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MrNovember wrote:I'm just going to ignore the last two pages...

I got into euro because I'm shit at guitar and always have been. I really felt like I hit a wall with the guitar so I started trying out all kinds of other instruments. Banjo and mandolin stuck for awhile, but it was just more of the same. Then I found the Drone Commander and basically started building my pedalboard like a synth. After a while of that I finally took the plunge, sold almost everything, and bought some euro.

I am also more interested in the experimental and sound design side of music and euro definitely speaks to experimentation. I have absolutely no interest in presets or any of the traditional synth ideas. I love being able to route things any way I want and not always being able to recreate something after I've unpatched it. The sounds and the possibilities are endless.

Sure it's fairly expensive, but honestly my 12U, 84hp euro system probably costs far less than a lot of peoples guitar rigs

It's definitely not for everyone, but I absolutely love the chaotic mess of euro

i have this dichoto.... matic? relationship with music. everything you said about harnessing chaotic and unpredictable elements and just ENJOYING making noise.... i LOVE doing that. i can spend hours playing simple things into delay and layering ugly ugly happy making things.

but i do love making songs too. and i get reallllly frustrated when i don't have anything...... i dunno.... to show i guess? any permanent progress to work on?

behndy wrote:oh. oh hell yeah. i LOVE non standard approaches to noise making. someone in another thread pointed out Bastl (sp?) synth loot, and it is SEXY. i want to get into some of that after i get some other things in household.

i still don't think it's for me, but your words, your sexy buttery little words, make me want to get a little setup to play with.

Bastl can be had for pretty cheap if you have any soldering skills? They're pretty big in the DIY scene I believe. That's another aspect of euro I haven't explored too deeply because my DIY skills are pretty lame, but you can make a pretty epic DIY rack for fractions of the price of a normal rack

behndy wrote:i have this dichoto.... matic? relationship with music. everything you said about harnessing chaotic and unpredictable elements and just ENJOYING making noise.... i LOVE doing that. i can spend hours playing simple things into delay and layering ugly ugly happy making things.

but i do love making songs too. and i get reallllly frustrated when i don't have anything...... i dunno.... to show i guess? any permanent progress to work on?

Euro will definitely be much harder to make a "song" with or to perform "normally" due to the lack of presets and the fact that you'd need a massive system to really build an entire song. But, it definitely excels at just spending hours manipulating a simple input and making ugly, nasty things. Or beautiful, heavenly things. It can go either way really. I've really embraced it for the experimental and ambient side, but I do still have a pretty simple guitar setup for when I want to jam with people or try to write an actual structured song

i like you suh.

behndy wrote:i like you suh.

Thanks!
I should add a disclaimer though: don't listen to me! Euro is a fucking rabbit hole of crazy shit that you'll want to spend all of your money on

lol. yeah. the moneh and GOTTA CATCH THEM ALL aspect that i am highly HIGHLY susceptible to preclude me even attempting a toe dip right now.

Uncle Grandfather wrote:i work for myself, own my own business and I worked my ass off to get to the point where i. i didn't mean to trigger you man, was trying to be encouraging that yeah even though shit costs money there are ways to make it. that's all, I didn't mean you were too entitled to work at jobs that you feel are below your worth or that indeed you were a lazy fuck. I hustled for extra jobs last two years and have been spreading myself extra thin so I could put together this euro, where there's a will there is a way. stay positive

I saved up money for 5 years working so I could go to school without spending anything. Fortunately, I could get a full scholarship, so I've had gear money to throw around for the last two-three years now, so I'm not sticking up for myself by any means, but rather a general respect for people and their hard work. Your initial comment just seemed like it came from up on a very high and ignorant horse. To say "where there's a will, there is a way" is sort of the same thing, to be quite honest. For some, there is no way. I'll lay this to rest now, but try to understand that not all people have a safety net to fall back on, even if they have a will and see a way, and whatever extra money they have will be pragmatically prioritized elsewhere for themselves and their family. I'm out.

Not that long after I started trying to take a whack at making electronic music (mostly on a computer with a few pieces of hardware) my band broke up, singer said fuck Seattle and moved to the country. So I had an active electronic project and a huge pile of pedals that were sitting around saying "money." To be honest I get the same exact sort of satisfaction out of eurorack that I got out of pedals, making weird sounds. In my band I only used a few pedals, most were there for me to go into rehearsal by myself and do solo freak outs. Now I do freak outs at home in the guest bedroom in my pajamas. A personal bias bonus, I don't like playing bass into headphones, but with synth I do like it, so as a bedroom set up it's pretty great.

You're right Behndy, about no save spots, but in a way that is liberating. The fact that you build each patch from scratch makes it an entertaining "life is a journey" type discipline, as you survey what the most recent patch cable or knob twist added, or took away, from the sound.

Finally if you like what you got, tune it, beat sync it, record it, use it as a sample later. That's the easiest way to save your work.

Dark Barn wrote:Finally if you like what you got, tune it, beat sync it, record it, use it as a sample later. That's the easiest way to save your work.

Exactly what I do now. Any time I find something I like, I just record 5-10mins of it to be used later. The last time I submitted something for an ILF collab it was just various recordings layered together to make a complete song

UglyCasanova wrote:

Uncle Grandfather wrote:i work for myself, own my own business and I worked my ass off to get to the point where i. i didn't mean to trigger you man, was trying to be encouraging that yeah even though shit costs money there are ways to make it. that's all, I didn't mean you were too entitled to work at jobs that you feel are below your worth or that indeed you were a lazy fuck. I hustled for extra jobs last two years and have been spreading myself extra thin so I could put together this euro, where there's a will there is a way. stay positive

I saved up money for 5 years working so I could go to school without spending anything. Fortunately, I could get a full scholarship, so I've had gear money to throw around for the last two-three years now, so I'm not sticking up for myself by any means, but rather a general respect for people and their hard work. Your initial comment just seemed like it came from up on a very high and ignorant horse. To say "where there's a will, there is a way" is sort of the same thing, to be quite honest. For some, there is no way. I'll lay this to rest now, but try to understand that not all people have a safety net to fall back on, even if they have a will and see a way, and whatever extra money they have will be pragmatically prioritized elsewhere for themselves and their family. I'm out.

no worries. honestly i didn't realize it was offensive these days to suggest that perhaps a part time job would give you extra money to spend. hell i even said don't take this the wrong way and even pointed that out a couple times, made the "get a job, hippy" joke....

DRodriguez wrote:CV is control voltage, it just a way of using electricity to control other things. There is still audio running through a modular system, just at a different level than a guitar's output. You can get modules that convert the guitar to a more usable level for modular. (from my understanding, I don't actually have modular stuff)

Just to expand on that, in most modulars CV and audio are at the same level (Buchla is different for this but that's one of the only ones). Typically up to +/-10V (with +/-5V being expected by a bunch of modules). For these, the difference between CV and audio is the rate. Audio goes faster. You've probably all played with an effect that has an LFO (low freq oscillator) that goes faster and faster up to the point where it defines an audible pitch (applied to an amplifier for a tremolo, etc.), that's basically this.

And a modular can be a very good way to make music that can not easily be done (in hardware) with other devices. I've been playing electronic music for 15+ years. My first concert was a gameboy with nanoloop making drones and fed to a Boss DSD-2 pedal that was triggered by a small box a friend made me that output the sum of 2 squarewave LFOs. That's basically something you'd do with a modular patch.

I wanted a modular around 2000 or so when only Doepfer, Analogue Systems and Analogue Solutions made Eurorack (and ASol was a bit different) but didn't have the money, used other synths, effect pedals, etc. for a long time and realized 3-4 years ago or so that there were tons and tons of Eurorack manufacturers (and there's 3 or 4 times the amount now). I had more disposable income so I started growing a small system. Which is now a not yet full 7U case (i.e. 2 rows of normal modules and 1 additional row of small modules). I can do things with this that are not simple with other instruments but sometimes I prefer using a keyboard and a few effects or a guitar. Different instruments. To put things in perspective, some of my favourite musicians are Mika Vainio, Carsten Nicolai, Christian Fennesz, Tim Hecker.

Anyway, the main thing is that while modular (99% eurorack these days) is quite trendy these days, it's not for everybody. If it fits what you want to do, then it's great, as long as you know what the fuck you're doing and read enough things/documentations/etc. to have a proper understanding of what the different modules do. It's a more involved process than plugging a guitar in an amp because part of the composition work is in the patching itself (whereas guitar is mostly in the playing).

And it's expensive. If you can DIY, you can reduce the cost quite a lot but not everything is available as DIY. And if you don't resist temptation easily or have a tendency to spend money you don't have, yeah, avoid this. Because unlike other instruments it has no limits apart from the ones you define yourself, and if you can't enforce these it's easy to get more focused on the acquisition process than on actually using the instrument.

MrNovember wrote:Edit: CV and audio are different, but similar signals in a few ways. Someone correct me if I'm wrong (because I definitely could be) but audio is generally 10Vpp AC signals and higher frequency, while CV is generally 5Vpp DC signals and lower voltage. However, a lot of the time, audio can be used as CV.

In euro there is usually no voltage distinction between low rate CV and audio (i.e. audio rate CV). Buchla differentiates between the two (audio being line level basically) but it's the exception more than the rule.

Some euro modules are not DC coupled and can not handle non-audio signals but most modules handle everything fine.

K2000 wrote:I like low tech stuff.

Pretty much.

Modular is cool, just not for me. I find the idea, looks, and sounds to be quite enticing, but it just doesn't fit with my workflow. I tend to enforce strict limitations on what gear I use, in order to wrangle the most out of it, and a modular system would quickly become too overwhelming. That being said, I would love to fuck around with someone else's system sometime.

Eivind August wrote:

K2000 wrote:I like low tech stuff.

Pretty much.

Modular is cool, just not for me. I find the idea, looks, and sounds to be quite enticing, but it just doesn't fit with my workflow. I tend to enforce strict limitations on what gear I use, in order to wrangle the most out of it, and a modular system would quickly become too overwhelming. That being said, I would love to fuck around with someone else's system sometime.

Let us go on a quest for modular friends.

This is also a good strategy in terms of affordability.

UglyCasanova wrote:

Eivind August wrote:

K2000 wrote:I like low tech stuff.

Pretty much.

Modular is cool, just not for me. I find the idea, looks, and sounds to be quite enticing, but it just doesn't fit with my workflow. I tend to enforce strict limitations on what gear I use, in order to wrangle the most out of it, and a modular system would quickly become too overwhelming. That being said, I would love to fuck around with someone else's system sometime.

Let us go on a quest for modular friends.

Next time you're in Canada, hit me up