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Does anyone regularly use and enjoy any MODULAR SYNTH APPS?
Jasuto
Zmors out
Audulus
I am sure many more. These are the ones I have off the top of my head.
I guess Zed and Tera are sort of Semi-Mods.
I am talking full modular.
Comments
Sure, I've spent the last few months with SunVox. Haven't touched Gadget for most of that time period. It's tougher going than Gadget but I kinda find that rewarding, and liberating.
Am cogitating and deliberating whether to get into Caustic but I'm not sure I have the time to learn another environment and there is so much more to discover in SunVox.
I think SunVox is underrated in this category as many people find the resizing windows, multiple module options, and tracking options too daunting and or confusing.
On the plus side there are many video tutorials you can view on YouTube, the app is midi controllable, works on many different operating systems, is regularly updated, has new modules and capacities added for free. It can be used to create synths, effects, sequences, and can manipulate samples including some picture file formats.
It is relatively simple to setup midi control via various modules connected in different ways such that when you make certain modules active you route midi to a specific set of apps or hardware and a different combination when you activate another all on the fly.
It is an extremely versatile and powerful app which requires some time to learn but you don't need to learn everything and even one aspect of what it can do can be very useful.
If you don't want to get into tracking, you can control the modules via midi or route audio into and out of SunVox. After you've used SunVox for awhile, you come to appreciate being able to resize and scroll your modular work area so you can build large patches without running out of screen or having to open up sub-patches.
Connecting or disconnecting modules is as easy as touching a module you want to send from with one finger and touching the other module which will receive the signal with another finger. Repeat this step to disconnect. Building multiple connections is done the same way. No fiddling with getting the right connector or accidentally breaking a connection.
By making different modules active with a touch of your finger allows you hear how various parts of your patch sound. This facilitates building patches and playing/experimenting with them. The app is very stable and efficient in terms of the iOS resources it uses.
let's say, if I was on a lonely island with only an iPad and a solar panel to power the iPad, I would use SunVox, Audulus, Zmors, and even Jasuto every day.
does audulus know now this wants +-5 and this wants 0-20000?
I've been playing around with iVCS3 after picking it up on sale last week. I think that patch matrix qualifies it as modular. So far it's kind of confusing and there aren't many videos on it so I've mostly been tweaking presets to see how things work together. Lends itself well to creating weird space sounds as opposed to musical patches like basses or keys.
Hazel.
And not analogkit ?
Good overview @Paul. I find that everyone who mentions it either praises it to high heaven or finds it a bit intimidating.
In some ways it is difficult to make comparisons with other apps. Is it a modular synth? Is it a sequencer or DAW? Is it an effects processor? Is it a weird noise machine? Of course the answer to all of those is yes, but you have to do a bit of leg work compared to single focus apps.
Personally, would explain it as closest to Korg Gadget but without some of the help and infinitely more flexibility to route and create sounds in many ways you can't imagine yet.
For instance, when you first learn that there is no standalone ADSR/Envelope generator, the reaction can be to dismiss SunVox as incomplete or defective. But then you find out that you can use a short slowed down sample as an envelope (which you can draw with your finger tip) and suddenly the possibilities are wide open.
Another feature is the timeline. I see it as a bunch of post notes that you arrange in time with instructions like 'set the BPM here', 'play this sequence of notes here', 'apply this effects routing here' and so on. Again, the possibilities of this approach are miles ahead of any other sequencer I have used.
So yeah, SunVox has replaced Gadget for me. It ticks most of the modular boxes that I need and then some.
On a last note, I find the interface beautiful in it's simplicity and usage mainly but also frustrating for other actions.
What are you making with SunVox?
What kind of music do you do or enjoy making with the kind of sounds of SunVOx?
Maybe a better question, what kind of sounds make SunVox special? Or is it the process?
What app is most comparable to the sounds you get out of SunVox?
I appreciate your time.
I think it's a mixture of the ouput, the process and the opportunities for abusing sound. I can't claim to be making anything most people would want to listen to, but it does allow me to explore a much wider range of synthesis than I previously had access to. If I want to process a simple sound with the same effect chained ten times, I can try that. If I want to have a string of modulators causing you to get a really strange wobble to your bass, equally simple.
The other thing that makes SunVox quite unique, as far as I have found, is that you can pull in other SunVox files as modules. So you could make your own quirky little synth and use it in many different projects. Also you can use the sequences from the imported SunVox files meaning that you could run a drum track at 80 BPM in sync with a bass track running at 120 BPM. The possibilities keep expanding the more I try things.
I'm not really sure how much of the sounds I get are SunVox and how much my own deviations.
Ditto
It's also a decent effect when placed in the AB effect slot.
I don't have AnalogKit (yet). But I forgot to mention iVCS3. That's actually the one I can work best with, and has a good sound.
I really like SynthQ.
I am not sure what class or genre synth that is really.
Semi Modular?
It is a really fun and diverse sounding app. Amazing LFO control and parameter control along with a gnarly UI
IVCS3 is amazing as well.
Love it for evolving and pulsing industrial background and trans-formative aggressive type flow
Importing samples and tweaking is fab
Ivcs3 is great for experimenting with, takes a while to figure out. It is possible to get some more musical sounds from it too. The 1.5 update when it arrives will have 180 presets I did as a free IAP including 60 that are just playable keys/bass.
I am loving Analogkit right now too the interface is great
Love Analogkit. It is maybe the most open to modification to the modules, but can be used as a modular system without exposing the details of how a module works, a regular modular synth environment of oscillators, envelopes, LFO's, and effects. Being able to download other people's modules they've shared, from within the app means you don't have to build everything.
One could just use it as a modular keyboard, but recently I've been getting into building guitar effects in it, and making demos for teaching people the basics on analog synthesis, because it has some good visual tools for showing what is going on with the sound.
Highly recommended for those that like plugging stuff in unusual ways. Like in Reason, when you flip the rack around and mess with the cables, but even more so. Of the modular apps I have, I like this one because the UI is great for fluid work, and twiddling the knobs.
Not a full modular, but I really like Thor as well, digging into the mod matrix page makes it almost a modular system. The oscillator choices (FM, wave table, phase distortion, as well as subtractive) give it a wide palette of sounds.
I think SunVox fits really nicely with the music you make, and from the way you talk about it is a nice match to your musical ethos.
Where's your SOTM by the way? I look forward to hearing your stuff, and makes me want to experiment with the app, even though I know I'd be stamping on the iPad after 5 minutes
Thanks @monzo, it's reassuring to have someone who 'gets' the stuff I put out beyond the general helpfulness and majorly civil nature of this forum. I seem to have a lot of other priorities fighting for my attention lately so I will probably sneak in a submission at my traditional 11th hour, maybe even later. I have a good candidate nearly ready but want to spend a bit more time with it.
As far as SunVox goes I think it's more different than difficult. It is a lot less mathsy than other similar synth apps I have used. There are some good videos by a guy calling himself Solar Lune on YouTube but I don't think anyone has done a really solid foundations video for it yet. If I could work out the right gear and circumstances to make a half decent recording I would be tempted to have a go because I do think there is a lot of fun to be had with SunVox.
"NightRadio" himself, the dev, has a lot of video too but I have to slow it way down, it's not narrated, and the guy is wicked fast in his own app
I hear ya @Littlewoodge...here's a sample for the uninitiated, but there are so many others..
That's what I'm talking about. A video like that may look impressive but it has little use as a tutorial.
I like iMS-20 even though I don't use it as much as I should....it qualifies as modular?
Zmors synth is somewhat modular, you don't see the wires
I think modular is a fairly loose, organic description. If you have a means to rearrange the signal path and the order of sound sources, modulators, effects, etc.. then it is modular in my book, even if certain parts of the synth are fixed.
You can do a lot with the modular in Caustic.
Actually you can.
That is actually a really good synth.
The way I’d always defined a true modular is that of a synthesiser comprised of separate interchangeable modules of generators or modifiers that have inputs, outputs and controls. In this purist sense, nothing is connected to anything else. You have to do that each time, somehow (typically with patch cords, but a pin matrix is an equivalent means). If you don’t connect anything up at all, nothing happens.
The synths I grew up with were like that — the Roland System 700, and the later System 100m. However, the intermediate System 100 (not ‘m’) wasn’t truly a modular. Yes, it had notional separating lines drawn on the panel between ‘modules’, and it had patch jacks, but if you didn’t do any patching, you still always got a sound. This is because it had normalised routing or normalised patching, built in. The patch jacks were pre-connected in the “normal” way (i.e., VCOs and Noise Gen into Mixer into VCF into VCA then output; LFOs and Envelope Generators into VCOs, VCFs, and an ADSR Envelope Generator permanently into VCA). Most people would have patched it this way to start with anyway, so it saved time to pre-patch it at the design stage of manufacture with such a normalised patching behind the panel. Plugging something else into the jack that had a normalised connection simply broke that connection and allowed your jack signal in instead.
I wouldn’t really class my Arp 2600 as a modular. A lot of people would, true, but it’s not really one. I can’t decide to have four VCOs one day without a lot of bother (or more likely, simply deciding instead to use my Mono/Poly, which does have four VCOs (with cross-modulation!) (yeah!)). I can’t easily make a new synth with an Arp 2600 — it’s designed with the modules it has and although I can break the normalised routing, I can’t really route literally anything to anything (even if it makes no sense at all) like you can with a VCS3 (also featuring non-changeable modules).
Having said that, although I’ve been a big modular fan in the past, and you’d expect that I’ve got a lot of iPad modulars and spend all my time there, I don’t. I’ve got Zmors Modular, but I can’t actually read a lot of it, the patch cords and graphics are hardly visible, so I’ve really not used it a lot other than prod the demos about a bit. I like iVCS3 a lot though, and it’s quite a capable thing, but has limitations (sample and hold, please, I’d swap the stupid spring reverb for an S+H any day) (in fact, with a modular, I’d like about eight sample and holds, each sampling from a separate VCO, and each gated from a down-divided LFO clock pulse, and wahey! you’ve got yourself the guts of Different Drummer) (or if you only use half of the above, Oscilab).
What I seem to gravitate toward these days is some of the more contemporary synthesis that’s going on these days, which is actually streets ahead of the additive and subtractive synthesis most commonly implemented in the old modular days (although yes you should be able to do pretty much anything with anything, nevertheless there’s usability biases in play by the design of the tool). On the iPad there’s some very good apps that allow experimental FM work, and also granular work, and crossovers of those types of synthesis, and those interest me especially. I mean, a lot. To the point that it’s far more interesting to noodle in new synthesis modes than it is to even lay down a couple of consecutive notes that might develop toward a tune. So, surprisingly (to me) I’ve found myself ignoring modular synths almost entirely.
And then I finally got to the last sentence and it all made even THAT MUCH MORE SENSE.............................
Interesting thoughts Ian. I don't really mind whose definition of Modular we use. I feel both of ours occupy similar territory.
I see your point about newer synthesis methods vs modular emulations of analog synthesis. However, at least a couple of the modular-like apps, I have played with, have allowed me to play with granular synthesis and various FM techniques. Sure, the dedicated apps might make this a lot easier but at the expense of some flexibility. It's good to have choice.
Saying that, my interest was peaked by your description of Stria, earlier in the week. So thanks for that description because I forgot to mention it at the time.
I also agree with @u0421793.
Those modular synth apps are very interesting. But in the studio I'd rather do other things with an iPad. Controlling hardware, feed signals to an oscillator app, send triggers, values, and notes to a MIDI-CV interface, or simply use the iPad as a modular effect device. And program softsynths with Lemur.
But that's the situation in a studio. On the train, in a park, apps like iVCS3, Audulus, etc. can be great fun. Sometimes I get new ideas from those sessions. Often it is some kind of challenge; I try to create a full track with a couple of apps and Auria/Audiobus. I never get it finished when the train arrives at the final station, but it was a good experience. These tracks or projects get deleted one day, they never make it to be produced in the studio. But that doesn't matter.
coming back to the question if one regularly uses and enjoys modular synth apps: no I don't. I enjoy them sometimes to kill time, and I use them sometimes for fixed applications like filters (Audulus VC-330) and effects (Audulus tremolo).