Some wild responses here. Obviously the law should be considered here, considering it is a matter of law when there's a conflict. Something being lost, that sucking, but the retailer fixing the issue doesn't count as a conflict.

In the US it is quite clear. Sellers ship, sellers insure (even if they ask you to pay for it), sellers are the ones who have to file lost package claims, etc. It's on them. The one case it becomes the buyer's responsbility is if the buyer specifically waives a signature delivery. For example, Perfect Circuit requires a signature by default, but you can select the option to have your package just dropped off.

Private sales are the wild west, though. Always confirm terms in writing. I'm sure you could civilly sue someone, but you'd have to have been screwed out of quite the expense for it to be worth it to hire a lawyer.


Sort of annoying that there haven't been any new rack themes in forever. Would be really nice to have a wood case without huge shelf pieces between the rows, to mimic higher end studio furniture.


I would add, that if your not willing to spend at least 1 year with VCV rack, then you should not purchase anything in real life.

If you don't enjoy VCV rack, then you wont enjoy the real life version.

VCV rack is the way in.
-- Shadowsaun

For whatever it's worth, I hate working with VCV rack, but spend at least two to four hours a day on my modular. A lot of people gravitate to modular specifically because they're tiresd of computers.


5 seems to suffer from the appearance of creative tunnelvision. You can absolutely find your way through a tool, and should be encouraged to try as many as you can. The more useful lesson is to learn not to rely on it. You don't have to learn that lesson by pretending your relationship with your equipment isn't as big a factor as it is.

To note -- I really enjoyed the essay, and don't think the intention was to stifle anything, but instead to tell people exactly what I just wrote.. That's just the way I think it is being read into.


There's a difference between being blunt and belligerent, especially when the bluntness is being delivered along some very thin lines of opinion and some off the wall assumption. Good grief. I do not miss those personality types from my days as an engineer.

VCV rack is a good choice for starting off in modular because it's A. Free-ish, and B. Nothing ever works or interacts quite the way you're going to guess that it will. This is why people also say to start small. It's also a good idea to consider starting with some basic building blocks, because it will really help your ability to understand what's going on under the hood to have experience creating some more complex functions from those simple parts. A lot of people I know go out and buy specialized modules every time they have a problem they want to solve, rather than figuring out how to solve it with what's in front of them. Labels and panels lie! All modules do the same thing, move electricity, just in different ways. It's essential to prioritize this kind of knowledge. Down the road it will blow your mind the kinds of unexpected things you can do off-label.

I think the system you designed is primarily weak on utilities, which is not an uncommon sight. That shit may seem boring at first, but it won't later. Attenuation, inversion, offsets, CV / audio mixers, etc. are crazy powerful tools. Utilities are the bread and butter of modular. Having a goal in mind is great because it means you're in problem solving mode. Ducking important? Cool, you found a solution. When you start piecing this thing together, just remain fluid about what goes in and out of the case. Expect to buy and sell. Thankfully eurorack gear holds a lot of its value on the used market. And lord, who gives a rat's ass what you're doing in 2040? Hell, you could be dead. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, just dig in and see where it goes. Certain kinds of gear are theoretically better for certain applications, but the beauty of modular is just that -- its modular. You can tweak all sorts of modular gear to do all sorts of different kinds of things. Both you as a musician, and your machine as your toolbox, are going to change and evolve. You can't really predict where that might go, so sweating something like that is likely going to be counterproductive.

I'd consider a couple of things with where you're at:

  1. How you want to pit HP against performance, and even ethics. Case in point, the MI modules. There are much smaller third party versions. Cramped as hell though, and you might not be okay with those purchases depending on how you feel about the way the open source is being used.

  2. Lean more towards your melodic / drone elements, or more towards your percussion at first. There's nothing that says a system can't be a hodgepodge that does it all amorphously, but it looks to me like you want some dedicated gear. If I had X dollars, I'd try to use it to maximize what I can do in just one of those areas at a time, to make it easier to design and explore.

  3. Spend more up front on a larger case, unless you're buying into a case system that's expandable (such as the Mantis stuff, which are easily joined). What it looks like you want to do is going to take more space than you're giving yourself sooner or later. It'll save you money in the long run vs. ending up like a lot of people juggling ten small cases.

  4. It might be more helpful to start another thread, only from the angle of "Here are the modules I'm interested in, here is what I want to do... what's the most minimal version of this I can make to get started?" I also recommend doing so over on Modwiggler, because this place seems more prone to unhelpful narratives.

  5. Don't overthink it. :) ...talking about gear is super fun, but dialog and actuality are very different. Just pull a few triggers and see what happens.

Hope some of that helps! Good luck on your journey.


Really love your system design. I can tell you put an incredible amount of thought into it, and I'm just scratching the surface.

That said, good luck with that complete thing. :D


Bought a Doepfer Fixed Filter Bank from @fredeke and it arrived quickly (as quickly as overseas allows) and in great shape. Also bought a Doepfer Matrix Mixer from @harvestman a while back (before I realized I should post here) and that was a great transaction as well.

Excellent experiences!


What's bizarre is that I've watched it display properly, then not, then properly, then not again for a couple of days now. Tried emailing ModularGrid but no response yet. I mean, it's no big deal, just a little irritating.


Okay nevermind. Someone went in and updated the Audio Mixer's info, and now the cropping is worse again. Tried reverting to the working version and updating the info, but no luck. Can't do the "remove and start over" trick because it is now not just in my rack.


After a lot of trial and error I realized the one that was really far off just needed to be removed and added again from scratch. Seems like graphics are cached server-side in some way that went funky.

Both are still cropping tightly on the top and bottom, though.


I'm assuming this has been answered before, but I'm unable to locate any helpful information.

Just added my first two modules -- new Audio Mixer and Output (Eurorack) from Noise Reap. Both of the module graphics show up just fine when you're looking at the info, but in the rack output gets snipped a little on the top and bottom, and Audio Mixer gets really badly cropped.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'd like to know! Also, if anyone wants to jump in and fix whatever I did, that's cool too.

Thanks!