Buying 3x1 VCOs or 1X3 + VCFS

Lounge
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Hello,

Currently I have a Behringer Crave and a Vola Keys as my original idea was Crave for Bass and Keys for chords and lead, although both play everything very nicely (except for the envelopes kind of are not good on both and the filter sweep on the keys is not good). Now I want to add more voices to my setyp and I am looking at the VCOs and VCFs in eurorack from Behringer.

Would it better to buy 3 of the same or 3 diffrent ones. I am thinking with 3 different ones maybe each oscillator will find its place in a chords, like one will mostly be better for low end, second one for middle and so on eventually, or is it very impractical to have 3 different oscillators in a chord?

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it depends on what kind of music is in your mind, if you think you can orchestrate your music for 3 different voices go for 3 different voices, if you are going “just” for chords buy the same ones.

boring and useless part

try downloading Musescore and see if you prefer writing for piano or (let’s say) for cello+viola+violin. the second one is much more difficult to master, expecially if you want to make them sound properly; you have to know not just their registers, you have to know where they sound the best, both in their own registers and how they relate to each other…while playing their own line! I personally enjoy more scoring for different instruments, but I’m a (let’s say) classical trained musician with a conservatory diploma in film music composition, so I have studied and practiced orchestration quite a bit…of course I can’t afford to have an an orchestra in my studio :slight_smile: so I bought a piano. in the end, most of the times, I write music in my mind and put it down on Musescore :broccoli:

that said, I would not buy single vco/f/a (s) to play chords in eurorack :wink: I have a bunch of monophonic synths + a small/medium eurorack system, and my advice is: go for a PolyD or a MicroFreak (I have one and it’s very fun) or something similar. It’s WAY more practical, hands down…be aware that they are paraphonic and their voices can’t be driven individually by cv/gate (if you want to play chords you need midi)

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I did a piece recently with 7 note polyphony (VCV, not hardware), and every voice was a different VCO! Admittedly I wasn’t using full chords, just 2 or 3 notes with a long release so they overlap, but I think it sounds a lot more interesting.

Worth considering.

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Hello, :cherry_blossom:

The problem with the polys is that ĂŤ also want the oscillators with a filter for each to play as individual voices also when i need to.

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ok so go that way, I would go for combo modules like this or 2500 behringer series filtamp (I have both) or full voices modules like the behr/roland clone, they are ugly looking imho but sound very good!

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It would be so cool to have an extension somehow for Musescore to be able to loop sections of notations. It is possible to loop ie start over a section in Musescore already but it does not loop seamlessly as a eurorack sequencer does. I would love to be able to loop sections of sheet music and move a step at a time forward, it would open up so much possibilies to re-use already written music.

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Well it’s notation, and surely it supports standard repeat sections.

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Oo, Im gonna try. :cherry_blossom:

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just to be clear: Musescore is a music notation software.

even if “out of the box” it sounds good (these days), don’t look at it as a kind of sequencer with sounds pre-loaded, that’s not fair.

a sequencer is much more capable in the tasks it has been built for, expecially it you already into making some kind of electronic music or if you compare it with the tools built in a DAW.

in Musescore

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if you want to create a repetition (let’s say) 5 times from A to B, go to the last measure of the “zone”, right click on it and set the number of times it must be repeated. then the playhead will move on, and I doubt there are more flexible ways to do that.

the boring part

in real world we use sequencers as sequencers, notation software as notation software and daws as daws.

tbh Cubendo is very well integrated with Dorico and works great 100% if you are into those software. Pro Tools has Sibelius, but PT is PT (and it is not MIDI friendly)…and the UI of Sibelius…[implied facepalm] is a nightmare!

of course it is possible to connect REAPER to MUSESCORE with MIDI and play them “live” (I don’t know the numbers of latency issues, but expect them to be there), but trust me, it is much easier to export a MIDI file and load it here or there.

I believe, if community asks, that in the future there could be some kind of DAW integration. I have asked in the past some braille features for a couple blind people I know. it took a while (a couple of years) but now those features are there.

If they would make a paid VST3 version like the one that VCV Rack provides in the Pro version, I would probably buy it, based of the price and the features. I can’t see it dropping soon and I expect it to be faulty in the beginning.

For now I use Musescore as a very good free notation software that also gives me a good quick hearing of my ideas. When I have to make a proper mock-up I export MIDI from Musescore, load it into REAPER and work with an orchestral library, which is much more difficult to program if you want your music to sound kind of realistic

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