Voices and Effects for "normal" pop music?

Hi Is there a tutorial for creating playable voices and/or effects in VCV Rack to be used in pop music or music, they are playing in the radio? :slight_smile: I don’t like these pluggy or crunchy generative music with no straight rhythm and melody.

Thanks for Tips Thomas

Creating voices ? Do you mean recording voice ? You can always record a microphone into one of the sampling modules like Simpliciter from Nysthi :slight_smile: .As for the effects, just treat the vocals as you would usually do in a DAW production. Some reverb, some delay, there are quite a lot of nice tutorials on how to treat vocals for certain genres like Pop :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: . I’m far from being in expert in vocal treatment, so the tutorials will probably be a better help than me :wink:

@thomas0906, you can make any style of music that you want in VCV. While I have made some generative patches, I, like you, have begun to lean towards making more deterministic music. Whether it is pop or jazz or just some other electronic style, you can patch chord sequences, bass lines, drum loops and melody voices. There are piano roll sequencers like Squinky Labs Seq++ or Entrian’s Timeline for writing fixed melodies and other voices. I’ve also begun to do more recording to a DAW because, for me, the arranging of multiple voices and musical scenes is more flexible. As for a tutorials, I know @Omri_Cohen has done videos on recording VCV to Reaper, and there may be a video or two about using VCV with Ableton. If you don’t like the sounds you are creating in VCV, you can also use the Host module to open up the world of instrument VST plugins. I am sure Omri has a tutorial for using Host. There are many tutorials on the web to teach music theory, harmony and composition. VCV is just one possible instrument to use.

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@Olival_Clanaro I am talking about sounds, not vocals. I want ro create synthsounds, basses, drums, piano, organ, pads, strings, whatever and all kinds of effects with the VCV rack. I want to create arpeggios, sequences changing with chord input a.s.o. I want to play the whole stuff with my midi keyboard and reaper everything synced.

And for the creation of sounds an effects for that purpose, I am looking for examples…

Best regards thomas

There’s a “Synth Voice” tag in the library that will reveal a lot of semi-modular synth modules that may help you get to where you want to go quicker, but bear in mind a lot of users use VCV Rack to build a synth voice out of several discrete modules so a lot of the emphasis is on building your perfect synth instead of having one pre-built.

One I would recommend as a great starting point is Surge Patch Player because that reminds me of an old school general MIDI module like a Roland MT-32, something you used to find in the cobwebbed corner of a studio that you can use to quickly fake a harpsichord or marimba if nothing else is handy.

I haven’t seen much in the way of tutorial videos where people are building synths to play (e.g. via MIDI keyboard) in VCV Rack though I haven’t been looking for them either.

It will be interesting as and when the official plugin version of VCV Rack is released to see if things change and more people start using VCV to build instruments they can ‘play’ from the DAW just like any other plugin instrument. Because it’s a bit shonky getting VCV and DAWs to play nice currently most people (at least those who post patches) seem to be using Rack standalone to play generative sequences rather than ones needing a player’s input.

Hello there Thomas, Worker 13 has created synth voices, Trautonium, Organs and synth voices in patch form, have a look on VCV Rack Patchstorage, people have created patches for different sounds, there are Minimoog, Bass Station, string, choir synths from numerous creators, hope that helps. You can download patches from there and alter them. Squinky Labs as an organ module already to use. All the sounds in patch form are available on Patch storage.

Like you, my main intent with VCV is to build voices for manual playing.

I don’t know what your background in synthesis is, but I’d strongly recommend Gordon Reid’s Sound-on-Sound series: https://www.soundonsound.com/series/synth-secrets.

If you’re starting this journey from the very beginning, there is a nice series of short tutorials done for a college course that will help you get up and running: Analog Synths In One Minute - YouTube . Omri has a number of “let’s build the FOO synth in VCV Rack” for a few fixed architecure synths. These may be useful.

I think the big thing is to note that for a given basic purpose, VCV often has multiple modules, and that they often differ in sonic qualities. Part of working out a patch is to decide which sound sources or filters you want to use. Even basic things like modeled VCA (consider Vult’s Punch) can contribute to the character of the sound.

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All the advice here is good. One quick way to get an organ sound is with my Organ-3. It can’t do anything EXCEPT make organ sounds. There are a zillion ways to make nice pads in VCV. My Saws module will make the infamous Roland Super Saw sound, and can be filtered a bit to make some string section pads. But, like others say, if you want to be happy with VCV you will want to learn more about synthesis.