Hello dear ones. After using VCV Rack for almost a year, I thought I’d say hello to the community.
Maybe I will introduce myself briefly in my first post. My real name is Hermann, short Hery. I’m from Germany and am currently using a translation tool to check my insecure English^^.
I hope that I don’t write too much incomprehensible text.
Professionally I am not really a musician but a .NET developer. But I like to produce some cat music from time to time after work to relax. I started with Fruity Loops, but since I discovered VCV-Rack at the end of last year I only use this tool. It is relaxing and exciting to discover new sounds with VCV-Rack.
It is the perfect tool for a developer who spends a lot of time on the screen anyway. There are also many nice people who explain how everything works and motivate you to get involved with modular music.
At this point I want to thank all developers and musicians who make VCV-Rack possible. It is a great tool.
Even though I’m not an expert in modular music, I thought it would be a good idea to make a patch regularly. Maybe with time I’ ll gain enough experience to build something that sounds good
I will publish my patches here, maybe it will motivate other VCV rack beginners to know that even a complete beginner can learn to get along with all the cables and knobs over time.
It’s best to start with my current patch “Symmetries”.
Thanks for the nice posts :). So here comes the next patch. I swapped the small mixer from Mind Meld for the big one this time. I think this will make the modules in VCV Rack re-render a bit faster. The separation between melodies, drums and effects can be done in the mixer with the help of colors. Really handy this mixer.
For this patch I used more or less the same modules I use all the time. It is nothing special. This time I wanted to do something with voice recording again. For the upcoming 31 October I read the wiki article about ghosts :). My microphone unfortunately records the voice very quietly, so I always have to amplify it a bit afterwards. This time I reworked the recording from the Complex Simpler in Davinci Resolve. The result sounded a bit louder and clearer, but for some reason it couldn’t be reopened in complex simpler. I then exported it with the Edison tool in FL-Studio, which didn’t cause any problems. It’s really strange that the complex simpler doesn’t recognize the exports of Davinci. Is it only me or is this a known issue?
Download contains the VCV file and a recording of the spoken wiki article about ghosts.
I think it’s hard to imagine my patches without Supercell. This time I played around with it again and tried to create interesting effects. The effect at the last mixer control sounded a bit like strange screams. Since it was the first sound in this patch, I named it “Screams”. By the way, the last sound was the birdsong, or what sounds like whistles. I think the patch could be made a bit more performant. I didn’t really use the LLFO’s and ADSR’s sparingly :D. I found a picture of a cat with open mouth. For the cover I used it to recreate the following scene: “Cat wants to eat mouse, screams with joy, but doesn’t notice that it is about to be eaten by an owl”…
Thank you. Here is the next one.
In this patch I practiced a little bit to make drone music. Drone music often has a bass-like basic sound, which varies slowly and is accompanied by interesting effects. As theme for this patch I chose tree-like life forms.
The basic drone sound is created by the wave module in the first mixer control. The 3 other mixer controls are responsible for the variation of the drone sound.
The sounds for the life forms come from the right outer mixer control. For this I took the technique from Omri’s video “VCV Rack Live Stream - JW NoteSeqFu”.
I thought the sound of a circular saw would also go well with the tree theme (second last mixer control). You can also hear crooked sounding bells. I thought this would make the whole thing sound like a mystical magic forest. In Drone Music I often hear voices too, so I read the wiki article about trees and integrated the recording it into the patch.
I didn’t want to insert drums, but at least a slight knocking sound that gives a calm beat. You can imagine it as slow steps on a forest path or someone hacking on a tree.
In the end I didn’t want to let the music end just by reducing the volume, so you can hear 4 small sequences at the end. I know normally you don’t hear melodies in drone music, but somehow I was missing something. I will try to pull myself together next time
In this drone patch I wanted to have a closer look at the modules Neutrinode (Sha#Bang), HIVE (Stoermelder) and Sussudio (NYSTHI). Neutrinode seems to be very well suited to create random sequences for drone sounds and it is interesting to look at :). With neutrinoodes the white circles are signal receivers and the colored circles are the signal transmitters. If a colored circle comes close to a white circle, it starts to transmit octave signals. HIVE can also generate random sequences. Whenever a colored hexagon touches one of the white hexagons, a trigger and CV signal is generated. I used the EOC signal from the ASR to change the direction of the colored hexagon, which generates random sequences even if the position of the white hexagons does not change. Sussudio can be used to randomly play lyrics or melodies. I use the EOC signal to trigger JANNEKER (NYSTHI), whose timer is set to a few seconds. Whenever the timer runs out, the Sequential Switch is used to randomly select and play the next section from my recording in Sussudio.
When the patch is opened for the first time, the colored circles of Neutrinode will not move until you press the move button once. Additionally, the timer in JANNEKER cannot be saved with the patch, it has to be reset every time the patch is opened. To do this, click with the mouse pointer on the number in the secons field and move the mouse up/down. The timer is basically only there so that there is a small delay between playing the samples.
In spite of colored cables, it is often easy to lose the overview in the patch if you use many modules. This time I wanted to try if it is possible to avoid overlapping cables as much as possible by using the module Teleport (Little Utils). I’m not sure if the PC is stressed much more by the additional modules than if I use cable connections. The modules seem to take a bit more time to render when zooming in and out. For the sequences I tried Algorythm (Grayscale) this time. So you have 8 trigger/gates, which you can optionally switch on or off. Normally the switched off steps don’t give a signal, but it is possible to change that in the submenu under “Step outs” with “Always active”. It is also possible to play the steps randomly. I think you can compare this module with the Sequential Switch (ML-Modules).
In this patch I wanted to do something space-like. The name of this patch is due to the effect in the last mixer control. It reminded me of old sound effects from satellites. The noise effect should pass as the sound of a rocket engine. For the radio messages, I recorded my voice a bit distorted in FL-Studio. The two recordings are of course included in the download. As usual I simply read the wiki article about space ^^'. I found that it is a bit complicated to move several controls at the same time with the mouse pointer, so I built this automix construction to help me. Basically I use AFFIX to control the 16 mixer knobs below.I stored some mixer knob positions with 8 Face and with the slew module the mixer knobs are moved slowly up and down. Since AFFIX did not give me enough signal strength to move the mixer knobs up to 0db, I amplified the signal to 3V with Bias/Semitone and Polymult. The Chances module next to it is simply there to trigger the 8Face module randomly if you don’t like mixing yourself
In this patch I wanted to try only the module Boss Fight (KautenjaDSP) and then I added 1000 more modules because I didn’t know when enough is enough^^. Hopefully your PC can handle it. I like this Clockkky (AlgoritmArte) module more and more. I think I use it for the third time now. With it you can click together a simple beat with little effort. The patch actually consists of two parts. At the beginning the music goes towards ambient and later develops into something that sounds like techno. If you want to play around with the patch yourself, I have stored some presets for the mixer positions at the top in the Transit module (Stoermelder). Unfortunately you can’t save the state of the 8-face modules below with it. Oh, if you are wondering about the raccoon animation at the beginning of the video. I just put that in for fun. This is a webcam avatar from Animaze, which you can download for free on Steam. The sound is not from Animaze, I made it in FL-Studio.
In this vcv rack patch I just wanted to try out some new modules from Instruo. While playing around I made an interesting noise that sounds a bit like a meat grinder. The notes sound a bit wrong. But I left it like this, so it sounds kind of scary in connection with the meat grinder sound
In this small VCV patch I tried the FLUX module from Vult. Since the patch is relatively small and quick to set up, I recorded the entire setup of the patch. I hope you don’t pay too much attention to my label texts. I sometimes can’t decide what to write in, Bells or Piano, everything sounds similar ^^'.
In this VCV Rack patch I build something on the topic “Shipwreck in the desert”. Please excuse the overlength of the video. It was initially planned only 15 minutes for the first two effects “Wind” and “Rusty noise”. Unfortunately I added some more effects to make it sound less boring and I couldn’t let this patch end without a little melody. This crazy circuit at the end is not really necessary. It’s only there so that you don’t have to manually click the trigger button in Rampage after opening the patch. I’m not sure if my weird construction works reliably. If Rampage doesn’t start, you have to click the trigger button manually. There is probably a more elegant solution for this. With the Tape mudule you still have to click on the play button, so that the module starts.
With the telephone effect, I jump between 2 frequencies in the Wave module, which is supposed to represent a “telephone on-hook signal”, or something like that. By modulating the density slider, the sound is a bit crooked, as if the phone is broken. If you remove the CV cable at the POS control of the Wave module and adjust the position control a bit (e.g. 32.747), you even get a sound similar to an old modem dialing into the internet. Maybe you can use that somehow for another patch, who knows.
You can use the Count Modula Startup Delay module to kickstart looping rampages instead of patching up multiple modules, it outputs a gate and trigger pulse after the selected time from startup or opening the patch.
