TC's VCV Jams

I’ve been having a blast learning VCV over the last month or so. I’ve been going over lots of YouTube tutorials and have taken to just recording everything I do. This started out as a live performance based on this tutorial from Modular Curiosity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke5IdqngYzo&t=10s

I added a bassline I wrote on a Pittsburgh Modular SV-1, and used Ableton to add an electric piano and a vocal sample at the end, and some general processing and EQing. It’s the first real track I’ve finished in many years. I don’t think I could have produced something like this without VCV, it’s really a remarkable creative tool and it boggles my mind that it’s free.

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I was stuck at home today while my car was getting fixed, so I threw this together. I was going through this tutorial from Omri Cohen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv4N_6qRAK8 and used a similar patch to create a six-minute jam, playing with the LFOs and Rampage and mixing the voices and some effects in and out. Put the recording in Ableton, added a simple bassline, electric piano chord progression, and stole an old (public domain) lyric and used a robot voice generator website to create the vocal. First time ever starting and completing a song in a day!

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Lazy Caturday morning track, made while following the awesome Starling GateSeq tutorial from Omri Cohen: https://soundcloud.com/tc909/acoustic-emission-analysis

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A happier song, made with the Modular Thing Turing Machine cranking out interesting melodies.

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Tried putting together a techno banger based on this patch from VCV Rack Ideas:

The dynamic range gets a little bit out of control, but I still had a lot of fun making it. Part of me wishes I had some more flexibility in going back and editing stuff like this to make it sound more “professional,” but another part of me appreciates the fact that it is what it is.

Spent my lunch making this, mostly playing around with filters, effects, Rampage, and the mixer all mapped to the knobs on the Beatstep Pro. I started off with this tutorial from VCVRackIdeas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsmfU5TnPy4&t=108s

I set a few different scales to the different scenes on the Repelzin quantizer and mapped the scenes knob to a knob on my Beatstep Pro. I haven’t quite figured out how to use the CV input to automate this, but it’s easy to manually cycle through the scenes if there’s only a few of them. Fun stuff!

Song that makes me feel like I’m back in high school.

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I think this is my first song where I tried building the basic patch from scratch instead of from a tutorial. Amazingly, all this stuff is starting to make sense to me. The basic drums and bassline and various drones and bleeps in the background were all recorded in VCV, and I used Ableton to add the lead synth, a few extra drums, and a riser/fall. Next time I’m planning to try multitracking everything in VCV Rack so I have more flexibility arranging everything later in Ableton.

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We’ve been having power outages at work this week, so while taking breaks from working at home, I went through Modular Curiosity’s latest Marbles video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVbrSVhF2-8) and came up with this thing. Used the Beatstep Pro to control Marbles and some of the effects and Resonator knobs.

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I started following along with Omri Cohen’s Lifeforms live stream and ended up creating a nice percussive backing track with the Percussive Vibration module and the Sequence Modeler. Spent the next few days building onto it and came up with a fairly legit-sounding tech-house track!

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I thought the beginning was a little tentative, but the second half was very nicely done. The breaks and drops were cool. :+1::+1:

Thanks! Yeah, I try to keep it simple at the beginning and end since I used to DJ and I found that makes mixing in and out of tracks easier. I probably stretched out the beginning a little too much on this one, though.

I listened to a bunch of your tracks while mowing my lawn and doing yard work today. The driving beats were great, especially in that context. :smile:

Aw, thanks. I’m too old for clubs these days, so yardwork time is often my techno time as well. :slight_smile:

Like many others, I’m loving the new MixMaster. Just mapping the mutes to the drums pads on the Beatstep Pro is hours of fun. Spent some time this morning putting this together.

Patch: https://patchstorage.com/sunday-drive/

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Nicely done!

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I haven’t had a lot of time to play with VCV lately, but I picked up a Moog Grandmother recently, and also an Expert Sleepers ES-8, which has opened up a whole new universe. I had some down time today, so I used a Turing Machine in VCV to sequence my Pittsburgh Modular SV-1, along with some envelopes and gates. This made a nice little backing track to play under the Grandmother. Also used Knock from Vult for the Kick, which sounds a lot better than I expected it to.