Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook(echo.orpheusinstituut.be) |
Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook(echo.orpheusinstituut.be) |
If you are wondering what everyone is talking about in this thread, please check it out:
I talked myself out investing in modulars because I know I'll never have the patience to deal with the wires when all I want is to play. Big respect for those who can do it!
Some modular performers like Keith Fullerton Whitman have a very dynamic approach to patching. I've seen shows where he was aggressively re-patching throughout the performance and hot-swapping connections on the fly. I'm talking several patches in a minute. It wasn't subtle, either. It was a nice contrast to many performers who tend to design their system as a fixed structure and then play from there.
Doing everything in a DAW is the most practical from a "business" standpoint, but it's way less amenable to creative exploration. You really have to know what you want already.
The practical compromise that works best for me is a well-designed hardware realtime synth. You have access to a small fraction of the design space of modular, but a higher fraction of the accessible design space sounds good, and you of course have patch save/recall.
Recently what I've been doing is creating modular patches, driving them with MIDI, and recording the output into my Elektron Tonverk using their on-device multisample recording. You can record samples at a bunch of different pitch/velocity pairs and save them into a multisample file.