Why Modular Synths?
There is a small part of me that feels like it’s necessary to justify the two (and counting) cases I have containing Eurorack modules. While I don’t begrudge any artists their tools, being able to articulate why I indulge such a luxurious and abstract hobby might help you decide whether or not these instruments will be compatible with your musical goals.
To give some context, I have been playing “real instruments” since I was quite young, starting with the cheap and portable recorder then being pushed to learn the cello.
Music, as it was performed to an audience, could only exist as a set of actions that directly resulted in the right notes played at the right time. This was a framework that I accepted as the only way for music to exist outside of recordings.
As a teenager I learned the bass, guitar and eventually bought myself a drum kit with the small amount of money I made working in fast food. I joined bands and played shows and learned the lessons that come with collaborative creativity.
Playing in bands stayed with me through my twenties with the same framework of performance: every note that is heard by the audience must be played. While there is certainly nothing wrong with this I found it hard to focus on the bigger problems within music: How do you arrange a song so it is interesting to listen to? How do the instruments build and shrink to progress a narrative? What is the result on the arrangement of shifting timbres?
While these questions are certainly not outside of the scope of a performer in a band, in retrospect my technical skills required too much of my attention to both play the right notes at the right time and ask these bigger questions. It wasn’t until I started experimenting with music composition on a computer that these questions even presented themselves to me.
Removing myself from the performance allowed me the capacity to listen to what was happening and ask the question: Yes but what else? What could be improved? What could be obscured? What could be removed?
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The computer allowed a near infinite set of instructions to be carried out exactly as described with the only limits being those placed on the composer and the technical limitations of modern computers.
This vast potential presented another problem me as an aspiring creative: how do I choose which path is most fulfilling? With modern music production software often bearing a close resemblance to looking at spreadsheets, it was easy to stare into the void of choices and become overwhelmed.
This problem of choice leads me to my attraction to modular synthesis and more generally, hardware musical instruments. There are orders of magnitude fewer combinations than would be possible on a computer and yet there seems to be so much potential. I find it easy to get lost in simple patches as they grow and become more complex. Guessing what sonic changes will result a knob being turned or a switch being toggled becomes less about technical knowledge and more about exploration.
There is also some magic in having my choices be shaped by something as simple as layout I have chosen in my case(s). Two modules next to each other will reliably be patched together more often than two that are far away.
The appeal of modular synthesizers is the limitations. The limitations of traditional instruments are present without the need to focus on playing the right notes at the right time. Exploration of timbres, timing, textures, space, noise and silence are all available even with a small selection of modules.
Whether this workflow is compatible with how you create music is certainly not a question I can answer within the scope of this short article but there are ways to experiment without any significant outlay.
VCV Rack is a free modular environment available on computers that even includes a lot of hardware equivalent modules made available by the manufacturers.
Modular Grid is a website to plan what modules will fit in which cases and ensure their power requirements are met.
