Any thoughts on my proposed eurorack synth?
A few questions: What is your end goal with this? What kind of music are you interested in creating? Do you already have any other gear, or are you new to synthesizers?
I first learned about synthesizers about 45 years ago in high school, as we had an ARP 2600 the music teacher would let me take home home on weekends. I have not done much sound creation with synths since though I use many synth presets in playing commercial music on weekends. (I currently own about 12 synths, several moogerfoogers, and about 20 rack modules in my little home studio). I like to create soundtracks, combining various sounds, some electronic, some acoustic, often in multiple time signatures. I am primarily a keyboard player. Most of my experience in playing with changing synth sounds in real time on gigs has been with a minimoog, and now a voyager, and in the past with Arp odysseys. So, I'm interested in getting into modular synths to explore unique sounds for home recording.
Very cool. You are probably going to want Lugia's take on this rack. I'm guessing he will likely tell you to leave the Moog semi-modulars in their factory cases and buy one of the three tier Moog stands for those.
Overall this looks like a fun rack. Are you planning to do all of your sequencing with the Moogs?
Very cool. You are probably going to want Lugia's take on this rack. I'm guessing he will likely tell you to leave the Moog semi-modulars in their factory cases and buy one of the three tier Moog stands for those.
-- farkas
You know me well. ;-) And yes, unless you like spending a pile of extra money on rehousing and repowering your Moogs, don't do this. Here's why...
OK...the rest of the build has some issues. You're lacking VCAs (two is NOT enough!), you're missing mixers, attenuverters, and other things that allow you to mix/manipulate the CV/mod signals. BUT...you don't have room to expand now. So, let's look at what those Moog spaces cost you.
Each 1 hp space in a Pittsburgh EP-420 costs roughly $2. Your Moogs eat up 180 hp. That's $360-ish JUST on housing the Moog components that already have cabs and power, so you'd need to add $120 to EACH Moog to see what they're really costing in this configuration.
Instead, if you remove each Moog, you now have 80 hp of Eurorack modules per row. So you can effectively cut this BACK to an EP-270 plus, yep, the three tier kit. EP-270 = $649, and that cuts $200 right there, while also giving you 10 more hp per row. And even tossing the $79 for the three tier kit back into the amount, you STILL save money. And that money can then be channeled back into the build to provide the modules I note above (in addition to some needed swaps in that part of the build). Also...with the Moogs, you really need something like Erica's MScale to get them to play 100% nicely with the other Eurorack devices, so space is needed for one or two of those, also.
Yeah, I do tend to bitch about this quite a bit. But that's because if you make sure and try and maximize your "bang for the buck" factors in Eurorack builds, you recognize that the only real reason for co-locating cased and powered patchables is portable convenience...and the EP-420 isn't a portable rack.
Another example of this: your VCAs. So, you have two VCAs, which take up 16 hp, and total out at $185. Averaging here, that's $92.50 per VCA. Now, if you just move to a pair of A-132-3s, you fill the same space with four VCAs for $280. Looks more expensive, right? But then, if you do the math, those VCAs now come in at $70 each. Twice the VCAs, but you save $12.50 on each one. And you can do even better than that by looking at other options outside of Doepfer's. Take Ladik's VCA selection, for example. Now, if you were to use the same 16 hp space for a pair each of A-011s and A-012s...OK, this costs $304. But now you have EIGHT VCAs in that space (four linear, four expo), each one of which costs $38. And you've not required any new space for this...it all fits into the space your two occupy right now.
This is how you have to think in Eurorack. Yeah, I get it...I started out on an ARP 2600 at around that same period of time. But times and tech have changed. You can go WAY denser on functionality and still come in with something cost-effective because you can double, triple, or more on what can occupy a typical module space. But RACKS are a different story. They've always been the spendy stumbling block to Eurorack, even if some more recent offerings do manage to pull the price down somewhat. The objective is really to maximize your minimum space, so that even if you spend more on denser modules, you're STILL coming out ahead.
