thank you. I’m in the process of selling it off, so hopefully that will work out. Above I wrote what I don’t like about Eurorack, so I’ll stay positive here. Serge was the first modular synthesizer I ever used (having read all the manuals and whatever else I could find quite a while before even seeing one in person), so I could be coming at all this from a strong mere exposure bias. The ‘atomic’, granular nature of the module functions (and thus their ‘programmability’) really appealed to me, plus the indifferentiation of audio and control signals greatly enhances compositional possibilities (and renders signal normalization a non-issue). And generally, banana jacks lend themselves to a more immediate and expansive signal routing process. The fixed 17" panel format also was ideal, given that I’m coming from instrumental music and thus used to contending with the structural limitations of an instrument as a set of compositional problems to solve, in opposition to the utopian promises that Eurorack format (and others) offers. However, it’s obviously not like ‘playing an instrument’—Bob Ostertag details some of these implications here—and requires a different instrumental and performing criteria, but this is true for any other modular synthesizer. Which is to say, I’m not sure if anything else about it is necessarily endemic to Serge and missing from other synthesizer designers (or software design). I still feel compelled to work with it because I often ended up composing music I otherwise wouldn’t have, for the better, insofar as it challenged my compositional criteria and yielded surprising discoveries. I’m skeptical whether I would find myself similarly surprised working with the computer. Anyway, I hope this post wasn’t too stupid and answered some things.
