Hello everyone!
I have made the dive into hardware with the nifty case and I have been trying to figure out how to send midi sequences to it through vcv rack. I was also curious if anyone knows what else I could achieve by connecting the two. Could I output some audio as well or just cv? I’m very curious about how I can get these connected together.
Any help would be much appreciated I am very new to hardware in general but intermediate with vcv rack in general.
Thank you all!
Expert Sleepers have plugins and hardware modules for this purpose. If you have a DC coupled audio interface, these can also convert analogue to digital with The Silent Way plugin.
https://www.expert-sleepers.co.uk/es8.html
https://expert-sleepers.co.uk/vcvrack_silentway.html#manual
Best of luck with the new toys. I do not have any ES stuff myself, but I’m nearly sure there are others here that have hybrid systems, hopefully the links provided yield all the info you need.
The midi side of things would just require a MIDI interface, if you have one or an Audio Interface with MIDI In / Out then you just need to connect a Midi cable from the device to Interface. In rack you select this device on any of the Core MIDI modules.
If you want to send midi out to the hardware, a good/cheap way to do it is with a midi CV converter like CV.OCD or Hexinverter Mutant Brain. They are basically same thing except the mutant brain is a module in the rack and the CV.OCD a separate box.
My advice would be to forget midi though and get a DC coupled (ie CV capable) interface like the Expert Sleepers Es/8 or 9 mentioned above. Now instead of sending midi and converting you are working with CV in both VCV and the hardware and can freely pass it back and forth between the two.
My other bit of advice would then be to focus your hardware on good analogue sound generators and processors - VCOs, filters, wavefolders, distortions etc and maybe some granular stuff and then do all you sequencing, triggers, logic, modulation etc in Rack - also come back into VCV for effects and mixing.
Watch some of Omri’s videos - he combines VCV and hardware really well.
I use an Expert Sleepers ES-9 to have VCV Rack work with physical Eurorack and a hardware synth. This video includes an explanation of an example patch: