Dreamworld Plus One Challenge (September 2024)

Music & Patches
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If you are ready for another creative exercise in VCV Rack patching, we are starting another one for September 2024 and you are invited! I’m announcing this a day early so everyone can start thinking about it.

Mission

We are a supportive community and we gather in the spirit of mutual education. This is NOT a competition. Our purpose is to challenge ourselves, not each other, to learn and practice electronic music as an art form.

Theme

The creative prompt for this month’s challenge is dream world. Create a VCV Rack patch that generates sound effects, textures, music, or other synthetic sound to evoke surrealism — the quality of being in a dreamlike state of consciousness. You might think of other ways of describing alternative realities or altered consciousness: hypnotic, hallucinatory, transcendent, the spirit world, etc. There are no theme police here! If it inspires you, go with it and submit it!

Constraints

  1. As we have done in recent challenges, the patch must fit inside the boundary markers of the template patch. Download the template patch file “dreamworld_template.vcv” below and use it as the basis for your submission.

  2. VCV Plus One: You are allowed to use free VCV modules, plus modules from one other plugin, in each submitted patch. The other plugin must be free and available on the VCV Rack Library. No additional plugins may appear in your patch. You may pick a different plugin for each submission if you want. You may use as many modules as you want from VCV and your chosen plugin, so long as they fit inside the boundary markers. Don’t worry, the Submarine TD-202 I use for the template boundary marker does not count against you.

    2.1. UPDATE 1 Sep 2024: Because certain kinds of modules (e.g. reverb) are not available across a wide variety of plugins, we will allow an optional “wildcard” module. This is a single module used one time in your patch, for example Valley Plateau for reverb, that does not belong to VCV or your chosen plugin.

  3. Your patch must be generative: no samples, recordings, microphones, MIDI input, or other externally derived sources of audio or control signals. You may optionally perform your patch using mouse and/or keyboard, especially if you provide a video showing what you are doing. The purpose of this rule is educational: it should be feasible for others to download your patch and reproduce your results without them needing any special equipment or musical skills.

  4. To allow everyone’s work to be seen and appreciated, please submit no more than 5 entries for this month’s challenge.

Template patch

dreamworld_template.vcv (942 Bytes)

Patches

As always, the purpose of this challenge is education. We learn by doing, and we also learn by seeing and interacting with each other’s work. Please upload each patch to PatchStorage.com and post the link here (preferred) or upload your patch file directly to this thread or to some other file hosting service.

All patches must be posted in the month of September 2024 (UTC).

Videos

The patch file is the only required part of your submission. However, videos are very much appreciated also. A YouTube video makes it easier for everyone reading this thread to experience your work. You can use the VCV Record module to record a video, then upload that video to YouTube. Then post a link to the video in your submission. Put the link on a line by itself like this to embed a nice video player:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whatever

If you don’t want to record video, you can also post an audio-only link to SoundCloud, Google Drive, etc.

Any posted video/audio recordings should be somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes in duration.

Linking

Please include the text “Dreamworld Plus One Challenge”, along with a link to this forum thread, in the title or description of any published patches, videos, or audio recordings. This helps promote the challenge for other people who might also be interested in participating.

I hope many of you participate and enjoy this exercise!

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I’m going to get the dreaming started with my own first of five allowed entries. Of course you could guess which plugin I would select!

You can download the patch from:

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Wow that’s really dreamlike!

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Gorgeous patch!

One request - might you consider relaxing the rules just a smidge, allowing use of one free reverb of your choice that is not from your chosen plugin?

There aren’t that many plugins that include a free reverb, and VCV is not one of them. So the number of plugins available is pretty slim if you want to follow the current rules, and still use reverb.

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… and not all offer control over the stereo field.

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Yes, this does sound like it will make the exercise more fun, without taking away the creative constraint.

Hi @purf, do you also have a suggestion for a rule change? Perhaps we allow a single extra module, of any kind, from a second plugin?

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I wouldn’t mind an extra mixer of sorts, Mindmeld Console (seeing how the VCV one is a commercial module)

(edit, as I hit Save As on a first idea: on the other hand, I usually rely on stereo shenanigans a lot, so maybe it’s also quite cool to not being able to do that)

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Yeah, many consider the mixer to be separate from the main patch. But a lot can be done with a few VCV VCA Mix, though maybe a bit tedious. I don’t mind that constraint.

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Hmmm… I don’t really understand the rules, but from what I see in your example and the discussion, it’s VCV Free collection + any collection that is free, am I right?

**If I am right, I want to criticize this set of rules real bad, but that’s your challenge and also probably some people already started doing something… So take it as me whining, haha

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Yes, but …

I agree that we can do mixing using VCA Mix 4, etc., and so allowing a full-blown mixer is a luxury, not a necessity.

Let’s do it this way. We will allow a single wildcard module, meaning you can have a single instance of any one module from another plugin. This keeps you from getting totally boxed in, but is still a creative constraint.

The constraint could force you outside your comfort zone for how you usually approach patching, and that is intentional. Often this causes surprising shifts of creativity!

1 Like
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Yeah, that’s true. But I wanted to criticize the dissonance between rules and the theme. Cause dreams are free, when you are limited to using two things in your dream, that’s a nightmare. Dreams are free and unexpected, maybe even absurd… It’s too late to change anything, of course, but my way of doing the dreamlike stuff would’ve been like “don’t use two instances of one module, so your patch would be colorful, and try using modules where they don’t belong” or something like that. “Do crimes to your patch and see what happens”. That’s what dreams are in my opinion…

Well, again, I am not trying to stop the challenge or rewrite the rules. I am just complaining about what I think is an inconsistency or a contradiction.

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Hi Yier, I appreciate your feedback. I like some of your ideas and I hope I can steal them for future challenges!

I know that by doing something different, some people are not going to like it. On the other hand, I hope this also provides a chance to be challenged to solve problems and learn new things.

When I made my first submission, I felt creative freedom to imagine how I wanted something to sound, and then the technical challenge of making it happen with the plugin limit. So it’s fun for me.

I updated the Constraints above to have a new section 2.1 explaining the new single-module-instance rule. We can call it a wildcard for short.

1 Like
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Sure! that would be fun

That’s true, but… I don’t know i just feel this dissonance between the goal and the means… hard to explain it further than I already did, haha. Again, I am not saying like “Stop the challenge! We need to rewrite the rules”, I just think this time these constraints feel artificial and arbitrary to me, not consistent with the “dream-like theme”. Well, maybe it is just me. Would it be another theme, that would make more sense to me. Like… imagine being a novice. We’ve all been there! For some time I wasn’t even aware that there are other collections, so I made maybe about 50 patches with VCV rack 1 free collection before realizing that there is a library with different modules. Or a prison. So you are in a prison and you only have one set of modules that are permitted, haha. I guess it’s a Norwegian prison. Anyway, there is also a smuggled collection by your choice. And it should look like a permitted collection. So it should be visually as close to the official collection as possible. Or you are stranded in an isolated island and you only have maybe a dozen of modules. Now go and build an FM radio transmitter, haha. You know what I mean? Maybe that’s just me, but these challenges motivate me more than just VCV plus one, because we need some limits. Sorry if it sounds aggressive, I don’t mean it this way. Well, anyway, I like your challenges! Just not this one…

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HAHAHA!

No it is fine. I can tell you are saying how you feel, nothing personal. I’m new at creating challenges so I’m still learning as I go along. I can use good feedback like this to help me design better challenges for the future.

In fact, I’m wondering if it makes sense to have a more open discussion here on the forum about future challenges before we launch them? To avoid total chaos, I would still provide a draft idea, and then we could get feedback and make changes before officially launching. I would still make a final ruling (benevolent dictator style) but only after getting a sense of what makes the challenge the more fun for everyone.

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I think that would be fun… I am not sure if the feedback would be… what’s the word… enough? There’s a better word, I am blanking, I don’t remember. Anyway, you can try! That would shape it into some interesting form eventually if all goes fine. Cause there are lots of creative people here and I bet they would have some interesting ideas, but of course, people come and go, they get busy with work and family and all that… And some people are here to consume ideas, not to produce them, which is also totally fine. So yeah, I am a bit pessimistic about engagement, but if it sets up, that would be supercool to see it developing even further, yeeeah

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Knives ran, he had been running for as long as he could remember. The demons from the sky were close. He had to to hide.

A swamp? How did he get here? He couldn’t remember; but he knew running would be impossible while threading the murky, stinky water.

Go up, hide in the treetops. That was his best bet. He climbed, as fast as his human hands allowed him… that’s when he heard them, their horrible growls.

He looked down from the trunk to see one had caught him, its terrible glowing eyes and those black, sharp talons… that tore through his flesh and snapped the bones in his leg.

A silent scream formed in Knives’ throat. He woke up, sweating. Spaceships, post-apocalyptic humans… demons… silly dreams. He composed himself and headed to his studio… that game wouldn’t score itself.

When he opened the studio door, his eyes widened in fear, terror, even… more than he had ever felt.

Someone had stolen his mixer.

The video:

The patch

nightmare.vcv (7.0 KB)

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Hi Don, in my opinion, your challenge is fine, it’s great and inspiring as it is!

And no matter what you come up with, there will always be someone who likes one challenge more than another or decides to skip on occasion. I think that’s fine too.

My preference would be to talk about creation and music and spirit and feel, not about criteria. Wouldn’t that be more fun?

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Certainly the theme part is more fun to talk about. However, the criteria/constraints are important for practical enjoyment of the participants. I saw that my choices were a bit controversial this time. I really would like to get a better understanding of how other participants feel, not just what I think is fun.

2 Likes
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I think, the “Plus One” is a real challenge for a “Dreamworld” patch.

What do I think that I need?

  • good reverb for dreamy soundscapes
  • sequencing tools
  • shiny VCOs
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This is all great discussion, but I would like to move this side topic to this thread, so we can focus on this month’s challenge. I’m not going to change any more rules at this point. I’m happy to discuss more about the October challenge and afterward in the thread linked above. Thanks everyone!