Every "voice" needs its own set of CV and Gate signals. A modular oscillator will accept an incoming CV signal; an envelope will accept an incoming Gate signal.
Here's a very basic example that involves 3 modules; an oscillator, a VCA and an envelope.
You connect the CV from your controller to the CV of the oscillator, and the Gate from the controller to the Gate input on the envelope. You connect the audio output of the oscillator to the audio input of the VCA, and the VCA output to your mixer/speakers.
Now you have a very simple monophonic synthesizer. If you add a second oscillator module, you need yet another module - a mixer. Both outputs of the oscillator go into the mixer, the mixer output goes in the VCA, and the rest is still as described in the first paragraph.
This gives you a very simple two-oscillator synthesizer. It's still monophonic as you'd understand it from a traditional perspective. If you wanted to make it truly polyphonic, you basically need to duplicate that entire set of modules for as many times as you want to have voices. So if you have a Prophet 5, you need 5 x 2 oscillator modules, 5 x 1 filter modules, 5 x 2 envelope modules, 5 LFOs and a bunch of mixers and multiples. This gets expensive fast.
The trick is that the modular oscillator does not care where the CV comes from. You could say - "I want a monophonic 2-osc/voice synth", or you could say "I want 2 1-osc/voice synths" (and your limit would be in the number of VCAs and envelopes because the gate signal supplies the articulation). So the challenge is in "how can I orchestrate my music" - because it's more like composing for 5 instruments than composing for a 5-voice polyphonic synth.
Of course, nothing stops you from multitracking.
This is very helpful indeed. Agreed on the multitracking as well.
1. Yes and no. That is a tricky one. Yoozer pretty much explained it well, but there are exceptions/tricks/grey areas. But for the most part, yes, Monophonic, but with multiple voices happening (depending of course on how much you expand.)
2. Absolutely! I perform every month live with a bunch of modular guys and gals, and a lot of them use either their Minibrutes or Microbrutes to interact with their modular system!
Also, one of the best utilities out there that I highly recommend, is the Korg SQ-1 sequencer. It's only $99 new and you could use it to sequence your Minibrute, any MIDI synths, your modular stuff... I have two of them!
And MIDI is not out of the question... there are many MIDI to CV modules out there. When I worked for Synthrotek, they had a good simple MIDI/CV module that I tested and works really well. With it, you could sequence your modules from your DAW, or use a MIDI keyboard to control CV parameters on your module.
And with that, I will leave you with a couple of videos for inspiration... not my best work, but hopefully you'll be able to hear what all can be done with a fairly small setup (and as you'll see, I don't do "bleeps and bloops" nor do I do techno.)
I summary, after reading these answers I did some more digging on my own.
I've also looked a little more at Braids and Rings ... absolutely fantastic. I've also looked at some DIY instructions and so on in order to understand how Eurorack works. Of course from there, my questions have multiplied but I think that'd be more suited in a separate thread.
I liked your youtube videos, especially the cinematic one but they're all cool. This is definitely some stuff I'd like to get into!
I ended up travelling to the store. One thing I must say is that modular synth people seem very nice!
So I spent some 4 hours trying out what I had researched and discovering modules asking questions, etc. In the end, I bought Elements, a power source and a MIDI to CV module along with some rails and screws and cables.
Back home I assembled them and connected the Minibrute (pitch and gate)... My plan for now is to control some parameters through MIDI from my DAW.
Elements is just as expected and then some, especially that it can be very musical. Very happy.
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19th July 2016
