Toying with 5U again

I swear, every few months it happens...I get this wild hair to cook up a 5U setup and rererereREconsider going with Eurorack yet again. This time, though, the results came out kinda interesting. Still fiddling with it a bit, but it's largely complete.

Kinda interesting how I managed to cram 18 VCOs in there. Normally, that gets prohibitively spendy, but these new, fairly cost-effective 1 and 2 unit VCOs from Grove actually sort of make this work. I started on this purely with Dotcom and then started in on trying to up either the module capability or function density and only kept a little bit of focus on the pricing, just to see where that strategy wound up. Interestingly, a lot of Dotcom remained in, especially Roger's newer modules like the EG++, LFO+, and so on. And as a new twist (since they seem to have some recent introductions), Grove Audio got a big foot in the door here as well. Prior attempts soared WAAAAAY out of a proper price range in the past, but this actually isn't that bad, considering.

Cabs are Dotcom: all portable series with single rows on top, duals for the next two below, and the bottom is a portable angle case with the panel at the flatter, shallow angle instead of the steeper one. PSU3s in the left and right, definitely making use of the multiple power taps on the backs of the angled cabs. For transport, the idea is to 'clamshell' the left and middle 2 row and top row cabs, lids for the other two.

As noted, this is usually something I wind up hemming and hawwing over until something else in the Euro realm gets me excited, but this time...I dunno. I kind of like this, plus with my near vision gradually going all to hell as aging does what it does, this might be a more sensible option...?

EDITED Jan 27th 2018, 05:01

Haha, looks pretty impressive! :-)

I didn't look at it for too long but it seems pretty light on mixers for that many VCOs?

Not so much...some of the VCOs are intended for AF-domain modulation of either VCAs or direct FM to other VCOs. I tend to do a lot of that...this one thing I just got done tracking on a few minutes ago (decompressing post-overdubbing!) has a massive amount of that going on, albeit in this case on an Arturia ARP 2600V (works about the same as the actual one I had, in fact...no major regrets there) using strange cross-modulations that eventually get out into a huge processing cascade, with the result (once I get up tomorrow and apply some band-selective filtering to it) that I have this perpetually-evolving sound wash that'll sound like moving through a forest by a stream, complete with intricate spatialization partly done with a Lorenz attractor device in MAX. Frickin' beautiful, in fact.

But sometimes, ya just got to have knobs and wires to grab onto...so something this, ah, expansive (or should that 'a' be an 'e'?) is what I'd feel comfortable with, particularly if the eventual plan is to get out and do more live work. And that IS the plan...eventually...

I see! :-) After I posted I wonder if maybe you were doing lots of modulation and didn't need so many mixers.

Although, have you considered the Moon 592 Modulation Matrix? Might be handy for combining modulation sources and routing them to destinations during a live performance?
http://www.lunar-experience.com/assets/downloads/592_2s.pdf

Kinda...the problem I have with some of the Moon stuff is that, fully-implemented, it's space-hungry. I went instead with the Dotcom Mix++ modules, both to mix/invert/distro VCO audio signals as well as to do the same with modulation sources. They do a lot of the heavy lifting there, but don't require extra routing, etc expanders. Although, I do like their Quad Reversable Attenuator module. It's turned up in some other build sketches I've done in MU as a convenient and cost-effective attenuverter bank, as has the 592...but the 592 tends to get 'evaluated out' because of the space vs cost issue, while the QRA always seems to make it thru to the final refinements.

On the other hand, the more I see of the Grove Audio modules, the more jazzed I get about their features in small spaces aspect. You'll notice quite a bit of their devices in the above layout, and their appearances have actually been something of a growing trend as I slog toward an eventual budget-commit final version. Their 1-space Quad VCA/mixer is frickin' brilliant, IMHO, and that new Quad VCA stereo mixer is turning into a 'given' in some further refinements of the above.

Ultimately, while a portable cab version is the 'optimal', the real fact is that I'll likely go with something like this:

...if only for cost-savings. It cuts down the module compliment to something a little more fiscally-rational, and the Studio cabs do bring the price down incrementally. Still comes out to roughly $22.5k, which is...spendy, but I like the functionality vs space issues this refined version gives. FYI, the bottom 'row' actually denotes two Box4 enclosures that attach to either end of a QKB37, and these get filled with eight (yep, eight!) wheels to give me some expression CVs that can be sent back upward to other destinations in the synth. Costs a bit more, but that's a functionality tradeoff I like.

EDITED Feb 19th 2018, 05:43