Advice needed and MUCH appreciated on my 1st eurorack

Hello everyone! I’m Antti and like many others before me have just fallen for eurorack... I’ve got some experience with hardware synthesizers, including some semi-modular ones (0-Coast, DFAM, Dreadbox Nyx) that I love and will be trying to hook up with my forthcoming eurorack, but I’d much appreciate your thoughts on my current build plan. The idea is to create dark (organic-sounding) ambient with some percussive elements and rich textures. I’ve found myself a 6U 84hp GMSN! case second-hand, so for the time being I’ll be sticking with that. I can see myself expanding in the not too distant future but I’d appreciate it if you could point out ways to make the current 2x 84hp as well as possible.

As for fx, I’m planning to run the modular through Octatrack and/or external fx, so I don’t see myself acquiring a huge amount of fx modules. I’m also planning to sequence the eurorack from the OT. Anyway, here’s what I’ve planned and (to a large extent) bought so far. Again, huge thanks to anyone and everyone who’ll take the time to comment!

Hi Antti,

Oh you are already the third or fourth person in a row that got an Octatrack and you also got yourself a 0-coast, I am so jealous :-) So that with an Eurorack should go nicely together!

Regarding your rack, well you got already a 0-coast and an Octatrack, so that’s a good start. A few matters you might want to look into it:

• I noticed the Veils (Quad VCA), so that’s good however I am missing an audio input/output interface. How are going to output your Eurorack sound? Everything via the 0-coast to the Octatrack? That might be a bit limiting. I think you should consider an audio input/output module for your Eurorack so you can lead the sound directly from/to the Eurorack to/from your Octatrack

• Since you mentioned yourself already that you might want to extend in the future, perhaps you should reconsider your choice of mixer, the A-138s. If you take the A-138p and A-138o, it’s indeed a bit bigger but ready for the future, it has panning & aux options and the A-138p is chainable with more A-138p’s so you can just simply start with one A-138p and the A-138o, gives you 4 channels and once you require more channels you just add an A-138p to get to 8 channels (or 12 or 16, etcetera). I guess now you want to do that all with your Octatrack, understandable however if your Eurorack gets bigger you might need a bit more mixing possibilities before you go out with your Eurorack sound to your outside world (i.e. Octatrack)

Other than that it looks quite complete to me, you mention yourself already that effects, etcetera you want to do with your current external devices (for example the Octatrack), so that saves indeed some space in your rack.

Perhaps you could consider one or two more oscillators and/or filters but you also can keep that in mind for the future and just start with what you got here. Together with the 0-coast and Octatrack I think you find yourself here with some nice stuff to play with :-)

Good luck with the Eurorack and kind regards, Garfield Modular.

It looks almost good to go. As far as your envelope generators, you seem to only have AD generators at your disposal (Maths & Erica). The Erica looks like it can produce one full ADSR... but then you're giving up your LFOs. I would think about adding a couple of ADSRs (maybe the Intellijel dual ADSR at 14HP) so that's covered.

Next up would be some modulation toys. I'd go for a micro Ornaments & Crime at 8HP. You should have the space. It's clockable and will also offer an internal sequencer, quantizer, and some other nice toys (though only one mode is available at a time). Sequencers aren't just for notes. So it's always good to have one somewhere, even though the bulk will be coming from your external source. If you only care about sequencing, the Noise Engineering Mimitec Digitalis is a four CV sequencer at 10HP.

If you go with the dedicated Intellijel ADSR, then you might want to swap out the Erica for a Xaoc Batumi at 10HP... plus the Poti expander at 3HP. That gives you four LFOs with lots of options in the same 10HP footprint (plus 3HP for the optional expander).

You have 30HP available, my recommendation will take up 25HP. If you go with the Noise Engineering instead of the micro O_C you'll use 27HP.

EDITED Sep 23rd 2019, 18:40

GarfieldModular and Ronin1973, thanks ever so much for your help! I’ll take a good look at your recommendations. You’ve addressed the two things I knew were either slightly off (for some reason utility modules have been hard for me to get my head around) or not taken into consideration enough (modulation). I’ll be back... Thanks again!

Edit: Sticking with the Erica eg/lfo for now in my projected build as I have some space issues. Will keep an eye on the Intellijel Dual ADSR module.

EDITED Sep 23rd 2019, 19:52

This is where I’m at atm. So I grabbed another small case dirt cheap (bottom row, the blind modules are just to note it’s only 68hp)... The Erica Synths will be swapped to the Batumi at some point and there are some modules I still haven’t bought but I’m getting there! Edges was actually the first module I bought in the spring, although I’m not sure if it’ll go into the rack in the end.

Hi Antti,

Oh yes, that extra row does it, gives you a bit more space to plan this a bit better and looks like you got about 44 HP space left if I calculated it correctly. Not much but if you think that's sufficient for the future then you should be fine.

Just still missing that audio input/output module, I see you have added now the Doepfer A-119 for audio input, but where is your audio output? Or did I overlooked it? Don't assume that you Doepfer A-138o is sufficient, that's just the output of the mixer but still at "Eurorack level voltages" which might be a "bit" too high for your possible input of the Octatrack or of your possible external mixer. So therefore you need an audio output module.

Therefore my suggestion to simplify this a bit, take out the A-119 and instead take a module that can do both, i.e. audio input and audio output parallel at the same time, for example Intellijel Audio I/O is such module and doesn't use up too much space. The Doepfer A-119 is 8 HP, that Audio I/O from Intellijel is 10 HP, so you just need 2 HP more. Of course you can take any other kind of audio input/output module, it mustn't be the Intellijel one.

I am just mentioning it because I got it myself, quite happy with it, the only thing I am missing on it is the headphones output but since you got your Octatrack and most probably do everything on that one, you got your headphones there; therefore not having the headphones within the Eurorack might be fine for you.

You are almost there :-) Good luck and kind regards, Garfield.

Just wanted to share this with you guys: my first build is ready! I just finished my first jam with the upper 2x84hp rack and built a simple (but beautiful, methinks) patch with Batumi, Telharmonic, Morphing Terrarium, Dual ADSR and Serge VCF. The journey has just begun but I’m super excited with the paths this opens up for me. Once again, thanks GarfieldModular and Ronin1973 for your invaluable help!

Hi Antti,

That sounds good! :-) I wish you much fun with your modular synth!

Kind regards, Garfield.