Nice patch. Post more.

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So, I’ve been playing guitar for almost 30 years. Gotten pretty decent at it. Can play a bunch of different genres (blues, rock, country, fingerstyle) but have always been drawn to more ambient/experimental stuff as well. I’ve been into synths for quite a long time too, but didn’t discover eurorack until about 3 years ago. Ever since I made the jump from semi-modular (0-Coast, Mother 32, Mini-Brute) to full modular my guitar playing has fallen by the wayside drastically. I was big into pedals as well but I ended up selling most of my ‘cool’ boutique pedals to buy modular stuff.

I acutally have found that I am way more productive than I have ever been in my musical life since getting into modular. Even though the gear addiction is in some ways worse with euro, I feel like the big difference is this… with pedals, I felt like I’d spend so much time just noodling with a new pedal, to try to hear these really subtle differences in ‘tone’. Fundamentally most guitar pedals just alter the timbre, the don’t actually create any music. In contrast, many of the building blocks of modular are instruments, so every new thing I got would be something that would improve my instrument, and potentially give me more composition tools.

Getting into modular also coincided with the birth of my son, quitting the last formal rock band I was in, and a shift of listening to way less structured music as well. Modular has really allowed me to create in the moment in a way I never have before. With guitar, I was either practicing technique, learning something new, or writing a song with the intent of it being played by a band. With modular, I usually sit down, build my patch, then record a few takes live, and I’m done. I start over again every time.

I really love this workflow, it works well for my lifestyle right now. But, I’m really trying to figure out ways to reincorporate guitar, because I feel like guitar and synth is a largely unexplored territory (compared to straight synth and or just guitar), and because since I’m much better at guitar I feel like I can react in much quicker and more expressive ways.

My problem is that often when I do try to bring the guitar back in, it does sound and feel a little cheesy, because I have a tendency to go back to over playing a little bit. I’m still trying to figure it out, but one thing that has really inspired me is this:

Trying think of mays to use guitar as more of a controller for synthesis, or trying to change the synthesis to respond more to guitar.

Still an ongoing process for sure.

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Yeah this is rad!!!

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There are a couple of more guitar based tunes on that Instagram account, but I must say that I’m not that comfortable in making videos while playing on my stuff. There’s an album of some sorts in the making with this setup. I hope it will be released later this year and I also hope there’s an interest in listening to it too…

Thank you! Super simple patch (if you got the same modules that is :wink:)

Here’s something I did the other day. The sound source is all coming from a guitar loop. There’s a bunch of processing through a filter, Morphagene, Mimeophone and tape as well though.

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For those that are running their guitars through modular, what are you doing for an ‘amp’?
Just direct? I’m currenty running the guitar from pedals into the Doepfer A-119, and it sounds really like garbage if it distorts. Also, I’ve always preferred the sound of the real amp, but in my experience playing live with a guitar amp I sometime gets unwanted grounding and noise issues, and its just another thing to carry if I could just go through the pa. Is anyone using any amp/cab sims?

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this is what i wanna know. do you get limited to a good “out” module to mixers only?

The idea in this thread was my original goal but got distracted because i liked the bleeps and blops of everything else too. I over complicated my rack and now its not what i had intended. I never wanted a “pedal board” for my guitar, i wanted a live processing unit with a few tools to accompany my guitar sounds. I loath hunching over messing with pedals. On top of this all,I had hoped to do it in a compact arrangement. I’ve failed miserably! re-evaluating my who setup now and scaling way down.

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I’m mostly doing this with acoustic guitars, but I also use my electric from time to time. When I use an electric guitar through the eurorack setup I normally let it go through the pedals and let one of them with a stereo out go into Ears (from Mutable Instruments) and the other output from the pedal into the amp. But I’ve also miced it up and then into Ears. Whatever rocks your boat I guess :+1:

Ears has enough gain and sounds good?

I use Mutable Veils usually, recently into a Meng Qi Please Exist. I’m going to start experimenting with the gain on a Boss DS-1, curious if that will get me where I want to go–the Veils exp gain is pretty twitchy.

Honestly I feel like the strymon iridium is the perfect companion in this scenario

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Mannequins W/ makes for a great looper.

Depends what I am doing really. Recently my fave “patch” has been my electric guitar into a Fromel Seraph Deluxe (dimensional chorus like the Dimension D SDD-320), then one output of the Seraph goes to my guitar amp (Deluxe Reverb clone) and the other output goes to the input of my Moog Grandmother (filters and spring reverb mainly, although with patching the sky is your oyster), that then goes to a Chandler TG2 pre/DI and then to one of my ATC monitors. Once you get the balance right it’s a super wide stereo image with all kinds of goodness. For recording I can record the DI signal or slap a pair of KM84s on the amp and ATC. The Deluxe Reverb also has a pre-speaker DI out that can be useful if you want some tube sound in the DI. So it depends really, just go wild and experiment.

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I recently sold almost all my guitar gear to get some modules, so at the time I’m just using an ART Tube MP (I also tried the mixer’s preamp alone, but it was not enough) , plugged into my mixer then sent to ears or clouds via the aux buses.
Works good enough for the moment, but I’m thinking about getting a more guitar-oriented preamp.

+1 to Iridium

I either take the output of that through Ears or an external preamp (Golden Age Pre 73 or whatever it’s called), and then often into a filter to get rid of some high-end (there is so much whiny/buzzy electrical interference where I live. My studio spot is literally next to where all the electrical comes into my building).

Yeah, I was looking at it but I don’t really love Strymon stuff, everything I bought of theirs I’ve always felt sounds a bit ‘fake’ to me… Magneto, Timeline, Flint. I feel like their interpretation of harmonic distortion is too balanced sounding, if that makes sense. Everything I’ve tried has that sheen to me.

I had some extra credit card points on Amazon I just ordered a Joyo clone of one of the Sans Amps, the Fender one. I’m going to see if that improves the situation at all.

PS. I stand corrected, the Iridium does sound nice. The demos are great. A little more raw than I expected.

Can you sync the loops to a clock on W/?

I just recently picked up a TC Electronic Ditto X2 Jam. There’s a microphone input and you can actually send a clock to that input and syncs to modular pretty well provided you don’t have any drastic tempo changes. Its a pretty elegant solution.

Unfortunately not easily. you can output a trigger from w/ with the end of a loop point. There is probably something one could construct with creating/editing cue points with an incoming clock, but that’s beyond me at the moment.

I’ve occasionally used guitar and lapsteel through the modular. Sometimes simply for the effects, sometimes using envelope followers to trigger sounds from VCO or move sequences etc…

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the ability to bypass effects with a footswitch, rather than have to play with wet/dry mix knobs. Are there any modules out there that would allow for this? I know Pittsburgh had a stompbox-like enclosure way back, but seems impossible to find now. Ideally, I’d like to use the small 4U case I’ve built for mostly effects; something in the 1U row to bypass certain effects would be amazing!

Thanks!

Seems easier and cheaper to bypass on the floor rather than in the modular.