I have a very wide question, from a beginner:
I'm crazy about the sound of MINIMOD VCO, and would rather buy 3 x VCO, Glide, VCF, VCA etc .. but it's also a lot of money .... so my question is:
Should I wait until I can afford to buy MINIMOD setup, or could I "settle" with an Intellijel Atlantis? ... or can not these 2 setup not be compared?
The latter...one is just a VCO, the other is a synth voice. Apples and oranges. However...
You might want to consider if a modular makes sense at all in your situation. As you noticed, a full build is a spendy thing, and given that you're just starting (by your own admission), I don't see the sense in piling up cash for a complex modular (or even a not-quite-so-complex modular) system when you're at a stage where you're still wrapping your head around synthesis techniques in general. My suggestion would be something prebuilt; if you like the sound of the Moog VCOs and so on, get a Grandmother when they start shipping. It's patchable, it has the ACTUAL Moog VCO circuit rather than a clone, and it can easily be integrated into a modular build later on. It's also $900, which includes the keyboard controller, case and power, etc etc...which, of course, are extra expenditures in modular.
Modulars are sexy things. Modulars are also very expensive, a huge swamp of pitfalls and traps for beginning synthesists that can easily be avoided by learning the basic architecture of a proper synth before ever considering modular. Yeah, yeah, Deadmaus has a few...BFD. Deadmaus also makes more money than the gross national product of some third-world countries and can afford to make critical errors in purchasing judgement as long as people keep buying his tracks. And owning one will not make you Deadmaus (thank god...given that I own a few myself).
So...my advice: stop. Study the 'classics' and see how and why they work. Get something that moves you toward this zone, but where you don't wind up spending thousands on something you could easily get lost in. Then, once you've sorted out where to go and how to get there, then look into modular synthesizers. Otherwise, your experience in this sort of thing...and potentially music in general...could turn out being not as cool as you'd expected.
Thanks for a friendly kick ind the music balls :-) YES, I'm a hopeless romantic who dreams of learning ALT about modular synthesizer, and my thought was that if I bought the best from the start, I had a goal to aim for :-) And yes, I'm going to get better into it all the stuff, and know it's expensive, but it's so sexy and I only turn on on modular without keys.
I think about your words and try not to spend all my children's savings. But I choose MINIMOD, because it looks nice with all the sexy buttons and fat noise coming out.
And again, thanks for taking the time to see it all in a helicopter perspective :-)
