Complex patches

Newbie here. Purely curious. What is the most complex VCV patch you’ve ever seen? Like, a crap ton of modules; cabling; complex sound; etc. Not gonna lie, it’s super fun to look at insanely complex patches but if the resulting sound is really really cool, icing on the cake!

Not sure how complex they really are, but many of the patches Matthew Paine posts are huge and daring. I think he works in the daw with VCV rack and other tools besides. A real composer as well as fellow audio experiementer.

As I see it, complexity often starts with limitation rather than bloating your patch. You can tie a few pretty snarled tangles with a single string, so the real challenge begins when attempting to do more with less.

Try getting big sounds with as little as possible and your patches will become inherently complex really quickly. Polyphonic modulation often is a good tool.

Emulations of Rob Hordijk’s Blippoo Box can be rewarding, too, for example: Blippoo Box by Rob Hordijk.

Also, Krell patches are quite fun to study. A few links compiled at: The ever-changing generative patch challenge? - #21 by Alphagem-O,

… and a more recent patch:

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I agree that complexity doesn’t always follow just from using a large number of modules, and using polyphony can make very complex sounds with a small looking patch. Not all modules are polyphonic though, so sometimes I’ll split a poly signal to multiple copies of the same module, and that ends up looking quite complicated. Take this effects patch for example, which was probably unusable for anyone else :rofl:

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All of these sound super fun hahaha!

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