On April 21 last year (2021), I started my Eurorack journey. I had been on the fence about modular synthesizers for some time; I probably had learned about Eurorack modules some years earlier and even knew several people making music with them. I did my research and I watched videos, but I really didn’t know if it would be for me. When the NiftyCase came out, I thought, “What the heck, let’s give it a try.” I mean, I could get a powered case, along with its two stock modules, Chipz and Cellz, for about $250. If it worked for me, great; if not, I could either sell it or give it away. It’s a no-brainer, right? (By the way, this post contains no affiliate links whatsoever.)
So, yeah, I took the plunge. The NiftyCase arrived and I knew—within moments—that this was what I had been looking for, probably for my entire life.
I’m not new to creating music. I’m a classically trained composer with a catalogue of works that goes back decades.
I’m also not new to synthesizers. I distinctly remember sitting in front of an “Arp synthesizer”—most likely an Arp 2600—when I was about seven years old, playing with it, tweaking the knobs and faders, and experimenting with the patches from the patch book. It’s just that the path to actually connecting with synthesizers as a compositional tool took a long time to traverse.
I played in plenty of bands in my high school and college years and was around synthesizers a lot. As a guitar player, my money went elsewhere—into amps, pedals, and such—so I left the synths to the keyboard players. I took electronic music classes, most of which focused on using computers to generate sound. I was definitely not hooked: writing lines of code to create music was totally unappealing. I’d rather stick to pencil and paper, which I did.
At some point life intervened and put me into a creative stasis that persisted for nearly a decade. I wrote scarcely a page of music for nearly ten years. The light of inspiration simply refused to shine, and I sat in the shadows.
That NiftyCase changed all that.
Within a week, I realized I needed more and started to accumulate more modules: a Mutable Instruments Plaits, a Make Noise Maths, and an Intellijel Quad VCA for starters. Then I acquired more, and more. A year later, I’m probably several thousand dollars deep into gear acquisition.
I’m not a gear hog, though. I don’t actually lust after new modules as though they are some sort of toys that will change my life or bring me true happiness. I acquire modules because they speak to me. They are creative tools and nothing more. I acquire what I need based on what I want to create. And what I want to create is a process that evolves not only from what I discover from the modules I have, but also from what I’ve discovered over the decades I’ve already spent creating music.
If you listen to my music, you may find it unconventional. My acoustic compositions fall fairly well within the European post-war modernist realm, which actually is neither controversial nor unconventional at this point. My recent creations, however, sound nothing like that. Most of the modular synth music I encounter falls broadly into one of two camps: EDM or ambient. I don’t do either. I can’t go “techno” because I like acoustic instruments, and I don’t want to simulate their sound, their gestures, and their idioms with electronic media. I can’t go ambient because I’ve never gelled with pretty much any of the process-oriented, minimalist music that began to appear in the 1960s. No, I want to create music that I simply cannot make in other ways.
That’s what modular synthesizers give me: tools to create in a new yet weirdly familiar-yet-unfamiliar landscape.
As a classically trained composer, I learned how to be in control of all aspects of a composition. In some camps, it’s nearly a mark of ideological purity to exert such control. With my modular system I can let go of control and explore a world of pure sound. Yet I have the years of experience in structuring sound, building dynamically organized soundscapes, that I can intuitively lean on. The process of making music is not new, but the tools and what they yield are, and it’s absolutely exhilarating.
So, at the end of a year of exploration, my vision is clarifying and I am seeing more directly what I want to create. There’s a lot more to be said about this journey, and those words will likely follow in future posts. For now, it’s time to return to the world of sonic exploration.