#251

WRT is VCV Rack good enough to be your main squeeze, I would like to point out that if you are on SoundCloud there is a VCVRack tag. If you search for it you will find dozens of songs and you can decide for yourself.

Yesterday I found myself preferring the sounds of VCV to some of my hardware, but I think as a musician its all about riding the wave of whatever is currently inspiring you.

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#252

Wow, these are some really cool modules. They appear to really take advantage of being computer and polyphonic! Hmm, the Chords also appears to take a ton of the “Music theory” out of creating chords or cool arpeggios. Wild! Thanks for the tip. I will read more of the Scaler module as well. But damn, between those three, you have A TON of stuff to work with.

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#253

On the question of what people are using for sequencing, I’ve had success with the free RCM Piano Roll. There’s an Omri Cohen video I’d highly recommend watching as there are some deep / non-obvious UI features.

I guess it almost feels like sacrilege to use a DAW-style piano roll in a modular environment, but it’s so cool and capable that I can’t worry too much about that :slight_smile: And you can load up multiple instances of them to go all asynchronous or polyrhythmic if you like.

I believe VCV is working on something similar (VCV TImeline) that might just be a game-changer, by the way. Among other things, according to the creator, “the upcoming VCV timeline module will be DC-coupled, so you can record, play back, and rearrange CV clips as well as audio.”

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#254

I’d be down to help out with panel porting to SVG. Looks like this is the relevant info I’d need to pay attention to? https://vcvrack.com/manual/Panel.html

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#255

Yeah! I’d be down. I can email Andrew if that works.

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#256

NLC stuff is great, I’ve been dying for sloths in VCV.

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#257

I was just curious, since polyphony is quickly emerging as somewhat of a killer feature of VCV for me, is there any compelling technical reason why it hasn’t been attempted in hardware? Is it simply the predominance of MIDI particularly or digital generally in electronic music that’s somewhat ruled out the option? Obviously, there are modules which function polyphonically, but either they require a bundle of cables or MIDI DIN to patch, with, of course, MIDI precluding polyphonic audio signals as well as high resolution control signals.

It seems to me that VCV showcases a rather compelling vision of polyphony in modular form, and, though maybe it’s just not yet economically feasible in hardware, that vision could be properly replicated with up to eight voices in a single cable, by either digital or analog means. Doepfer, for instance, has their multicore interface, which adapts up to eight TS patch points to RJ45 for analog signal transmission, and Expert Sleepers uses ADAT in a number of ADC/DAC interfaces for transmission of up to eight PCM encoded signals in similar fashion; both mainly as convenient means of networking racks together.

Obviously with ADAT, one would have to be okay with PCM encoding, and with RJ45, there’s always the possibility of crosstalk (CAT7 and 8 do shield some of the wires from eachother, but are not designed for analog audio and so-forth, though purpose-built cabling could probably rectify this). Beyond these caveats, I think it would mainly be a matter of the expense of packing multiple oscillators or filter cores or whatnot into a single module, though I imagine that in most cases, FPGA (or FPAA, for that matter) could make things a bit more practical.

Anyway, I guess this is somewhat of an aside to the topic, but, for my part, I would have to attribute the concept to VCV Rack.

#258

Tiptop was working on something maybe 5 years ago (the 8 voices in one cable idea) but it seems not to have gone anywhere.

Unless the hardware is digital you also need N physical copies of each circuit underneath, this is either expensive or the modules don’t end up being very interesting.

There’s also an issue with standardization of the polyphonic cable, and interfacing with traditional modules.

VCV rack has popularized it, but the capability has also been there in Reaktor from the beginning (since 20+ years).

#259

It’s just a sketchpad for me now, but there’s value in this. It helps me plan what to do next with the hardware.

I’m struggling with this too… the problem for me is not getting enough tonal contrast, that is, I’m creating in too small of a box, but I’m slowly finding certain modules that help push out the boundaries. The box gets a bit larger each time I find a new oscillator or filter.

I am not sure if its me and I haven’t really mastered how to handle the audio levels etc I do get crackles and distortion.Or perhaps some processing issue from my PC.

Gain staging… mix/attenuate oscillators before going into filters (most of them have some kind of nonlinear effect), and then mix all the parts again before going out. Keep mixing separate from VCA, even though there are VCA’s at the mixers.

If the crackles are more like skipping buffers/samples… then just keep trying different (lower) sampling rates… Only 44.1 and 48 work for me, no matter if I have two or 20 modules.

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#260

Five years ago, I think, was quite a different beast than today, in terms of the market and tech. I do hope at least someone’s revisiting the notion.

And, maybe it’s just me, but most modules aren’t particularly interesting in and of themselves, but I think that even a simple oscillator becomes much more interesting with polyphony (specifically poly having both poly in and out), or at least I’ve found this to be the case, lately.

Yeah, this would obviously need to be handled with a separate module, which VCV demonstrates with its various poly utility modules (i.e., summing, splitting, or assembling poly I/O). If RJ45 and ADAT were put forward as somewhat of a dual-standard, for instance, the means of adapting them to monophonic TS already exists. In such a case, I see two dynamics coming into play: spending more on the poly module and less on the interface (which can be passive) when going the analog route, or vice-versa for the digital route.

#261

it’s a tricky issue in the analog realm - e.g. is it reasonable to say a poly module (and so multi cable) is 8 voices… why not 4, or 16?
in the digital world it’s easy, we 1 cable multiplexes as many signals as you want.

I wonder sometimes if a front panel digital bus might be cool when hooking up digital modules, but the splitting of digital and analog is a slippery path.
(I2C is nice, but think id generally prefer front panel connections, I like modular to be hands-on, and also what you see is what you get :wink: )

I do wish eurorack would just accept TRS for audio though, we are seeing so many more stereo modules, but support is sporadic (e.g small stereo mixers) … and compatibly is not really an issue, as splitting/combining is already very simple.

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#262

I got a positive response from Andrew:

I am happy if you use the logos and panels as is. I have most panel templates available for DIYers to build their own panels. These are PDF filesgenerated by my PCB design software but I think most programs such as inkscape can import them and export as SVG. They are just blank templates tho, so you would need to add white background and gold labels.

Most panel templates are on the wiki -

https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/wiki/doku.php?id=modules:list

but older modules will be here - http://www.sdiy.org/pinky/data/data.html

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#263

Sounds like it should be pretty quick. Might not get started till the weekend, but I’ll report back here.

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#264

Can anyone point me to something akin to a recipe page for modular sounds? As in, a general guide of what to plug in to what (gates go into ___, cv goes into ___, lfo + vcf = ___). I’ve been plugging away in VCVrack and MiRack but could probably save myself time by being a little more deliberate. There’s a part of me that likes doing it all blindly in the spirit of being adventurous but I feed him plenty as it is.

#265

Awesome! No rush. I have the code in Euro Reakt for the following modules:

  • Neuron/Diff-Rect
  • Squid Axon
  • 8-Bit Cipher
  • Divine CMOS
  • BOOLs
  • Numberwang
  • Segue

I could port the following without needing a reference module:

  • Let’s Splosh
  • GENiE
  • 1050 MixSeq
  • 32:1
  • Router
  • Divide and Conquer
  • Statues
  • Bindubba (Maybe, not sure on the JUMP inputs or SLEW without having a reference)

These all have pretty easy logic to reproduce. The analog chaos stuff (Sloths, Hyperchaos, FF Chaos, Brain Custard) would be amazing, but I don’t have the analog modeling chops or the workbench to analyze them on anymore. We’ll make this open-source, of course, so hopefully someone else could help contribute to those.

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#266

There’s a good post on the VCV community that can help you get started:

Awesome! I’m looking forward to this!

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#267

A few issues this morning:

  • from the list of modules @trickyflemming mentioned, only Neuron has a panel template posted.
  • the VCV Panel Guide doesn’t describe how to place screw components or how to reference custom components (although the standard VCV knobs and jacks do seem appropriate here)
  • gold-on-white is pretty impossible to make work on-screen
  • the only reference photo I can find uses black-on-white

  • I can’t help but wonder if we should be thinking about using @papernoise’s alternative panel design

1 Like
#268

Dang! I’ll look into it when I’m free. Screws are done programmatically, so no need to add those in the vector file. Same for knobs and jacks. Just the text is needed.

#269

You create placeholders for these components in the panel file, as described in the Panel Guide. The color of the placeholder determines the type of component (but they didn’t mention screws as a component type). You can also add labels in SVG that give you named references to grab from C++ code.

Unfortunately these details are not documented in detail, only mentioned briefly in the guide.

#270

the helper python script that generates code from svg file will add the code to add screws, they don’t need to be added to the svg file itself (and they’re not really required, no matter what the manual jokingly claims).

might be better to move dev related questions here? VCVRack: development

VCVRack: development