The inaugural Colorado Modular Synth Festival will take place on Saturday, July 27 from 2 pm to 8 pm at Belmar Plaza in Lakewood, CO.
This free event includes all day modular music performances by Colorado artists as well as hands-on activities for kids and adults try out different ways to get into modular synthesis.
As part of the interactive session of the festival I will be showing my hybrid modular system with VCV Rack 1.1.1 integrating with external MIDI devices and a hardware-based Eurorack system.
Come say hi and see how to seamlessly integrate VCV Rack and other hardware components to get the best of all worlds.
Example of one incarnation of my hybrid-modular system setup:
Hi! This should be an awesome event, and I am so glad that people will be able to see how well a hybrid Rack/hardware setup can work.
For those who are attending or considering going, I wanted to mention that J from Starling will have a table showing off our new beginner-friendly modules and some fun, easy patches with the other Vias. If you see the flashing triangles, come say hello!
I went to this and found it very exciting. Using VCV Rack for a1.5 years, I have never had my hands on actual hardware. Of course, it was fun.
There was at least one both with hardware and VCV Rack linked together. Everyone that I talked to had some knowledge of VCV Rack.
The actual performances, which went on for hours with a new performer every half hour or so, were wonderful and enlightening to me on how a live performance would be done with a modular synthesizer.
Overall, a great experience.
The first Colorado Modular Synth Festival was a smashing success with lots of exposure for VCV Rack.
I had a lot of people (kids and adults!) stop by our demo tent interested in Modular Synthesis in general and VCV Rack specifically. I literally talked to people for 6 hours straight. Hopefully, @Vortico will see an uptick in downloads.
For those interested, this is a picture of my hybrid setup I used to demo hardware and software integration with VCV Rack 1.1.3 running on a 2012 MacBook Pro.
Rack was used as the overall master interfacing with the outside world through an Expert Sleepers ES-8. Rack provided CV and Gate (Random Sampler) to Macro Oscillator 2 (VCO, in Rack), Mutable Instruments Plaits (hardware, VCO), and a WMD Chimera (hardware, percussion), as well as the MicroBrute (via MIDI Out through the Focusrite 6i6 interface). People could patch in some hardware filters on the outside. Vult Trummor 2 provided the rhythmic backend and NYSTHI’s Simplicter played an ambient loop.
Macro Oscillator 2 and Plaits were calibrated with Expert Sleepers Silent Way for VCV Rack and perfectly in sync. All outside audio (Eurorack, MicroBrute) went back into Bogaudio Mix8 in Rack through the ES-8 and into Plateau reverb (of course) before going back out through the ES-8 and into a headphone mixer.
The Faderbank controlled Rack modules via MIDI (CV, parameters via mapping, and Mix8 channel volume).
Shoutout to Jason from Starling, who was set up across from me and demoed their fantastic line of Via modules, including some new prototypes! Check their stuff out in Rack and support them by buying their hardware modules!
Next meetup of the Colorado Modular Synth Society is on Sunday, August 18 from 2-5pm at WMD headquarters in Denver. I’ll be giving a talk about VCV Rack.
