If you’re looking for an exhaustive guide to building a modular system from scratch with deep comparisons of all the different module options, this isn’t it. But I can walk you through what I put in my rack and why. Hopefully, that will positively influence your journey into control voltage madness.

Here’s how I approached building my system and the elements I recommend starting with:

A powered case.
A melodic sound source.
A percussive sound source.
An attenuator.
A sequencer.
A multi-effect.
A harmony sound source.

This approach isn’t right for everyone, but it fit my needs for making electronic music and sound designing.

A powered case

You could just acquire a basic skiff from Amazon, but I found them to be poorly built out of particle board covered in black vinyl. So I bought a rail kit and commissioned a custom wood case from my brother Jeff who does woodwork for a living in Nashville. He made a piece befitting a bespoke instrument.

I powered the case with a 4MS Row Power 30.

A melodic sound source

I was turned on to the Pittsburgh Modular Lifeforms SV-1 by Nick Batt from sonicstate. He coaxed some incredible arpeggios and drones out of it, which satisfied my curiosity about its melodic capabilities. But in addition to 2 oscillators with many waveform options, it also has a mixer, filter, envelope generator, and other useful things like LFOs, and signal multipliers.

Noir Et Blanc Vie also had a great video comparing the merits of the Moog Mother 32 against the Lifeforms SV-1 as a starting point for Eurorack modular.

A percussive sound source

After using the Lifeforms for a while, I struggled getting easy percussion sounds out of it. As strong as it was at producing and modulating melodies, I needed a box dedicated to rhythms. Luckily, I stumbled on Andrew Huang and his video about creating random samples with Plonk. Intellijel designed this thing to be a one-stop shop for complex rhythmic sounds that can morph into one another with each trigger received.

An attenuator

To call Maths just an attenuator would be ridiculous. It does attenuate up to 4 channels of audio or 2 channels of control voltage, but that’s not even close to all it does. loopop did an amazing video on 22 different uses for Maths from clock dividing, to slewing, and sidechaining. Maths is quite literally the Swiss Army Knife module for any Eurorack system.

A sequencer

Some people prefer to get an in-rack sequencer for sending notes and gates to their various modules. I chose to get a stand-alone sequencer for a few reasons:

Pattern recall. Most in-rack sequencers don’t have a way to store massive amounts of sequences and recall them quickly for live performance applications.
Sampling. Digitakt merely doubles as an 8-channel MIDI sequencer. Its main job is sampling and it does an incredible job consuming sounds from the modular system so you can re-use them endlessly to create new patterns while you repurpose the rest of the system for another patch.

Cuckoo did a mega tutorial on the Digitakt and it’s a great way to assess its capabilities and see if it’s right for you.

A multi-effect

The best way to get more out of an amazing patch is to add space. The Empress Zoia not only does amazing delays and reverbs, but it also sends and receives MIDI and CV information, acting as a living extension of your system. It also has its own oscillators, LFOs, filters, ADSRs, and VCAs that can take external clock inputs too! The Zoia’s guitar pedal format also allows for manipulation of any effects you add with three programmable momentary or latching foot switches.

If you want be blown away, check out Fireghosting’s claymation tutorials on it.

A harmony sound source

Once your system grows and you’re looking to expand, a great place to explore is sound sources capable of producing harmonies to your melodic sound source but with functionality that allows you to achieve vastly different timbres. For me, that was the Make Noise 0-Coast. Where my Lifeforms mostly operated in the East Coast school of subtractive synthesis, 0-Coast has more of a West Coast wave-shaping bent.

It also has the rise and fall slewing of the Maths, which is great to have more of in my system. mylarmelodies produced a crazy awesome video showing some the 0-Coast’s sounds that I highly recommend.

There is no conclusion

The joke in many modular gear forums is that you’re never “done” building a Eurorack system. You’ve only finished the latest row. After the 7 steps I mentioned, you can never have a shortage of attenuation and modulation. That’s likely where I’ll look to for my new module purchase. I’ll keep editing this post as my system grows, because I have no idea where this modular portal will take me in the future. I hope your developing systems will benefit from what I’ve shared here. Happy bleep-blooping!

How do you start a modular synth?