Hey thanks to both of you for the really thoughtful input! I tried to address common concerns up front (“how will this be sequenced”) etc, but even so all of this is super great.

NP

Some thoughts/responses:
- i was not aware of the Shallow Water, that pedal looks awesome! My thinking with the original setup was that the bass shouldn’t be sent through the same fix chain as the lead because delay and reverb on bass can be muddy and gross so having the lo fi junky as a later stage effect seemed to make sense. but i like this idea a lot
- however! the ADDAC pedal i/o is a really solid choice that i also wasn’t aware of and since it has two sends i could have multiple fix loops for different signals which is great
- i actually initially had Veils in here because i really liked the cascading aspect of it but also did recognize the amount of space it took.

at 12hp for a quad cascading vca - veils only works out at 3hp per vca - and given the cascading and amplification that most smaller vcas don't have - it's space well used

thanks for the great tips and reality checks around Pams and the rest. i love how flexible this all is but also it twists my brain up a bit trying to put it together. but in a good way, which is why its so much fun to think about.

that's why it's a good idea to start slow and grow slow - get a minimum viable synth - and then add gradually and naturallyfrom their - it may take you in a completely different direction (in terms of modules) than you thought - as you come to realise that a matrix mixer is more important than a 3rd delay, for example

Since I have the pedal board already I have been trying to resist adding fx to the rack itself, but I can see where it might still be worth it, particularly to be able to route fx sends in complex ways. maybe this can be accomplished with a couple mixer units and some sends. So it’s a good call out to be able to mix like crazy and focus on that ability to route signals. attenuators and rectifiers i am still learning about so I have some reading to do there!

one massive advantage of in rack effects is that you can modulate them - another is that you don't need to attenuate/amplify the signal to use them and as such are easier to incorporate into a mixing set up

yes lots of mixing is useful - not just for audio - where for shoegaze style music I would want to be (voltage control) mixing a lot of layers of effects - but also for control voltage (modulation and gates) too - newbies often forget about mixing entirely or only think about final stage audio mixing not sub mixing audio or any mixing of control voltages with or without voltage control

I'd be tempted to make a list of all the types of modules that you don't understand and then ask yourself what do you think they do before looking it up and once you have gone through that exercise go back and ask yourself what you would use it for note down any further questions you have about it, note them down - maybe the only way to answer some is to buy a module - a disting mk4 or ex may be a big help in this regard...

On the stereo front, I’m split on that. In terms of live performance most club PAs at the level I am at are mono anyway so stereo is a bit pointless. But for studio recording and of course headphone jamming it cant be beat.

I completely agree on this - but it is something to keep in mind

in terms of going bigger on the rack, i’ve looked seriously into both the intellijel 7u 104hp and the make noise 7u 104hp. people seem to not like the power supply on the latter but the bus looks like it could be really helpful for a project like this where lots of mixing and modulation is key.

seriously - I think the mantis has better power than either of those - definitely cleaner - I use mine for video which is much more fussy and see no unwanted noise artifacts in the signal

and the mantis is significantly cheaper - ok you loose the 1u row, but I've never been a fan, the functionality (that you actually need) can probably be had in 20-30hp or so for much less and the savings can be put towards the next case

if/when you need to take it out the decksaver lid and case are not that expensive to add

"some of the best base-level info to remember can be found in Jim's sigfile" @Lugia

Utility modules are the dull polish that makes the shiny modules actually shine!!!

sound sources < sound modifiers < modulation sources < utilities