Modular Synthesis Explained! - Everything is Voltage!

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3:00Welcome to the DTNS Weekend Edition, gratefully provided to you for your support of this show. I'm Jason Howell, and we got some more audio goodness to talk about because we did this a few weeks ago, and I know I had a great time. I know my guest, Rich Straffolino, had, I think, a great time because you're back, Rich. It's good to have you back. It is fantastic to be here. Someone said I was smiling the whole time, which is kind of how I felt when I was on. So I'm very happy. Totally. Yeah, I think we probably said this the last time. But, you know, for me, like I've got guitars hanging on the wall.

3:36Like I love music. I rarely get the chance to talk about it because we're so entrenched in technology topics. So music and technology do overlap, but a lot of the times I find don't walk in the same circles as the Jensen Wong passionate people and the big tech news of the week. There's small pockets of people that get it. But some of these topics that we're going to talk about today, I think, will be really interesting to people who might not also be into music technology. Because I'm sure a lot of people have seen modular synthesis before. When you think of like real nerdy, kind of like complex and complicated music technology, you think of these wires spitting out of like a control panel with all these holes and you plug them in and everything and all these like a thousand buttons, kind of like the dashboard of like a jet or a commercial airplane.

4:33And you're like, well, how the heck do you even know how to control this stuff? This is modular synthesis. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today. It's kind of like building a PC, but it's that for synthesis and for music. Yeah, I would say, you know, your typical, your Korg, like standalone, you know, it looks like a piano kind of synthesizer that you would get, which, you know, it has a ton of controls on it. to me is kind of like buying like playstation or a switch or something like that where it has a ton of possibilities it can do a ton of things but you're kind of along a fixed path uh when you have that you you have some you're operating within a set of guardrails uh in a lot of ways um and when you get into modular it's very like to me like the spirit of why you want to get into doing modular is very much like building your own pc where you're like i want to do this very weird specific thing.

5:27I want to cool this thing entirely with mineral oil, or I want the lights to be synced to my CPU cycles or my RAM usage or something like that back when we could afford RAM or something very weird. I want weird toggle switches to turn the thing on and off. There is something, you reach a certain level where you want something extraordinarily specific that you can't buy off the shelf. And so there are resources available to kind of build your own. Same thing with modular. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because underneath the hood, when you're talking about like a pro-level synthesizer or really any synthesizer, they are modularized underneath the hood.

6:04There is an oscillator. There is kind of an ADSR curve that shapes the kind of loudness and quietness and the volume changes when you hit a certain note. There's all of these different stages that an audio path goes through, and each of those stages impact the quality of that sound or the characteristics of that sound on the other side. and modular synthesis in the hardware world is like taking all of those things and making them individual hardware components that you can put in any order, routed any number of specific characteristics from those modules to the inputs of other modules to do incredibly creative and unique things.

6:50I've always found it kind of confusing. Like I'm like a very basic kind of creator of sounds, I would say when I've tried. but man people have walls filled with these things they they have and they know what to do with it yes well that's that's the correct well and it it very much becomes it very much is you're designing your own instrument and that's why i'm like where i'm like for like the hardcore pc builder that is you know 3d printing stuff and and and really you know customizing each little aspect of it that to me feels that same spirit and the the big difference here is when you buy your Nord synth, which sounds amazing.

7:28It's icy cold and is wonderful. It's a wonderful machine. That has a fixed signal path. When you turn that on and you press a key, you get noise. If you have a modular synth and you plug it in and give it power, right? It will make no noise because there is no signal path usually when you're operating with those. So yes, we are on screen here. This is a classic. it looks like a classic Moog system here. And those were some of the earliest kind of modular synths out there. I'm not a synth historian, so I'm sure that there are precursors to it. But that is a very classic system. Moog and Don Buchla were the other two kind of pioneers of synthesis and modular synthesis by kind of default there.

8:17Yeah, I look at these and I'm always like, oh, my goodness, that would be so much fun. And yet, I have to say, behind me back there, I have a Korg. What is it? Something I'm blanking, but it's a Korg synthesizer with a, God, I wish I could remember the model number. It's like an MS-20 or something like that? Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's it. Something like that. And I got this a couple of years ago just because I got a great deal on it. And I was like, I'm going to learn and I'm going to do all this stuff. But it requires an investment of time. You really have to invest your time because, you know, you plug the cable into two holes that aren't really necessarily meant to be compatible.

8:57Like you said, you're going to get nothing. And that's frustration. That's frustration when compared to what we're very used to nowadays in 2026 of having a million presets that you just hit one button and boop, the sound changes to a new, completely different soundscape. These you have to work and you have to have knowledge to build them. But you can come up with something so incredibly unique that other people don't have it. Yeah, there's kind of two schools of it. It's where you've been playing with a traditional synthesizer and you're trying to get something very specific. You're like, I want the filter cut off on this to spike five seconds after I press this key and then go into a weird delay or something like that.

9:37And you just can't with the current modulation. And I should say, a lot of like the Mini Freak by Arturia, right? That has an amazing modulation matrix where you can really customize all the outputs and stuff like that on there. So you can do a lot of customization with current modern synths. They are amazing. Where something that a modular can come out where you can have that one specific thing that you want, or you're just very much into experimentation. That's kind of the itch it scratches for me where I'm just like, I want to turn things that are not sound sources into sound sources. I want to cross modulate.

10:16So the output of one thing is going to modulate the input of another thing, which is, you know, which is kind of in a in a fun circle where you're creating like these wave dynamics and stuff like that. Like the experimentation aspect of it often is not very licitable. Please consult my family when I don't have my headphones in. But I thoroughly enjoyed just being like, I just made this sound like a dog barking. That's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Let's do jingle bells. Like, let's go. Yeah, there's a tangible quality to hardware like this where what you get out of it is purely created out of experimentation and getting your hands on things, you know, on these knobs or plugging these things in.

10:58There's an interactive element to hardware like this. And it really is your imagination. You can go anywhere given you can kind of think through it and you know what you're doing. So your imagination is the limit with this sort of stuff. And so I know that this kind of leads into this world of Eurorack, which I hear that term thrown around a lot. And I have a general sense of what that is. That's explain what that is in the world of modular synthesis. Sure. Eurorack is kind of the equivalent of like the ATX specification. If you're, if you're in the PC building area, right? It's a set of standards around how big modules are going to be that you're going to plug in.

11:40There are specific heights. They run generally within a certain power limit. So you have a case that has kind of a power ribbon along the back and those have, I believe, a 12 volt and a nine volt rail along the back there. So it's like, you know, if you plug in a Eurorack module to a Eurorack system, you're not going to blow it out. You're not going to feed it voltage that it can't read or something like that. It's not really a, like a, like a, it's not like an ISO standard or something like that. It was originally pioneered by the company Dofer. It's German, so I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, but they came out with a system, the A100 back in 1995 was kind of the first, they retconned it into being Eurorack, but this kind of idea of a modular system with these height and voltage specifications.

12:24And really, so it's only been around, only been around for, you know, 30 years or something like that, I guess, in musical terms, that's ancient now at this point. But it still seems like, I mean, compared to like Moog or Buchla systems, which go back to the 60s, 70s, you know, it is a more modern specification. And to kind of demystify, I guess, fundamentally, when you're seeing those patch cables that go from module to module, all those cables are doing is they're sending voltage. Voltage is kind of changes in voltage. All of these Eurorack systems, all modular sense really, but specifically Eurorack is entirely about controlling voltage in very specific ways.

13:07And once you kind of wrap your head around that, it actually kind of, it puts everything almost on the same level where you understand like, oh, just kind of going through some of the basic aspects of this, like an oscillator. That's like your primary sound source. That's the thing that makes the synthy sound. An oscillator is just a voltage that's going up and down at a certain rate that is audible to the human ear very consistently. Right. And that voltage is used to vibrate a speaker. Like that's all it is. Right. If it's a very, very long curve, it's going to be a low frequency thing. If it's a very tight curve, it's going to be a high frequency thing.

13:46And then other things get in there and interrupt that and change the shape and square it off or triangle it or whatever. And all that shapes what you hear. Yeah. Does the voltage immediately go from like zero to one, zero to one? Then you have like a square wave. That sounds very harsh and buzzy and stuff. If it's a constant rate of up and down, it's a very soothing tone. It's a sine wave. I'm sorry if I'm bringing back any trigonometry nightmares for anybody out there. But, you know, you got everything in between. I love some of them, though, are so literal. Like the sawtooth just looks like, you know, the teeth on an American pull saw, you know?

14:20It's a good descriptor. I like that it's very mathy, but then they're also like, I don't know, it looks like a sawtooth. Hey. Yeah. There you go. It's very weird. It's easy to recognize. And over time, as you work with those things, with those different shapes, you really get a sense of the sonic quality of each of them. And I think people who go real far down this rabbit hole understand then what it means to kind of like layer a couple of them on top of each other and the phase cancellation that you might get out of that as a result. So that creates a unique kind of spin on the sine wave or whatever.

14:55And that's just one aspect when we're looking at, you know, this whole panel here, all of these different areas. I think one thing I love about the modular approach is that different companies create different modules to do different things, which sounds so simple. It's like, okay, well, yeah, that's how a lot of industry works. But they're all thinking about this in a way that's like we thought of this very unique set of outputs and voltage outputs and shapers and whatever else you can think of. And so we're just going to give it to you. We have no idea how this is going to actually interact with any of the other things that other companies have created.

15:33But I bet you can come up with something. And then people do. Well, and that's kind of a cheat code is if you find a module that you particularly like, like you like the way they're handling filters or something like that. You're like, oh, man, it's crazy. It gets real gritty and stuff like that. Usually their lineup is kind of all formulated around that. I mentioned the company Bastl last time. I very much like they're very performative based with a lot of their Eurac stuff. So they have a lot of sliders that you can use so that if you're playing live with it, you can kind of motion record stuff and do some very cool stuff.

16:03So if you find a module you like, usually the manufacturer is kind of living all within that. That being said, often you'll be like, okay, I like their approach to how they're doing filters or I like their weird pingable envelope generator. But their oscillators, they're too gross or they're too clean for me. People get very weird when it comes to, like with any hobby, people have very, very specific needs. And then you're getting into, you know, how you, my favorite thing is sequencers when it comes to your rack. I know that sounds very dorky, but like those kind of control things where you're talking about modulation like that, when you think about sequencers like in a drum machine, right?

16:44Like a sequencer is just bass drum plays on, you know, one, you know, one five and whatever. Play at this tempo, this instrument plays at this moment in time, this one plays at that moment in time. It's just putting together a sequence of sounds and triggering events. Yeah, it's a sequence of triggers. Yeah, exactly. When you realize that, oh, wait, all of that is voltage, really all a sequencer is is a series of stepped voltages. So you don't have to just have a sequencer trigger notes. It could trigger a change in a filter. It could trigger another oscillator. It could trigger noise. It could trigger a random event.

17:19You can like kind of sequence anything when it comes to this because everything is just voltage. You're just passing voltage from one to another. And so in very weird ways, there are, it doesn't help, but you can be wild. That's why it's so wildly experimental to me is everything kind of speaks the same language, right? There's very rarely will you find something, oh, this only wants audio, like maybe like a reverb or something like that or an effects pedal or something like that. really more wants audio input, but it's always going to have some sort of voltage. We call it, it's called CV in Eurorack speak, control voltage.

17:54And yeah, it's just, it's so wildly creative. It's very fun for me. Sweet. All right. So that's kind of the idea behind modular synthesis. You, and here we are talking all about hardware and stuff, but one thing that you're going to show off is kind of like a software version of this called VCV Rack. So why don't we take a quick break? And then on the other side of that, we can kind of take a look at VCV Rack and see what taking some of the concepts and fundamentals around modular synthesis and putting it into a software that's on your screen, what that looks like and what it sounds like. So hang tight.

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21:46All right. I had never heard of VCV Rack. I feel like I'm pretty plugged into different software, but I had never heard of it. so I'm happy that you're showing this off here. Oops, I just disappeared it. So tell us a little bit about this. Is this a software you can buy? Is it open source or what is the deal here? I believe it is a commercial product. There is a free version of it. Like the base app itself is free. There are pro versions of it that you can buy that have features that I don't particularly need. I like using this for playing around with ideas. And then you can also, So there are free modules that you can buy with that come with it.

22:23You just download them offline. Some of those are open source. So a lot of people will take open source algorithms for reverbs or delays or other things like that. You can imagine with Vibe coding, the environment for that has completely exploded. For sure. There are also paid ones that you can buy. Some of those emulate actual hardware. So this can be extraordinarily useful if you're like, I don't know if this module is going to fit into what exactly I want to do. Oh, you have the software model. You can plug it in, patch it up, and you can kind of get that same thing. I will say, like, again, a lot of the joy with a lot of these systems, with any musical instrument, is kind of physically interacting with it.

22:58There's something lacking when you're playing with a knob on a screen versus this. I actually think you can do MIDI controllers with this. It definitely does, like, MIDI in and stuff like that. So you can turn your computer keyboard into a regular, you know, into a musical keyboard if you really want to. But, yeah, it's just a fun little playground. And you can get started. You can do a ton of stuff for free. There are literally hundreds of modules available for free with just crazy amounts of versatility and stuff like that. So it is a ton of fun. Do you want me to bring up my screen here and kind of give a quick overview of the UI here?

23:32Yeah, sure, sure. All right. I'll go ahead and cancel this one, and we'll take a look at your screen. All right. At some point, we're going to hear some things. And just as a kind of a forewarning for folks who are listening, we were trying to figure out the routing before we recorded this. And we got it so that you can hear what Rich is going to show off here at points. But when you're hearing it, you'd hear an echo for me. So I'm going to kind of shut up when there's things being played and everything. And then once it's not, then I'll take that as my cue. But, yeah, show us what you got here.

24:02So this is kind of a complete emulation of what you would expect from a Euro rack setup down to it has the rails here, where you screw in the little modules. It's very skeuomorphic, very cute, and very great. Most of these modules here are kind of like the stock ones that come with the free tier, and they sound great. You can get all sorts of great tones. But if you... I'm mousing over the sheriff window like it's going to do anything. But you can actually, if you go here, these are just the ones I've downloaded personally. And you can just see here, there are just tons and tons of just weird things.

24:37This is my favorite one that I've discovered. It's one where you give it a JPEG, and then it goes pixel by pixel, and by the color values, gives you a modulation output. So you can trigger stuff based on a JPEG picture. Very weird. I don't know why you would ever need that, but I love that someone was like, yes, this is what is missing from my setup. Yeah, it's less about need. It's more just about what would happen if. If I made something that broke down the numeric value of an image into digital zeros and ones or whatever and then converted that into control signal for an audio plug-in or whatever, what would that sound like?

25:13And you just don't know what you're going to get on the other side. Sometimes it sounds horrible. Sometimes it sounds like nothing you've ever heard before. Jason, I've thought of a voltage like doing CV control over like an espresso machine. I've been trying to figure out. It's like, all right, I need to convert a little voltage here, but I think I could do it. You get into a weird headspace when you realize everything's just voltage. But here I have the most basic layout to make a relatively controllable sound with the Eurorack. And you can see here, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. There's nine modules here.

25:45You can probably get away with seven. I have a scope on here because it's just more visually engaging to see the waveform. It's the most fun thing in the world. So if I plug in, it's not going to make it. I don't have the sound on right now. But if you plug it in, you can see here there's a little sine wave on the screen here. It looks wonderful. You can plug in different things, and it'll show. I'm hearing that in my ear, so it's not the most pleasant sound in the world. But what we have here is for the most basic setup you can have is we have a VCO, which stands for voltage-controlled oscillator, because everything is controlled by voltage when it comes to modular and particularly Eurorack.

26:18We have a VCF, which you'll never guess, stands for voltage-controlled filter. So your oscillator, like I said before, it's just a voltage going up and down in a controlled way. That's your main sound source. A filter is going to allow you to cut off certain frequencies. So this can, for a low-pass filter, you can have kind of a formless booming bass. For a high-pass filter, it's really good for like more metallic-y kind of sounds there. We have a VCA, you will never guess, voltage-controlled amplifier. this is kind of the key VCAs are kind of the underappreciated when you're first learning this you don't realize how important VCAs are but VCAs are things that allow you to go from like zero volume to max volume or allow you to kind of control the volume of the sound which is kind of important when you like want to trigger a sound in a controllable way and that isn't necessarily like going so loud that you get to distortion that's probably a different yes yeah yeah I mean believe me when we're talking about line level audio and and outputs and stuff like that, that gets also very weird.

27:22But on the most basic, yes, this will prevent you from destroying your ears or your system. You have an envelope generator right here and an envelope generator. Again, it's just a ramp of voltage that says you can use to kind of control anything. Generally, when we think of envelopes, we think about shaping notes. So does a note go to full volume right away, like a drum hit or something like that? Does the noise ramp up to its maximum volume? I always think of like, I don't know, like a woodwind or something like that, where you can start up very soft and then get very loud and then kind of have a long tail off.

27:55How long does the note resonate and decline after you let go of the trigger? That's something an envelope also does. But again, because this is voltage, you can use an envelope to control the filter cutoff. You can kind of ramp the filter cutoff in a very specific way. You can apply it to both at the same time. Yes, exactly. Very often, that is indeed the case. or apply it to both the same time, invert one of them. So it goes the opposite. Your mind starts to go, oh, what if I did this? What if I did that? And that's the kind of the fun thing with your rack, because it's all in the speaking the same voltage language.

28:29Like to your point, Jason, you can plug in stuff and nothing happens, but you're not usually not going to break anything. So you can kind of just plug and play and kind of figure your way out here. The other one that I don't think a lot of people might not be familiar with is an LFO, which stands for low frequency oscillator. So this is the exact same thing as your voltage controlled oscillator. But this goes at generally sub audio rate, although this particular one for some reason can go up to like a C4 or something like that for no reason. I don't know why. But you would use this to, again, it's all voltage.

29:01It's just waves and voltage. That's all you're talking about all the time with your rack. This will allow you to, like, if you add it to the volume, you could add like a vibrato almost sound effect if you put it into your VCA. You could add it to your octave. So you could add a little warble as it goes, like kind of like a tape warble or something like that. And your LFO can take any shape that a regular oscillator could. So sawtooth, square, triangle, sign, any, you can wave fold an LFO to get really weird stuff. It all is, it all is a ton of fun. And then I just have a different oscillator here in case I wanted to, we just wanted to get absolutely crazy here.

29:41um but the so what what i mean here and uh i'm going to turn on the audio now jason so i will shut up so um what i mean though when i say like there is when you plug in a system like this system is on right now uh if you're watching the video here you're seeing like the lfo a light is blinking and that's because it's oscillating we just can't hear anything even though it's on because we haven't told the voltage where to go. So like I can connect the oscillator right now to just the audio out kind of going out to my computer right now. And you can hear there's a beautiful, lovely sine wave. Sine waves are the most beautiful waves.

30:20They will put you to sleep. They sound wonderful. But right now it's literally, there's no control over it, right? I mean, I can change the frequency, but that's about it. I can make it go higher or lower just by itself. doesn't really do much, not the most exciting thing in the world. What you really want to do first is kind of connect that to a filter. And so once we connect it to a filter, you can see here, if you're looking, I need to change the cutoff here. But if you're looking at the waveform here, you can see that the it's literally the waveform has been reduced down, it's cutting off certain frequencies, you can turn up the resonance to make it sound really weird, which is always fun.

30:58but again it's just kind of this constant drone you don't really have anything this is where we need to bring in our VCA and our bring in our VCA and our ADSR our envelope generator so what we're going to do is send our sound into our VCA and we'll plug that into the output and you can hear it the VCA this little thing is a is a gauge here it says level 100 % which is kind of nice. It's all the way up. Once we plug in our envelope though, you can see the envelope is closed right now. There's nothing triggering the envelope, so it shut off the VCA. There is no sound. This is where our friend the LFO comes in.

31:37We connect a square wave, or any kind of wave really, and we put that into the gate input, which basically says, hey, trigger this envelope. Do this envelope right here. And now all of a sudden we're getting a very controlled signal. I'm actually going to switch this over into the square because that's louder and I love a good square wave. And hey, now let's play with some pulse width, make it sound all funky. And so now we have a nice rhythmic sound here. One of the other cool things with Eurorex specifically is they have a convention called one volt per octave. So it basically means if you send a one volt signal into the one volt per octave, it will increase it by one octave.

32:18uh if you do two two octaves etc etc you can work out the fractions there um but like if we plug this in to the triangle wave oh man now we got funky goodness going on because it's what it's doing is it's sending that lfo into the vco it's changing that uh uh that uh it's changing the frequency of it how fast it's going um and it sounds lots of fun and i like So this is your very base level. What you would do now here, and I'm going to disconnect it from the output so it's not bugging us here, and I will mute again. What you could go from there is you could add a sequencer. So like I said, the sequencer, you would send that pitch value in voltage to the one volt per octave input.

33:03Then you could actually sequence something a little more musical than one tone or a weird buzzy thing over and over again. You could plug in effects. You could, like you were saying, you could affect the filter cutoff as the envelope is triggered. You could have that exact same trigger, have the envelope going out to the filter as well to kind of change that sound. It's really wide open from here. You could attach a keyboard to it. You could send a charger output from a keyboard into there or any other kind of control system. That makes it playable versus entirely command. Oh, was that me? What was that sound?

33:40Oh, I bunked my microphone. Oh, I was like, is the synth playing and I'm not hearing myself echo? That was a cool sound. It's taking control. It's all just waves. I just sent voltage your way, Jason. It's all waves. Yes, it's all waves. And I love the scope, too. It's so easy when we're listening to sound to have a hard time remembering. I could probably phrase that differently. But it's easy to forget that at the end of the day, it is just waves. And when you make these changes, you take something that's very predictable, like a sine wave or like a square wave or whatever, and you start adding in these little kind of alternative impacts to it through these different modules and the different settings.

34:24And the scope really tells you the story, right? Like we hear it with our ears, but when you're looking through the scope, that sine wave is no longer this long, fluid, you know, up and down thing. It now has all these ridges in it, which in some ways ends up making it look a lot less, like it demystifies it a little bit. Because you're like, oh, all you did was add like three steps for every sine wave. And that's why I'm hearing what I'm hearing versus the nice smoothness of a sine wave. It's just a really cool kind of connection between the visual and the audio. And this is, just for an example, this is a more developed patch.

34:59This is kind of the stock one that they give you. And you can see here, the patching can get quite crazy quite quickly. This is like your stereotypical kind of nest of cables here that seems inscrutable when you look about it. But when you look, and then here, let me just play. This one's keyed to a keyboard, so I can actually kind of play it. If you can, where's that? Oh, it's not going out. Hold on. I've got to tell it where to go. Where are we going? Here we go. So if we can. I don't know why it's not playing, but that's okay. Anyway, this one is, this is kind of the stock patch you get when you first load up VCV rack.

35:39They get you started so that you can, you know, have something solid and then be able to fool around with. This is your very classic kind of Moog style, very like wonderfully resonant kind of deep bass synth here, which is a lot of fun to play with. And it just gets crazier than that. I mean, you can, the cool thing about this is you can download other people's patches. You can share them around. as long as you have the modules downloaded. That's kind of the only limit there. But once you kind of understand the very basics of it, right? There's envelopes, there's filters, there's oscillators, there's LFOs.

36:12It's not hard once you kind of can trace the voltage. It might take you a while. Some of these can be extraordinarily complex. I'm not going to lie. But all of it, you can kind of start to understand how that sound is being shaped in a very weird way, which is a lot of fun. Interesting. Okay, let's take a quick break. On the other side of it, I want to talk to you a little bit about kind of the software versus the hardware and where you see yourself going in the future. We're going to talk about that here in a moment, so hang tight. your daily supplement routine doesn't need to be managing a handful of different bottles on its total human brings key research-based vitamins minerals herbs and amino acids together in convenient day and night packs one all-in-one product designed to make supplementation easier the day pack supports cognition focus and cellular energy production at night the night Pack helps you wind down and supports a calm, relaxed state.

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37:54All right. So software with all this modular goodness, it kind of cracks open the possibility, right? Like that's what I've heard from people who are really into modular synthesis and especially the hardware. is that it's addictive. It's kind of like once you step into that world, it keeps pulling you further because you keep thinking, oh, well, if I got that one module, I'd be able to do this. Or I don't know what I'd get, but it looks really cool. Or just one more, just one more. So using something like this, do you feel has been a good kind of like education into what you might do if you were to go the hardware route?

38:30Is that something that you're even interested in, or is this good enough? Well, for one thing, it allows me to play with this, and I don't have to have a wall devoted to it. Like, that's the main downside to me is these do take up a ton of space compared to something that I can shove in a closet, right? These are relatively fragile. Like, they're not – you can buy road cases for them, obviously, but, like, stock, it's not something you can just throw in a closet and then take out and throw it back in. You kind of have to baby it a little bit. So I absolutely love VC VRack for, one, just getting comfortable kind of with the fundamental concepts before you outlay any money.

39:05And two, seeing when you're building out kind of gear that speaks CV, speaks Eurorack standards, is kind of in the modular world. You can kind of see how you're going to use it, if it's going to be the right thing for you. That, to me, is extraordinarily useful for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and once you get into that hardware world, I think one thing that I look at when I, you know, what were we looking at here? Let me pull up this one patch again. Like when I think of like the real big walls and everything, I, you know, I totally, I love hardware. But then I also love the convenience of software.

39:41And when I look at some of these patches where it's like cords go in a million different places a minute, I always think like, well, that's amazing. you better be ready like if you're using this in a recording studio you better be ready to like burn it to tape you know like kick that to tape because how are you ever going to recreate that i guess you just like take a picture of it but still you got to recreate it's just not nearly as convenient as as what we have in software now yeah no i i have a i have a good friend who's kind of been my urac sherpa uh for a while my friend andrew and he he tells me he's like once i have my thing set up, I don't want to touch it.

40:16Once I get it to a sound that I really like, I will mess around in VCV rack, kind of tweak where I want to go next or experiment with something else that I want to try. But I'm very loathe to once you're all patched up, I mean, this is a very expansive rack. So it's usually not that bad. I also see they have a nice Alisa strum machine on the bottom there as well. But again, when you think about it as your designing your instrument generally like once you get the thing you want you should keep it for for a good long time like there is there is that experimental aspect to it but once you kind of get things locked in um it is nice to be able to have something dependable um for sure that's where something um and kind of to split the difference here that's where something like a semi-modular synth really becomes nice something that has a fixed signal path but that has a lot of patch points where you can inject CV, you can kind of alter things up.

41:14So you can always go back to that very controlled base, but then very quickly get into weird territory. That's kind of how I cut my teeth into this world. I got this Bastl Soft Pop. You can see it has a ton of patch points on the front there, but on the base, it's just a very basic monosynth. Like if you just want to get like a baseline going and do uh you know some something acid-y sounding uh that'll do that all day you pair with a drum machine you know you're having some you're having some fun there you're making some house music or something um but then it can also again because there's kind of there is less rules than if you just had a a standard synth i can do all sorts of weird weirdness with it and have a lot of fun and then if i want to buy modules down the road i can And, you know, hey, throw in a weird algorithm generator and do weird slopes and stuff like that with my voltage and have a lot of fun with that.

42:07I know in the recording music world, there is, you know, enthusiasts and bedroom musicians and all that. There's the world of the preset, you know, like of which we are flush with options at this point. You know, every piece of software usually ships with like hundreds, if not thousands of presets. And it's like, if you never want to create an actual sound, you don't have to because the presets are there. But a lot of people look at that and they're like, OK, well, that's great. But then you just sound like everyone else because everyone else is picking those same presets, too. How do you differentiate?

42:41This whole modular approach is kind of all about that, right? It's like the extension of that. It's like no matter what, you're probably going to create. I mean, unless it's a very simple patch, many of the patches that you create will all have slight, you know, they might be almost the same as somebody else's, but they're not going to be exactly the same because you're talking analog everything. And so there's enough variation in there to be able to say with most certainty, oh, this is my sound. This is a sound that I created and no one else has this. They can get close, but they don't have it exactly.

43:16But which is also funny is that even amongst something that seems like it's extraordinarily individualizing, if you go on like the modular subreddit or something like that, there is also like everyone will recommend the same six modules to tell you to get maths and get a couple other modules and stuff like that. And I should also say, you know, I guess the method of CV is an analog connection. But, like, there's tons of digital, like, most modules made today are actually, you know, they're digital synths and stuff like that. Like, I have, this is called a Zoya. This is the Euro Bureau. They also make this as a guitar pedal.

43:53But this is basically, it has CV in and out. But I don't know why it's not focusing. But this is basically a virtual modular synth. So you can load little modules onto here and patch them together. It's just the internal patches don't have cables. It's all, it's all a simulation or it's all software. It's not simulation. It's all software. And then you can do CV out to other gear, which is super fun. So you can design crazy effects and set them up. So like there's, there's, there's a lot of ways to dip your toe into this and kind of get comfortable with it, whether it's through VCV rack, whether it's through, you know, Behringer makes a bunch of$99 patch point since that's kind of sounded amazing.

44:31Yeah, they do. Behringer's doing a lot right now. My goodness. And they actually have gotten into making Eurorack modules at extraordinarily affordable price points. Some people – people get upset with anything. Oh, people get upset with Behringer as a general rule. Yes. Yuli is the troll lord of the synths for sure. But yes, so there's a – it is more approachable now probably than it's ever been. That being said, VC-VRX is nice because modular can get quite pricey extraordinarily quickly. Yeah. You know what it reminds me of is back in the day, we're talking like 2000, 2001, somewhere around there, was when I discovered Reason.

45:17And Reason was one of my earlier kind of softwares that I used to create music and made a couple albums with it and everything. And I loved it. But one of the things that was really cool about it, and definitely a differentiation, because it was so early in this plug-in world that we're steeped in now, is that you could flip the digital interface to go behind the digital rack of effects units. And you could get in there and move around patches and stuff. And that was how you managed a lot of the signal flow in the app. So it kind of ensured that even though you're dealing with software, you're still connected to the physicality in a certain sense, in a digital sense.

45:58But you're still connected to the signal flow, this idea that it's not going to work if you plug that to there. But if you plug that to there, it's going to do what you want. And you start to learn the terminology, VCA, and all that stuff. And I always appreciated that about reason. For as long as I was using it, I was like, okay, this gave me a better, more formed sense around the physical world of audio, even though I was firmly in the box. So it's kind of cool. It is fun to, when you kind of learn the very basics of sound generation, right? Of like, you know, whether it's signal flow, whether it's literally what an oscillator does.

46:39Like when you start getting into that, I don't know, it deepens my, one, it deepens my appreciation of just hearing, of just like hearing music. Yeah, what you hear. It kind of just changes, yeah, how you approach making it kind of once you know how the sausage is made a little bit. Yep, indeed. Well, thank you for showing us how the sausage is made, Rich. That was awesome. And I love that no one even heard me echo through the entire thing because we were just listening to your beautiful sine waves and square waves. If people want more of what you're doing and what you're up to, where should they go to find you?

47:11On any social platform, you will find me as Mr. Anthropology. That's M-R Anthropology. And you can also find me at the CISO Series. I do a weekly show called The Department of No on the CISO Series YouTube channel every Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. We talk about the biggest security stories of the week with two security leaders, usually CISOs or directors of cybersecurity and stuff like that. get their take and find out if things are as depressing as they sound sometimes. Usually they're not, so it's fun. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. Cool. Well, keep up the great work. We'll see if we can find another, you know, I'm sure we can jostle up another reason to get together and talk audio because I think we both are on the same page without concern.

47:51So people listening are like, wow, they're really nerdy about audio. Yeah, it's true. It's true. While we've been that way, it sounds like you have too. What are you all thinking about out there? If you have an idea for us to talk about on a future one of these, let us know. If you have insight to anything that we're talking about at any point, share it with us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can learn more about the entire family of DTNS podcasts and shows by going to DailyTechNewsShow.com and on YouTube, YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash DailyTechNewsShow. And if you like what you hear, consider supporting us at Patreon.com slash DTNS.

48:28I'm Jason Howell. Thank you again, Rich. It was a ton of fun. We'll see you next time, everybody.

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