Minimum Viable Party

Hello all, long time lurker first time poster....

I currently make dissapointing house music for self-release using a NI Maschine but have been increasingly tinkering with VCV rack and loving the generative abilities/possibilities. I have a modest budget of around £1500 to build an initial setup loosely based around the idea of a "Minimum Viable Party" an all in one unit, this unit will be focussed on Techno / Electro primarily.

I have included Pamela and Ornament and Crime for Sequencing, quantized note generation and other functionality (Hemisphere firmware on the O&C)

My voices are Plaits and MCO for their versatility.
Pico and Hats module for 3 drum voices.
DSP & MMF for effects and filtering
VCA, Mixer & Outs (Envelopes for the MCO coming from the O&C)

Am hoping for critique in terms of module choice;

Are there better modules to achieve the same? Assuming the approx. price of each module is relatively firm (within 10% odd)
Do my choices make sense?
Are there any glaring omissions?

Thanks in advance you lovely people...

Welcome @benjaminjamesgreen. I would first recommend planning long-term, i.e. not what your current budget is, but what you want to achieve. Anyone who is into modular quickly finds out that money and space quickly disappears. With that said, most will tell you to invest in a larger case from the get-go. You WILL want the space eventually, and you can fill it with blind panels in the meantime. The TipTop Mantis is almost always the recommended starter case around here. 2x104hp, inexpensive, and great power supply with a decent amount of power headers.
A second recommendation would be to get a dedicated drum machine instead of trying to include drums in your modular right off the bat. The drum modules you have chosen don't have a lot of patch points, and so their sound design capabilities are very limited. They're also very tiny. That's not very fun. Get a more versatile drum machine that you can clock and interface with your modular for now. You can always invest in better drum modules in the future. Most beginners try to pack too much functionality into a small space (I did it too). For something small like this, focus on developing an excellent synth voice and try to make it as tweakable and patchable as possible. Plaits is always a good starting point. Also, you probably won't need an output module if you get a good quad cascading VCA to double as a mixer.
I've put together what I consider to be a good STARTING point for a modular synth. It overshoots your budget, but I promise that is going to happen anyway. And, you don't need to get everything at once. When you start patching, you will discover what you need to buy next. Some of the others in this forum will probably have recommendations and suggestions for budget friendly alternatives too.
Have fun and good luck!

Edit*
This build assumes that you will be using the Disting or uO_C Piqued for the envelope functions. I have added a Quadrax envelope generator but it's not showing up above.

EDITED Jan 5th 2021, 13:11

Pam's and O&C are great, but Varigate 4+ is more fun.

IMO Percall is essential for a minimal viable party. You're going to want a function generator eventually. Take a look at Maths, Rampage, Falistri or something like Stages.

This could use some refinement, but here is an alternate idea

EDITED Jan 6th 2021, 17:36

I have included Pamela and Ornament and Crime for Sequencing, quantized note generation and other functionality (Hemisphere firmware on the O&C)
-- benjaminjamesgreen

Glaring omission : switches. Pam's and OC gives you 12 channels of clocked triggers and modulation -- that's great (although possibly not enough considering you have five voices in here). But now you want the kick drum to go to half-time for a while. How do you this? From the look of your rack you have to go menu diving into Pam or OC, or start repatching while you're playing. Not a good look either way.

If you make copious use of AB-switches, switched multiples, switched OR-combiners etc etc you can redirect and recombine your control signals around the rack. I guess from the phrase "Minimum Viable Party" you know mylarmelodies on YouTube: check out his video on switched multiples; he covers about half the reasons you will want these.

I suggest you would also want at least one envelope generator (for MCO's amp envelope), and probably a second for the filter. Yes you can generate envelopes from Pam but again, you are going to want to tweak them while playing so having actual knobs to turn will help a lot. For reasons of tweakability and control you will also want some attenuverters/offsets and maybe a CV mixer.

I won't edit your rack, but here is one in the minimum viable party style that worked pretty well. Maybe it's actually sub-viable because my mixer and effects are outboard, but I still have room to add them if I needed to! You find some videos of this in action in "You" section of the forum.

Couldn't resist...

I went ahead and completed this thing...there was way too much missing. So now, this has a modulation section with two ADSRs and a dual LFO with cross-indexing between rates. I also dropped in a clock multiplier for ratcheting things like your hats and changing those up with a tweak...and a Ladik "Skipper", which is a probabilistic 2-channel trigger skipper that allows you to "rip up" a couple of the drum triggers to add variation with just a few knob tweaks.

Drums: threw all those others out; Maschine does those digital percussives just fine. INSTEAD...what I did was to drop in a Delptronics LDB-2 drum set and expander, and what that brings to the table are a host of electro-style percussives...stuff like the 606, CR-78, etc hits which work much better in this sort of setup. If you're housin' it up, you WILL want those. And the thing that looks like a mult next to them is NOT a mult, but a fixed-level, fixed-pan stereo submixer from Takaab. The idea is that, since you can control your levels via the Delptronics module, this lets you then send the outs from that into this, and you set up your stereo panning by plugging the Delptronics' outs across that. The white-ringed jacks are your left and right out, and connect to two channels on the Doepfer A-138s panned appropriately.

Modulation is next, followed by the TWO voices that are there now. A Klavis Twin Waves serves as a VCO for a "lead" and for a "bass", and since the Klavis' VCO1 can do suboctaves, that should bang REAL HARD. Especially since I paired it with a Viol Ruina for making the bass hurt even more. The other VCF for the "lead" is a Doepfer A-121-3 multimode. After that is the dual VCA for amplitude control of the two voice parts, and each feeds to a single Doepfer A-138s channel for panning.

Disting EX? Expensive. Instead, there's a Happy Nerding FX Aid in there for your stereo effects. Of course, if you want the drums to have no processing and have the lead and bass "raw", just patch the drum submix to the FX Aid and then send IT to a stereo pair, then send the stereo mixer's outs to the Befaco OUT, which gives you your isolated outs on 1/4" jacks (beefier, more endurance in live situations) as well as your headphone and...yep, there's more...you can also use the CUE patchpoint and switch on the OUT to check tunings, etc in mid-set. Lastly, I added blank panels to spread out your access to the VCF controls for live tweaking.

The same P/S is in there (and it's not even close to the current draw on the +12V rail...the build wants 610 mA, and the Row Power 35 can output 1.4A on there...you'll likely NEVER overdraw that!), as well as the Pam's (went with a cheaper one) and the o&C (also went cheaper here). The sole failing here is that it looks like I overshot by UKP300 or thereabouts, but you might be able to scrape by if you can snag some of the modules on the used market. But as for the build itself, yeah, this is pretty solid AND you get some important features that were missing...even for a "minimum viable" rig. Tricky build, as all 1 row skiffs designed to "do it all" ARE...but I think this manages nicely.

Thank you all so much for this, is amazingly helpful, a lot for me to consider and think i need to undertake a serious rethink..... This community is pretty amazing, offering you time / expertise to help out a stranger, you are good people!

Thanks again :)