Springing for Actual Hardware
November 2024
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL. Sometimes even for a pessimist like me.
I had messed with software DAWs for eight years. I had spent a few years doodling with sound for free with VCV Rack. Could it be that the allusive magic I’d been searching for resided not in software, but in real hardware? “Noooooooooo!!” The Inner voice screamed. (Inner voice listened to, and then ignored.)
In 2018, after much trepidation, I bought my first hardware synthesizer, the Behringer Neutron. The Neutron is a “semi-modular” synthesizer. That means that it’s composed of a bunch of different “modules," each with a different function. And although it has lots of jacks into which you can plug cables to connect its various modules together in different ways, it also has a “prewired” signal path, so it can make sounds even if no cables are plugged into any of the jacks. But honestly, even prewired, it took me an hour or so to get any sound from it all until I figured out which specific knobs needed to be turned up. And then I had to repeat this discovery a few more times when I’d set the Neutron aside for a week and then forget which knobs I had turned up previously.
Next came a couple of guitar pedals from Digitech, the Obscura delay and the Polara reverb pedals. Those very much richened and enhanced the sounds the Neutron produced. A recording of a squealing pig passed through a lush reverb can sound like an angelic choir, or at least an angelic choir of pigs. Over time, other devices were added to the collection.
At this point, I had pretty much abandoned the traditional music approach and looked for things geared more towards drones, noise and experimentation. I tried to seek out relatively inexpensive devices and devices that gave you a lot of bang for the buck, but admittedly, “relatively inexpensive” is kind of an absurd term in the world of hardware synthesis. I also bought and then resold a few items, but what I retained included:
Our son, Thomas, also gave me a LostVolts theremin for Christmas one year.
In 2023, I put together a small Eurorack modular system, but I’ll talk about that in another article.
