principles, starting with a sound that I have in mind (an Apple Logic default synth) and build a similar sounding (digital) synthesiser in some (hopefully open) format that can cross convert?

You'd have to explore sampling the output of the Logic synth, and then converting and loading them into the sample engine on the Piano.

https://www.nordkeyboards.com/software-tools/nord-sample-edi...

https://singlecellsoftware.com/caustic

And it is free for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux/WINE