Ooh, I like This Modular Rack...

[imrae]

I suspect people’s reaction is as much about their emotional attachment to Make Noise and the gear they love (pride of ownership and all that) as much as anything else.

I don't have any Make Noise gear and I'm still disgusted.

Personally, I think the eurorack world needs (quite) a bit of democratisation. If you see that Behringer is putting forward a price that is about 30% percent of what Make Noise asks for it, then i m pretty certain that Make Noise has cashed in pretty well on this module.
And modules like the Morphagene going for 570 euro? You can get a full MS-20 mini synth for that kind of money. So yeah, eurorack prices need to rebalance in my opinion.

So design an affordable slew limiter and compete fairly. If the goal is to democratise modular synthesis there is no need to clone beloved designs this closely. There is plenty of room left for original module designs; my notebook has a dozen of them. It's just greed and a lack of respect for the creators who built this scene.

And before someone comes in with "it's legal, get used to it" - I don't care. It's bad behaviour, it merits criticism, and I will think less of those who support it.

[resynthesis]

Cadmium salts in paint have been considered relatively safe due to very low solubility and being "embedded" in a matrix. That's why you didn't die at school There is some concern that light can affect the paint and lead to modified cadmium salts leaching out.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Cadmium salts in paint have been considered relatively safe due to very low solubility and being "embedded" in a matrix. That's why you didn't die at school

tbh my paintings were so bad I probably deserved to. Good to know we weren’t at risk from that though every classroom was an asbestos time-bomb.

[Stefken]

So design an affordable slew limiter and compete fairly. If the goal is to democratise modular synthesis there is no need to clone beloved designs this closely. There is plenty of room left for original module designs; my notebook has a dozen of them. It's just greed and a lack of respect for the creators who built this scene.

Sure, i am talking about democratisation, not cloning. I m happy to support Doepfer, Ladik, Klavis, Behringer and other companies that ask prices which i consider to be fair, clone or no clone.

I don 't think Behringer is greedy. With hardware prices rising all the time, they are the one hardware company that i know off that lowered their prices. Apparently, shortages of parts is getting resolved and they are the one company that corrected their prices.

As far Make Noise, I think that they earn very nicely on their products and if Behringer (or any other company) provides some healthy competition to rebalance things, them i am all for it. The price that Behringer is going for proves that some companies are using very large profit margins (even if you consider that Behringer has a better production efficiency)

(P.s. : I just bought Make Noise Maths, so it s not that i am not willing to support them either but i m all for prices that i consider fair ).

[whyterabbyt]

(P.s. : I just bought Make Noise Maths, so it s not that i am not willing to support them either but i m all for prices that i consider fair ).

I dont think there's any doubt that Behringer can sell stuff so cheaply because of the scale of their business and turnover. They basically built their own town, dont forget, so even the most successful 'boutique' Eurorack manufacturers will never be able to leverage that sort of economics of scale.
And I do think that probably, the margins on most of those unique and/or innovative expensive modules are a lot slimmer than most people might think, given R&D and manufacturing costs.

So yeah, there's a fairly hefty price on some of that boutique stuff, the elevation of module pricing over and above the levels that things were at when Doepfer were about the only player in town wasnt a complete suprise to me, but I was kinda surprised it became the norm. Im not that comfortable paying more than a couple of hundred quid for a module (well, unless its a very all-singing all-dancing flexible programmable digital thing) and my baseline is still Doepfer.

Anyway, Behringer are always going to have the cost advantage on manufacturing. Simple fact, I think.

I guess what's less, erm 'tasteful' is that they're also cutting costs by not having to invest in R&D to the same scale, given their, erm reuse of existing designs. Its that image of 'the big guy,' who could ostensibly design and build anything they wanted to, 'ripping off' the 'little artisan guys' who slaved over a hot soldering iron to handcraft their designs, I guess.

Which I guess is perhaps ironic, given that some of that boutique stuff does the same, though; its not as if there arent dozens of different Moog- and MS20- filter clones out there. Is it 'okay' for a one-man business but 'not okay' for a massive company? Dunno. But its not necessarily the case that someone selling a $300 module is making more profit per module than a $100 clone of that module.

So yeah, it more or less seems like Behringer are now basically tracking Juno's 'top ten modules by popularity' instead of trying to innnovate, but then they never have particularly tried to innovate, have they?

On the gripping hand, though, I can remember way back, when I got my A-100 system, it basically was just Doepfer and a couple of others, and Eurorack was frequently snubbed as cheap or lower-end gear by fanboys of the bigger formats. One thing I actually remember being leveraged at Doepfer more than a couple of times was that they were a 'big company', unfairly 'ripping off' pre-existing designs...

Its all a bit weird. And, ha! ha! I still dont feel any need for a Maths or a Maths clone....

[Stefken]

the elevation of module pricing over and above the levels that things were at when Doepfer were about the only player in town wasnt a complete suprise to me, but I was kinda surprised it became the norm.

That is what i mean. There are just so many modules out there costing 300 and above euro, that i m thinking : they do it because they can and it has sort of become the norm.

It reminds me of when i asked for a support beam in my house. The guy said that was 3000 euro. I asked for details of working hours, material cost of the steel beam,.. and the sum of that was about half (1500 euro). His response was : but everybody charges 3000 euro for a support beam, that is the norm.

Yeah right , so you want me to pay double for those pretty eyes of yours (and they weren t even pretty ).

One thing I actually remember being leveraged at Doepfer more than a couple of times was that they were a 'big company', unfairly 'ripping off' pre-existing designs...

That s actually pretty funny.

P.s. : I don 't want to derail this thread into a money thing.
I m happy we get to have these modules but no one will argue that modular is cheap, so i appreciate a fair price.

[vurt]

Looks like it

There is also bad news. Model 292T will not be available in Europe and UK. This is due to the fact that products with vactrols are not allowed in these countries. More precisely, light-dependent resistors (LDRs), aka vactrols require the use of Cadmium Sulphide that are subsequently prohibited in the EU and UK.

Strange because Thomann and Signal Sounds are selling the Doepfers.

ah well, guess if i decide to build my buchla clone rack, ill have to see if one of our american friends will ship me one.
im happy to take the risk.

[elxsound]

While checking out Klavis offerings I noticed Caltrans for transposing.

Are there others better than this one? It’s a utility I haven’t considered but while trying to do more sequencing without relying on midi input, I was wondering how people get past the sequencing limits and transposing sequences.

I remember hearing that the 2nd v/oct input on XPO was supposed to be for transpositions but I haven’t tried it yet.

[WatchTheGuitar]

I got one of those, they appear on eBay and Reverb every now and then for £100 or so.

It’s very handy. The only downside is you need to get fairly constant tones for it to latch on and do its thing. So it’s tricky to use it to tune things like pluck or stab sources, but if an oscillator can poke out a sine or square to get the tuning sorted then once configured it will track anything that the oscillator later puts out.

So, it runs notes across octaves to get proper tuning ranges sorted and I found it great even for locking down external stuff like the Boog Model D. Also worth noting it can also provide portamento for synths that don’t offer it.

The other unit I noticed that offers easy octave transpose is the ALM Beast’s Chalkboard, but I don’t think it offers semitone transpose.

https://busycircuits.com/alm002/

As a general thing though if all you are interested in doing is transposing sequences then you could feed an existing v/oct cv into sonething like Maths, add offset voltage either static or fed from an attenuated LFO and pass the summed cv into a quantiser to keep it to a scale.

[Stefken]

I was wondering how people get past the sequencing limits and transposing sequences.

I was wondering about that too today. I was playing the softsynth Bazille and thinking to bring some patches to hardware. Transposition is a free lunch in Bazille, just build in.

Then i was like, how does transposition translate to cv?
I m guessing use channel 2 or 3 of Maths to add/subtract some voltage?

[WatchTheGuitar]

yes, just as I put above. In basic terms an octave up is an extra volt added.

A quantiser which can lock to a scale is super useful if you go down this route.

[ghettosynth]

I nearly picked up one of these, I decided to wait a bit. I like it, I question how much use I have for it.

[elxsound]

I got one of those, they appear on eBay and Reverb every now and then for £100 or so.

It’s very handy. The only downside is you need to get fairly constant tones for it to latch on and do its thing. So it’s tricky to use it to tune things like pluck or stab sources, but if an oscillator can poke out a sine or square to get the tuning sorted then once configured it will track anything that the oscillator later puts out.

So, it runs notes across octaves to get proper tuning ranges sorted and I found it great even for locking down external stuff like the Boog Model D. Also worth noting it can also provide portamento for synths that don’t offer it.

The other unit I noticed that offers easy octave transpose is the ALM Beast’s Chalkboard, but I don’t think it offers semitone transpose.

https://busycircuits.com/alm002/

As a general thing though if all you are interested in doing is transposing sequences then you could feed an existing v/oct cv into sonething like Maths, add offset voltage either static or fed from an attenuated LFO and pass the summed cv into a quantiser to keep it to a scale.

Interesting… I thought it would work by feeding it CV, similar to how a quantizer works.

I just started using the quantizer in Hector. I have no idea how it stacks up against actual quantizers, but it’s been fun using the touch screen to add/remove notes which is a nice effect, but unfortunately not CV controllable

I’ll try it on maths using the offset. I’m pretty sure I can pull this off consistently with a sequencer after adding more attenuverters (or can use the ones in Maths).

[foosnark]

I just use Shades for transposition. When a channel's knob is maxed it goes through at a 1:1 ratio.

[Constructed Identity]

going for self-contained:

It's got a sequencer, few drum modules, envelope generator, distorting compressor, an analog delay, and finally a mixer with pan and vol. faders.
The most costly is the sequencer and uses the most space but I want flexibility to use either Turing or sequencer for my Swarm.