If a sawtooth VCO or a mixer can vary in cpu usage by a factor of 10 or more, why shouldn’t these more complex modules vary like that, too? I find it difficult to believe that they don’t.
Same here, I was reading through and noticing that despite the groans, it’s clear it’s a topic that everybody loves talking about.
I find myself firmly in the both camp, for as long as it’s fun. I couldn’t be more grateful to vcv allowing me to finally learn a good modular creative practice by accelerating the learning curve, making so many great utility modules available, and some pretty excellent voices. And knowing that it’s using a single sample as the processing vector size is really nice. It’s made the computer into a place that I want to play and compose in again.
It’s also great that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on gear in order to be able to make the music that you want to hear. I remember growing up in the 90s, I had all these ideas about electronic music, but no way to make any. I’d read reviews of synths and things but could never afford one until I went off to college. If I was a teenager now, I think I’d be working with vcv and having a blast.
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Modular vs VCV Rack/Reaktor 6?
Do you want to ride to work on horseback? That’s awesome!!! Want to churn your own butter? Far out! I support you 100%. Want to play Angry Birds on a 1950’s vacuum tube computer that costs 40 million dollars and takes up an entire building? GO FOR IT!
For the rest of us, it’s virtual, baby.
Paraphrasing one of our foremost philosophers: “We are living in a virtual world. And I am a virtual girl.”
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I really want the control of hardware, but I want all the options of software, and to get everything I want in hardware is impossible to me, it would be far too expensive and I wouldn’t even have enough space for it.
I really would like to have a controller that offers full control over a really powerful softsynth (like VPS Avenger or Surge - my favourites right now). That seems like the perfect setup to me and I don’t get why no company has develped that yet, there must be thousands of people who would instantly buy it… If NI decided to make a controller that can fully control Massive X for example, that would be great. Komplete Kontrol is really nice, but only has 8 knobs and no buttons 
Endless knobs, some buttons and a small display, and the option to switch between instances so you can control a whole bunch of them with one controller - that would be the dream.
I hope that the BCR32 will release soon, and that it will be really good, then I might attempt to control a really powerful setup with it.
With high resolution it would be even better, especially in combination with VCV Rack, >=10 bit controls would be reeaaallly nice…
For me, I love the fact I can experiment and learn things real quick in VCV without having to fully un-patch and patch my real rig. In a way, it helps mold the decisions I make when purchasing the next module. Almost like research.
I have a fixed rack setup in VCV that mimics the exact setup I have in eurorack, I only add bits and pieces to see if they suit my workflow. I find that that in itself truly helps with the creativity aspect of it.
Both are great and vital to myself, but there is something special when grabbing that first cable on an empty canvas.
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In the early days of pop + rock studio engineers would turn everything down to avoid distortion. When musicians learned to control It and use it we went from Hank Marvin (love him too by the way) to Jimi Hendrix. Even a digital distortion like this can be musical. Having an option to keep it is prescient IMHO.
BTW I am 100% software rack because 1) I am learning from scratch and VCV Rack is the best way to do this and 2) brassic so hardware is not an option.
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That one might really be an option… quite expensive, but if it’s really good it might be worth to get it.
Well… it seems it’s not… MP MIDI only has digital ecoders with 24 steps per turn… certainly doesn’t justify the price for me.
Yes, now musical instruments made from high-quality materials cost a lot of money, it is much easier to imitate their sound in a program.
from the day I discovered VCV Rack and bought an ES-9 I know that every penny I spend on music gear is for pure pleasure only.
I try to buy only controllers, but that’s not easy 
I live in an amazing era
Hard to say. The money put out for modular hardware could build a really capable PC. Yet, there is something to be said about the real feel of the knob.
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As long as you are rich, go for it.
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The answer is to engineer real knobs to feed into VCV. I’ve been looking into endless encoder (AMS AS5601) that should give me twelve bits of angle over a rotation. That should make zippering a thing of the past or at least severely reduce filtering and latency to smooth the input beyond zippering.
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There is true to what Squinky.Labs says, unfortunately
thats equally tactile but less convenient because you have to constantly remap, unless you only use a single fixed rack.
Without some form of electronic scribble strip, figuring what a knob does is indeed annoying. I’m thinking of something akin to the Mackie C4 but with high res encoders. For me it’s actually more complex, as I really want to control instruments and effects both inside and outside of Rack.
My thoughts are to send the data to intermediate software (in my case a self-written LuaJIT system called MIDImangler), and then route the interpreted data to the instruments. I realized this isn’t the same as one knob/one parameter, but that is quite impractical for large music systems, and even with real modular synth hardware, you’re limited by having only two hands and a maximum arm span. Deadmaus needs an assistant if he wanted to move more than two fairly nearby controls on his setup.
You can often turn two knobs or move multiple sliders with one hand. Footswitches can be useful too, as can modules that act as macro controllers and feed out to multiple controls.
All that is possible with real modules, or with a virtual modular and suitable controllers.
But the latter sadly still doesn’t feel like the former. There is the scribble strip problem but the real difference, for me at least, is that in the virtual world I always assign controllers after I have designed a patch and want to play it, whereas with the real modular I designed the patch in the first place using knobs, sliders, switches, capacitive touchplates etc. Playing and patching is seamless, and very much a jamming experience most of the time, not two separate activities (unless I want to make it so). It makes the patches that I design in the two environments very different. With VCV it is generally more of an intellectual activity (and I do make much more ‘interesting’ patches) and often they are primarily generative in nature; with hardware it is more visceral, and I am very focused on what I am hearing, though there remains the intellectual challenge of problem solving as you never have, or have enough of, what you need, and have to find another way of doing it. I don’t think ‘Oh, it would be fun to play this patch’ because playing it is naturally part of what the patch ‘is’.
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@caowasteland , I know you are engineering your own device (which I think is awesome!) but if anyone wants something like this and hasn’t seen the endless-encoder-based Faderfox EC4, check it out:
Loopop has a good video on it (as for most other things).
With a few firmware upgrades (apparently in progress) it has some really neat interoperability possibilities for Rack. I’ve also heard a rumor that a larger one is in development, although obviously COVID is forcing a lot of companies to change or postpone plans.
@Nik, I thought that was really well said. I’ve never put it as clearly to myself, but some of my long-term hopes with module development involve ways to, in your terms, shrink the playing/patching dichotomy in Rack; keyboard or controller driven cable control being the first thing, but ultimately patterns like “touch a module and its controls auto-spill onto a control surface.” For me, it’s about avoiding (or at least postponing) the configuration step. “Let me think about how I want to set this up to play it” is the biggest creativity- and flow-breaker for me.
I think the right approach could get most of the control anyone would want with almost no configuration. Doing it really well would require VCV controller metadata per module, but some of that can be gotten through the API, and a little more of it can be squeezed out for open-source modules through static code analysis.
Anyway, a topic for another thread and another time (and after V2 is out). But there are some incredible possibilities, I think.
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