The original The Verge article. “Get lost in the sounds of YouTube’s growing ambient modular synth community.” And I did.
I was lucky enough to have a Moog Prodigy to play with as a teenager : I’d had a musical upbringing (piano, cello and organ) and when we moved out to Tanzania, none of those instruments were … practical, so my parents bought the much more portable syntheizer. It eventually died after a family of cockroaches made their home inside it, but not before I’d had a lot of fun making irritating squiggly noises. And set up a lifetime of listening to music like Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream.
A Moog is an analog synth - it builds it sounds from analog voltages, rather than the later digital synthesizers. You take a sound source - an oscillator producing a particular waveform - and feed it through other components to add an envelope, set the pitch, amplitude and other parameters. Modular synths simply have each of those components as individual modules, and you pick the ones you want, patch them together and away you go.
Videos to watch
- Minimal set up with plants Spacy.
- Alastair Wilson 2 x Mother 32s.Slumber 006 REM Neon Snowflakes 41 Space Drifting last one awesome.
- Space Shuttle, great angle
- Fermi’s Paradox, State Azure 3 modules, huge sound.
- Close
- Woodstock 1
- Long useful intro, harsh sound
- Generative
- Wow
- Wow
- Minamalist setup, Ricky Tinez
- JunkieXL ridiculous setup.
- Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, syntheist and composer
Lotto projects
- Behringer Model D $650
- Mother 32 $1250
- DFAM POA
- Grandmother $1700