If you're curious about modular synthesis, you couldn't do better than to download and install VCV Rack. All you need is a decent computer and some sort of audio output device. The software is free. Or mostly free; some of the collections of modules have a modest price tag, but you don't need any of them to dig into modular.
My VCV installation includes, at the moment, more than 2,900 modules. There's a fair amount of redundancy in that collection, and a few modules that are defective. That's the hazard with free software. Once in a while a developer can't be bothered to fix bugs. But you never know what a module will do until you pop it into the rack and give it a try. Happy surprises are often just around the corner. And with a couple of thousand modules to choose from, there's no end of happy surprises!
Even so, after an hour or two patching up something tasty in VCV, I find that I'm getting bored. This happens over and over. I wake up in the morning thinking, "Oh, boy! This will be fun!" And for an hour or two it's fun. But then I hit the wall. And that wall is what I want to talk about this morning.
When I listen to music tracks uploaded by other VCV users, or to my own tracks, the music is static. It never really goes anywhere. Call it post-minimalism if you want to put it in a musicological niche. There are almost always a few clever variations in the surface detail -- perhaps a 16-note sequence in which notes 5 and 11 change randomly while the other notes stay the same. The filter might open and close slowly while the notes play. The segments of the envelopes might get a bit longer or shorter. All of this serves to sustain the listener's interest. But there are very seldom any larger structural changes, other than perhaps the entrance of the kick drum after 16 bars.
During a long and checkered life as a musician, I've played classical music, both on the piano and in orchestras. I've played pop music on bass guitar in a band. I've improvised jazz solos over chord changes and transcribed recorded jazz piano solos as sheet music. I've read books on music theory. I've composed a lot of synthesizer music into a standard linear multitrack MIDI sequencer. In sum, I'm very familiar with the varieties of syntax found in the European/American musical tradition. To me, this syntax is the essence of music.
The music made with a modular synthesizer has no syntax. It's just sheets of beautiful sound waving in the breeze. You can be entranced by it, but you can't be engaged.
After an hour or two, I quit VCV Rack and go back to Reason or to FL Studio. With either of these programs (they're called DAWs, an acronym for digital audio workstation) I can compose music. I don't claim that my compositions are brilliant, but I do know how to use chord progressions, melodies, counterpoint, transitions, modulations to other tonal centers, and forms that have clear A, B, and C sections. Those elements are the essence of the musical syntax of the European/American tradition.
Technically, you can do the same thing in VCV Rack. But you wouldn't want to. It would be like building a ship in a bottle. You'd have to spend hours setting up basic structures and transitions that in a DAW can be created in a few seconds.
The generous way of looking at it is to say these are just two different ways of making music. But I can't help feeling that to be meaningful, music needs to have syntax. The parts have to relate to one another in ways that can be perceived, and that arise out of a known tradition. What's the modular synthesis equivalent of a V7-I progression? Is there one?
It's often said that music is a universal language, and that's an overstatement. Different musical traditions are not necessarily mutually comprehensible. If you don't believe me, listen to some gamelan music sometime. I love listening gamelan, but I don't claim to understand it, any more than I would understand the spoken languages of Bali. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure gamelan music has syntax.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I want to bang out a chord progression. I want to change the rhythm of the bass line in this one particular measure, and I don't want to have to spend fifteen minutes setting up logic gates and inserting extra sequencer modules in order to do it. I want to double-click on the bass part, erase a few notes, hit the Record button, play the new notes on the keyboard, and move on.
I suspect that a lot of the people who embrace modular synthesis don't have the background that I do. They have an impulse to make music, and that's a wonderful thing, but they're starting from scratch. I try not to be critical of their efforts. I try to appreciate what they've accomplished when they come up with a beautiful sound texture. Probably I should just be grateful that I've had the amazing diversity of musical experiences that I've had -- and grateful also for the wonderful software tools I have. FL Studio has lifetime free updates. I reviewed version 1 for Keyboard more than 20 years ago, and I've never had to pay a nickel for a new version. It's an amazing program. And if I ever need to, I can run VCV Rack as a plugin inside of FL Studio.
Remind me to write an appreciation of the marvels of music software sometime.
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