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Jim!

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this incredibly resourceful reply, and educate me on some badly overlooked basics! Truly, I've learned so many things from your message.

NP - hopefully this will be just as educational/useful!!!

something I should have mentioned earlier - I'm not convinced that polyphony or paraphony in modular is a particularly good use case - it tends to be very expensive compared to what can be achieved with a fixed architecture synth - and I think that modular really only gets interesting if you're creating complex or unusual patches that can't be achieved with a fixed architecture synth - saying that getting a poly synth that has good sine waves may be difficult and/or expensive...

I've reworked a (hopefully) improved setup here:

I'n mot convinced it's any better or worse, just different & I'm not convinced that you did a huge amount of homework before re-posting - 2 reasons for this - the time it took and that with a little bit of googling I found out that the uVCFs might have tuning problem - due to no temperature compensation - so they are likely to drift, even after initial stabilisation... as @Plieuwski suggests doepfer a-110-4s may be the answer... and are significantly cheaper than the uVCFs... at least here in the UK you can buy an a-110-4 and a doepfer filter for about the same price as an intellijel uVCF

(if you have the time and patience to check it out – I don't want to stretch it here.) In a nutshell (or rather, a 500€ case…):

• there's the Mutant better MIDI input you suggested

good

• just beneath it are an offset module and a Disting module (the idea is to be able to generate parrallel chords from a keyboard, which, come to think of it, is the main/only way I currently use "chords" in my practice). Disting seems nifty, but maybe something cheaper would work just as well for this application.

can you explain your intended use of the disting, with regards to this? as a second offset/precision adder? I'm not convinced! not to say that the disting isn't a useful module...

as for the offset - I wouldn't use it like this - I would tune the 'oscillators' to the correct intervals or use precision adders and precise voltages - but I almost definitely wouldn't play chords like this (see below) - I'd use the offset for shifting modulation... but see below!

plus I'd buy a better one - by that I mean multiple channels - happy nerding 3*mia, for example...

• OSCs are now all resonance filters, which is a great, elegant solution, and I love it. I find I really love sines and at that point, don't care much about other waveforms in terms of timbre

you might not care about other waveforms now, but that doesn't mean you won't in the future, so the option of other waveforms is a bonus... plus see above re tuning stability... I'd go for the a-110-4s after doing a little more research on the subject myself!

• there's the Intellijel quad cascading VCA/mixer, which should allow for a number of mixing uses?

yes but you'll undoubtedly need more mixing as well as vcas - they are fundamental synthesis building blocks... (see below)

• then an apparently quite clear, clean multifilter

so paraphony only!!! for true polyphony you need a filter per voice... (see below)

• a basic quad LFO

I'd want something more fully featured than this... batumi, which has multiple waveshapes etc!!!

• I followed your perceptive advice and ditched the ring mod. Instead I guess I could FM the VCFs sines for instance?

standard practice for fm is to use another vco... so I'd want at least 2 oscillators per voice... for both fm or slight de-tuning (which makes them fatter)

• then a MATHS module which seems to be so convenient for all sorts of operations (including VC envelope generation and many other fun things)

it's a good start - especially when the 'maths illustrated supplement' is worked through multiple times - thinking what, why, how... you'll almost definitely want to duplicate most of the functionality that it offers - so that you can use maths for more complex things

• and a noise source which I suppose would come handy for all sorts of things

yes but again massively benefits if you have more mixers - mixing a small amount of noise into a voice or modulation is a good idea - you almost definitely do not need this to start with, though...

Your signature is truly a well of wisdom… not joking here. I think I'll post-it somewhere.

yeah - I should get some posters printed and sell them

Is there anything you would think is redundant? Sorely missing?

I don't think that there's anything particularly 'redundant' although I dislike that concept in modular - something's only redundant if you don't use it - and personally I don't think there's enough here for that to happen - if you want polyphony, or even paraphony, you'll need duplicates of modules...

saying that I don't think I'd buy the offset module just yet - channels 2 & 3 of maths will cover this for now - when you get into self patching maths to do interesting things and you find yourself reaching for more modulation/offset/attenuversion/mixing/logic then it's time to add those, until then I wouldn't bother...

stuff that's missing:

a mult - you'll need a way of copying the single v/oct signal from the sq-1 to multiple destinations - you'll probably want more of these in the future - and you may find that you need buffered mults - but passive will do for now (& this may be stackcables or headphone splitter) - I'd get one of these to start with

more mixers - just like they say "you can never have too many vcas", I think you can never have too many mixers... sub-mixers (for mixing wave forms and/or oscillators), matrix mixers (more complex modulation, send/return, feedback patching etc) and end of chain mixers are all incredibly useful...

I probably said this before - but I'd also add a multi-fx like an fx aid pro - it'll give you a lot of options - reverb and delay are really useful... personally I'd want at least delay and reverb - but you may have other ways of applying these!

I'm still thinking about the sequencing part of operations. I guess I could either use that cheap SQ1 with the parrallel chord thing (this covers most of my uses of chords really), or plug in a keyboard. For other, more 'experimental' play, maybe just use a square wave from one of the LFOs to trig something on MATHS for instance?
Then maybe invest in a more sophisticated sequencer when I feel the need for it.

this is definitely 1 area to keep thinking about...

experimental:

triggering maths will cycle the waveform - which could be used as a source of cv for pitch, with the addition of a quantizer... but it will be repetitive, up/down only - you might want to mix in a tiny bit of noise to this before quantizing...

for the parallel chord:

put in place a plan for order of purchase - don't buy everything at once...

buy a case (I like the mantis), a single voice and the sq1 and as much of the utilties as you can (at a minimum a mult and the vca) and a modulation source and a dual envelope generator (adsr if that's what you want)

for that single voice I would buy 2 a-110-4s and a doepfer filter - possibly the A-106-5 SEM or one of the ladder filters...have alisten to the filters on line - it'll give you an idea - search for comparisions of doepfer filters on youtube

I'd also be realy tempted to add in a trigger/gate delay especially if you can find a voltage controlled one - this will allow you to experiment with phasing by patching a slight delay into the triggering of one of the envelopes

this will allow you to "proof of concept" a voice before commiting to buying multiples... both in using multiple vcos for a voice (for both out of phase and detuned oscillators as well as some fm/am etc) and also experiment with sending an interval (the mix of 2 differently tuned oscillators) to a filter to see if you like the results...

you may find that you don't like some aspect of the voice and can easily change something out at this point before continuing...

once you are happy with the voice you have then add a second... this maybe just another filter, or it may be a filter and a couple of vcos and a mixer and another mult for example...

at this point you could then add in the midi -> cv module an/or a more complex multi-channel sequencer - the sq-1 can always be used as a modulation source, or for transposing the other sequencer, or for sequencing another voice (bassline/lead etc)

I'd build this up one voice at a time and I'd aim for 4 voices - why 4 and not 3? so you can go past basic 3 note triads - either by adding in a bass note or by extending the chord (7ths, 9ths etc) - personally I'd probably only use parallel chords for "power" chords - root and 5th and the root duplicated either above or below - or to do things with major/minor chords - for ambiguity - but I guess this really depends on what else is going on!!

my 'end game' here (for polyphony) would be 4 identical voices, each with a pair of vcos, a simple mixer (maybe more than 1 - I like ones based on the moog cp-1 - for example AISynthsis' Harmonic Mixer), a dual envelope generator, a trigger/gate delay, a filter and at least one vca channel (probably more like 4 per voice - vco, filter, modulation etc) and some shared modulation (including a matrix mixer)

things I'd also consider adding in would be more modulation, waveshapers & lpgs (towards a more west-coast ideology), a different bank of filters, some simple effects - patching effects in at different pounts in the path rather than just the end of chain can be intersting!

And lastly, would you have any good personal book recommendation to go through the basics of modular synthesis?

there's patch and tweak which is an actual book... it's good but in lots of ways it's a coffee table picture book...

the stickies at the top of the 1u&3u subforum on modwiggler are good...

for more advanced synthesis techniques the sound on sound magazine 'synth secrets' series - available online for free is dificult to beat.. but is very 'east coast' centric iirc - ie this is how you mimic this instrument with a synth - which I'm not that big a fan of tbh - but I did get at leasat half way through the series - iirc there's 50+ articles - when I read it...

there are also a number of threads about more advanced books both on synthesis in genersl and modular synthesis in particular (Allen Strange, Pelsea and X without Y, for example) in the 1u & 3u and modular synthesis general discussion subforums of modwiggler

again - hope this helps!! good luck - more questions? keep them coming...

EDITED Aug 6th 2023, 10:59