I really think AE Modular is great. My low musical ability couldn’t justify Eurorack levels of expense. The AE format is growing, but it is clearly not as mature as the Euro ecosystem. This means I have had to put in more effort to create an instrument I love using, but also AE Modular as a format invites that level of engagement, so it has been a joy. One of the critical pieces in my setup is a very rough DIY Arduino trigger/gate-to-MIDI interface, and the complexity involved in pulling that off is minimal—the hardware is just a nano clone, perfboard, a patchwire socket, some resistors, and a power header, and the firmware is very straightforward. Power is easy because everything is 5V, so I don’t have to do level-shifting of any kind.
The impetus behind this is that I love generating and manipulating gates in AE Modular, but I find things like tuning oscillators and dialing in precise pitches on a sequencer (especially with the tiny standard in AE modules) to be tiresome. So I do all of the fun, spontaneous clock dividing/logic/burst generation in AE modular, then convert the triggers/gates into midi note-ons, and send those to a pisound over USB, where they clock Supercollider patterns. I then send MIDI over USB from those patterns to two Grains modules (and some other supporting synths). AE Modular has a port of Grains, and I adapted wavegrains and trishape firmwares to be MIDI-controlled. No oscillator tuning required (I do work with conventional Western tuning, so that is a feature for me). The supporting synths are characterful and have a similar lo-fi aesthetic to the AE system: a Bastl microgranny 2 and a megaMIDI (by Aidan Lawrence) for chords etc., plus a Volca Drum.
A sound example is here: (Reductionist Earth Catalog on Instagram: "Slew detecting #sloth cv going up or down, in the fifth mode of limited transposition #aemodular #supercollider #tangiblewaves #arduino"), and here is my GitHub: (GitHub - reductionistearthcatalog/AE-GRAINS-MIDI: MIDI-controlled firmwares for the GRAINS module in the AE Modular format by Tangible Waves). I still have a long list of things I’d like to implement and improve. If folks are interested, I could start a new thread to document things more, or add to an existing thread that makes sense. Maydonpoliris over on the AE Modular forum has expressed an interest in trying out the MIDI-controlled Grains firmwares using a DIY Norns. I don’t have one, but would be interested in learning about how it works and if I could set up some kind of a development environment for Norns apps on my Pisound. There is a fair bit of command-line plumbing to establish the various USB MIDI connections, and I’d like to make it more robust and available on other platforms.
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