I’m relatively new to both VCV and modular in general so, firstly, gidday from Brisbane. After reading a couple of times about classic module pairings I’ve discovered the magical combo of MI/AI Rings and Braids which, triggered by Befaco Rampage, is a source of endless hours of amazement for me.
Would some of you more experienced VCV’ers care to share other classic pairings for me and other newbs to explore!?
Apologies if this has been asked before, I searched but couldn’t find a similar thread.
Turing Machine + Quantizer. The quantizer then goes into an oscillator, of course. I made a whole album out of variations on quantized sources of repeating randomness.
Repetition will turn anything into music. Quantizers will turn anything into music. It’s a wild beast impossible to fully tame, asking you to play along with whatever happens. Forget about harmony, randomness has no concept of it, it’s all about the hypnotic rhythms.
The Stellare Modular Turing machine is the easiest to get started, but the Skrylar is my current favorite, as it implements the Vactrol mix expander missing on the Stellare. MI’s Marbles is also worth checking out, but harder to learn. As for the quantizer, pretty much any of them will do.
Rings into Clouds is such a classic that people will call you out as unoriginal if you use it XD (It’s often a joke tho, if you try it and like it, by all means use it )
Talking about pairing:
Geodesics Fate was made in the idea to be paired with Impromptu Foundry: Foundry is IMO the most advanced deterministic sequencer. You can write some very advanced melodies of your own… and then let FATE gently mess up with it
I’m not sure that it’s a classic pairing but I use Vult Leakage as my source of random pitches and then modulate the offset over time with the Frozen Wasteland Seriously Slow LFO. It’s a great module for creating very gradual movement in a patch (though for some reason the cycle period is always double what it says it is, at least in the “minutes” setting).
Okay, I’m curious, how much do other people vary there module choice between patches? I always want to try new stuff (though I did that a lot more when I was still streaming) so I always end up using a variety of things.
edited because I didn’t actually explain what I was talking about
It’s fair so say I almost always have a clocked (nor now a CLKD). I use it so much I built a command into my sequencers to find the closest clocked or clkd and patch the run/clk/reset lines, and set up divison rate. Gives me an extra 30 second every day at least!
Regarding Foundry and Fate, I’ve enjoyed using the Phrase-Seq-16 and twelve key together before. Slightly different in the sense that the sequencer is run by a constant clock, and the gentle skewing comes from human input (via the twelve key), but the organic feeling you get out at the end is quite similar and very hypnotic indeed.
Another classic pairing would be the effects pair of Chronoblob 2 and Plateau for that extra ambient wash; ya can’t go wrong there!
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