Wanna play?
Want to make some weird sounds?
Wish to explore the infinite possibilities of electronic sound-making, sound-design, electronic music making with Modular Synthesizers?
Let me introduce you to the magic of VCV Rack.
It will not break your bank because it’s for free!!!
A long long time ago in a universe far far away — actually, it was in 1975 I guess, in this pretty little town of Salzburg/Austria — my girlfriend Lotte introduced me to a guy she adored, but who’s name I have forgotten.
Not that he was somebody easily to forget, since he was a 120kg-big-man in shabby clothes, wild hair to the waist and a big smile behind an even bigger beard.
The guy was a sight to behold, I tell you that!
But more than that, he owned a big old-fashioned furniture-moving-van equipped with the biggest Modular Moog Synthesizer that Austria has ever seen – and there were no other Moog synths in still-very-conservative classical-music-obsessed Austria at the time. And he also had a Sound System installed in the Van that could blast your brain out pretty well.
So he was driving around doing his one-man concerts here and there, odd experimental abstract sound-art that nobody at the time could really grok but the man himself.
Well, those were the days!
Now – and thats why am I telling you this tall tale – many-a-years have passed and those incredibly rare and expensive and fragile original modular rigs have faded away into the dustbin of universities and museums, now the concept of Modular Synthesizers has been resurrected and for some years now is very much alive and kicking. Electronic music making with modular synths is here to stay, it seems.
Just do a quick YouTube search, you will be surprised what a big toy for mostly big boys it has become again.
Some really cool girls are at it as well, fortunately 😎
Anyway, those modules still cost a lot and the whole thing can be quite addictive, I hear. And detrimental to the health of your bank account.
But then VCV Rack came along, the ever growing collection of Virtual Modular Synth Modules. Programmed and put out for free as Open Source by some awesome programmers for the fun of it!
The open-sourced source-code has been ported to Mac, Windows as well as the Linux Operation System, so it can run on any computer, which is pretty unusual and advanced in itself.
And now – thanks to other sound enthusiastic programmers – it has been ported to the web, so it can run in the web-browser as well. Chrome or Brave browser preferable. And a good computer is also recommended!
Try it out!
You can patch cables to your hearts delight. And maybe even get some sweet sounds out of the mess 😉
It will take a while to find your ways around. The learning curve is pretty steep, I can tell you that!
But fun!
And you can learn a lot about how sounds can be made and manipulated in infinite ways.
On YouTube you can find no shortage of tutorials, a lot of show-offs and quite a few serious educators as well.
Omri Cohen being my all-time favorite.
Some years before the appearance of VCV Rack I had taken my own amateurish steps to program sound design modules for educational purposes.
To teach a young friend some of the basics of this field.
Check it out here if you wanna see.
Play with my little Modular Sound Toy. Enjoy!
I am not all too proud of the whole thing. Done in Javascript it is pretty slow and clunky.
But hey!
It did the job, the kid was happy and over the moon ; )
Now some years have gone by again and we have become a little smarter (i hope ; ) and so today we can have a version of VCV Rack in the web-browser.
The great Brave Browser or Google Chrome is highly recommended.
No need to download anything.
In my opinion its nothing compared to the “real Application”, but hey! If you are adventurous enough, go try it out!
Well, as i said, its still not the top of the pops 🙄
I guess that’s it for today!
Here are a few of the many pieces that i made over the years where i used VCV Rack as sound source and a program called Touchdesigner to create interactive visuals to it.
