I’m with you on this. I went as far as getting the evaluation copy of Bitwig last week, but I found that I dislike doing music in Bitwig as much as I do in Ableton.
Oh sure–me too! I think of it as building an ephemeral instrument and then exploring it. I use Rack standalone or in a hybrid setup much more often than the VST.
Well, not quite “forego,” in that Pro works standalone as well, but I know what you mean. TBD if Andrew converts it into a standard commercial plugin eventually. My point was only that if you’re already thinking of Rack as a full modular, you can just grab, for flanger and chorus:
and for phaser (in APF, natch):
and some LFOs/mixers and you’re good to go (and way more in control even than with these). The new effects are nice modules but their main purpose (seems to me) is convenience. Personally, I’d be a little more set back if something really unique (like VCV Sound Stage) was Pro-only.
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It looks (from reading the manual), that to do a “normal” chorus, with one going up while the other goes down, you need to be in stereo? Or use an outboard mixer to mix back down to mono?
Normal mono chorus is dry mixed with a signle wet modulated chanel. would be just using the left channel in and out, you’d have a mix of the dry and modulated signal. One going up andanother one going down is an “ensemble” effect, you can have it in mono with the 3CH button that adds a line, or stereo mixed back to mono
Well, I call the one up and one down a “normal chorus”, but if the more used term is “ensemble” then that’s cool. Didn’t the original boss CE-1 have one up, and one down? The E does stand for ensemble, but I think this was the first “chorus”, wasn’t it?
And, yes you can sort of get the one up one down effect using 3CH in mono, but if you do that the two delays will be 120 degree out of phase, not the desired 180.
The reason, of course, that you want one up one down 180 degrees is because the pitch sounds fairly constant that way, but with only one delay you will get vibrato along with your chorus. Two differing by 120 will not cancel out the vibrato, although it will diminish it some.
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If anyone was wondering why you would want a polyphonic phaser, here’s an interesting effect. Obviously you can do this with a single channel, but it’s way better with 16!
Also, I just discovered Sparkette’s Stuff Polyphonic Repeater, which is great. Just saves me patching 16 cables from the audio device into a Merge module!
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There’s also Bogaudio Polymult
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Good call, I missed that one!
Cheers Steve.
I really don’t understand this,
as I see it:
you get a whole bunch of modules and FX with VCV for free
and you can do amazing things with this freeware. So why should you need anything more?
and I can’t see another modular suite of equal value for free.
Yet you’re not satisfied and argue with Andrew that he expands the Pro version with some
interesting FX that add to the value of the Pro version and maybe help selling it?
Imho this is not very grateful but rather demanding.
Can you give any good (= convincing to the developer) reason why these FX should be free, or not bundled with the Pro version?
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For people who only run Rack standalone, but do purchase premium modules, why should they be excluded? If they want these modules, why not make them available for $20 or so and still get some revenue from people who would never pay for Pro because they don’t need it.
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I was just chiming in along the line of proposing that all VCV brand commercial modules be included with Pro, but they are also available for purchase for standalone. Of course that is up to Andrew. Hopefully he is open to input from the user community.
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My completely uninformed guess is that Andrew’s experimenting[*] to see if Pro-exclusive effects drive Pro sales. Seems like a strong case to be made for making them generally available at the point when they’re no longer doing that. Kind of like a VCV version of the old MI exclusivity model.
I will say this, having experimented with these–if anyone’s not a Pro user, not positioned to upgrade right now, and feeling FOMO because they can’t access these, don’t. IMO they’re nice, very well-made modules, a good part of the Pro package, and would definitely be worth $10-$20 themselves as an option, but nobody’s music is going to be limited by not having access to them. All of the really special stuff–the key Fundamental components, the free and open-source community treasures, the excellent a la carte commercial menu–is available in Rack standalone. No one should feel sad or left out. (Also, VCV Host plus a million free/cheap VST modulators will get you there too, although not all VSTs will support audio-rate experiments and it’s obviously slightly clunkier to set up.)
[*] Happily, the experiment (and the response) was pretty moderate, as opposed to the other early-October 2022 music software business model experiment–whoof.
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maybe for the reason I explained above (to make the purchase of Pro more valuable),
but I can understand that you ask for a premium version of these modules for non-pro-owners.
You can send an e-mail to support@vcvrack.com and ask them for a paid version,
maybe Andrew will consider it.
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He could still bundle them with Pro for no additional cost, still adding value but not excluding people that can’t afford $149.
I don’t really care, as a Pro user (free, for which I’m grateful, but I always run standalone) I have them, though I have preferred alternatives mostly via VCV Host, these are common fx after all, but it would be nice if people on a budget weren’t excluded by ‘Pro only’ modules.
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If I were on a budget
I certainly would prefer Host over most other paid modules
and I’d
use hundreds of free and superb vst fx and instruments.
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As a compromise maybe make them premium paid modules, but give purchasers a credit towards pro in the same amount. Then non pro owners get the chance to buy them and also an incentive towards getting pro at some point without feeling they’ve wasted money.
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I’m pretty sure the dual dual inverted is how the Juno chorus works. as for the CE1, I can’t really read schematics but it doesn’t look like there is two parallel processing paths with BBD on each?
This is the first time there have been “Pro only” modules so I imagine that the idea is to make the difference between Pro and Free about more than just the VST plugins in the long term. It’s not unreasonable for there to be Pro Standalone users after all - and what might tempt them is a set of VCV modules that aren’t available in Free. Between the Fundamental modules and all the 3rd party plugins, users already get a huge amount of stuff for free.
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Just to be clear…
…this:
I would likely buy them, just like I bought Host, Sound Stage, the Pulse Matrices and Console (for a total of $120 in today’s library) but for how I use VCV I won’t. Not for $149. Is weird. Is all I’m saying 
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