Well, this leads into one of the things I was going to say, about the relatively ‘boutique’ nature of modular/Euro (and I can only speak for the Euro end of things):
a lot of the objects in modularland are made in really short runs. Like, batches of 50 or 100 and a time. Few manufacturers can do more (I think MI’s runs are around 250 a pop, usually, and I believe their pricing is based around the first run being “break even” - that’s when the open-source release happens).
And at those runs, pricing changes a lot. Not components, really, we’re already into cheap territory there - but manufacture prices and times.
So, for instance, panels: silkscreened panels are also still the most expensive bit of many Euro kits you know. And, unlike a off-the-shelf Hammond enclosure, they’re almost always custom: custom cut to size, custom silkscreen.
Euro is expensive, it’s true, and one of the reasons why is many of the makers are very small. You’re supporting small one-to-two person shops who are designing, cranking out prototypes, co-ordinating BOMs, board assembly, and mechanical construction, shipping, retail, whatever. It’s not very efficient or practical, and we could probably make things cheaper if we were making them by the thousand. But that’s not just what the market will bear, despite the baying posters on forums who are grumpy about small retailers being out of stock. Many of us like buying products and designers from manufacturers we’ve spoken to or know personally; it is not efficient but we’re not buying consumer electronics (despite what the modular buyers who snap them up like they were Pokemon would suggest) - we’re building instruments. (Weirdly, I’m now happier buying expensive objects from small manufacturers in many fields - craft, clothing, electronics - but also less happy about expensive projects from large manufacturers - eg overpriced headphones; modular, and making my own hardware, has changed how I perceive the value and costs of manufacturing).
And now consider that a ‘moderate’ studio-grade guitar from a manufacturer making a lot of them - say, a Les Paul Standard, or American Standard Strat - is low-four figures new - and it seems reasonable. Or, for instance, my big red electric piano from a popular Scandinavian manufacturer. It feels expensive, but it’s the piano I plan to keep for as long as I possibly can. Plug-in mentality strikes again: is Massive the thing you’ll use for that sound this month, or the thing you’ll play for the rest of your life? Is the latter impossible given the short shelf-life of software?
So I think that’s another flipside: modular is expensive compared to a few tools in software, and a lot of electronic musicians are coming from well-stocked plugin cabinets where a new idea or tool can start at $40. All of a sudden, they’re back in the land of needing to buy patch cables. Except that’s where I was as a teenager - at nineteen, using a knackered old mixer and a hardware sequencer. Like “$200-$800USD every time I needed to add something to my sound engine” - I’ve been there. £450 for a sampler, which changed the palette I had available to me, and which is now obsolete. That’s just what even the smallest project studio was like. Electronic music has, thanks to powerful processors, become available on the most entry level computer. This is great. It helps that the captive audience is colossal. But it doesn’t mean that all electronic instruments need to behave that way, and this has always been the case, really; it’s just it’s now more visible given the scale of people coming from an educational copy of Max or hooky copy of FL Studio into this world.
I’m wary of hardware as fetish - I listened to two people at a gig describe a good drone artist’s table of gear as ‘more authentic’, and I wondered what was so authentic about all those cheap op-amps; if authenticity could be bought just by spending money on Boss pedals rather than doing it all in pd; it made me a bit sad. (And yet, seeing Sarah Davachi play a gorgeous set with an Odyssey, a loop pedal and an Eventide H9 was just beautiful).
But the flip side is: embodied interaction is real. We think with our bodies and our physical worlds, not just our heads. We come to new ideas through new tools. Being able to run the same algorithms or make the same sounds in two different physical systems and processes is not equivalent; modular is a process and interface as well as little boxes.
Sometimes, “buy both” is the right answer to somebody hoping one module will change everything, when in fact, it’s the modular interconnectedness they should invest in; sometimes, ‘buy both’ is lazy consumerism speaking.
Modular is expensive, and in a weird bubble, but it’s also cheaper and more accessible than it ever was previously. It’s a funny space, and I’m glad we’re talking about privilege and assumptions around it. I’m tired of the ‘icky collector’ mentality @TomWhitwell mentions (which is real, and depressing, and not representative of so many musicians in the space). I’m interested in smaller, coherent instruments, and I love the emphasis on that around these parts. And DIY - and design - has been great; there’s a joy to making music with something I built myself.
(ramble over)
