Recently inspired by the utter failure of traditional social media as a place to share things, and with my general dislike of Discord from a UI and UX POV, I’m somewhat inspired to start talking about the random shit that interests me on this blog instead of having it be purely technicall-yfocused. To that end, I thought I would start simple by talking about my current hardware music setup. This current setup is what I will be using to perform live for the first time in a decade in February this year.
The Thinking Behind It
I played live with a laptop and various controllers for a long time, but when my job became based in tech - and I started working from home for 80% of my work week, the thought of closing my work laptop and opening my personal laptop to make music wasn’t very appealing. I wanted to change my setup so that it focused solely on hardware without a laptop in the mix. I began experimenting with Eurorack modular and other hardware devices and found that what I valued is the immediacy of “one knob per function” as much as possible. I don’t want to menu dive - I want to know exactly what happens when I turn a knob. That has led me where I am today - an Elektron Octatrack as my main “brain” and looper, and the Eurorack modular system as my playable sound source.
The Octatrack Setup Real Quick
The Octatrack (OT) functions first and foremost as my clock source and sequence run/reset control (i.e. it starts the clock on the modular but doesn’t directly sequence anything on it). The modular system sends its main output into the Oktatracks A/B inputs. The tracks on the OT are as follows:
- Kick Drum
- Modular Live Feed
- HiHat
- Ambient Bed
- Percy Rhythm
- Percy Rhythm
- Modular Looping feed
- Master
Track 2 and 7 are important, I have it configured such that arming track 7 records a quantized 4 bar loop of the modular, and I can swap over to that using the crossfader. That allows me to record live knob twiddling on the go, reconfigure the modular on the go, or mix a loop and modified live feed into one another. This is 1000% stolen from Blawan and Surgeon’s live setup, but it’s a great idea.
The Modular System
I use the Intellijel 7U 84HP case - it’s the right balance for me in being constrained enough that I don’t just continually add new things, and need to be thoughtful about what I want the system to do. Here’s the layout from ModularGrid:
Note: ModularGrid does some fairly heavy CDN caching, so this may not be up to date with my current setup, picture below
The bottom left is my sequence generation area. The main pitch CV generator is the Turing Machine, which is quantized by the Intellijel Scales. The Mimetic Digitalis is mostly used for modulation style sequencing. Gates come from a combination of the pulse output of the Turing Machine, and the Trig output of the Scales.
The primary voices are:
- Mutable Instruments Plaits
- Doepfer A-111-6
- Noise Engineering Tymp Legio (mostly just for hi hats)
The remaining modules are mostly effects and utility:
- Noise Engineering Electus Version - this is mostly for gnarly distorted reverb on the main Doepfer voice.
- Intellijel Sealegs - delay. What else.
- Molten Modular Motion MTR - this is my “send” mixer, which feeds whatever signal I want into the Sealegs.
- Intellijel Mixup x 2 - my mixing section. These are jumped together, and then the sum is jumped to the case 1/4” output.
I love this setup for improvised techno. It’s hands-on, its immediate, and it’s fun to play.
Below is a short recording of a jam I did that gives an idea of what I am doing with it.