It seems layed out more towards subtractive synth structures like the Nord leads.
Not at all! It may have a lot of the standard subtractive synth modules, but I’ve made patches that make sounds entirely without using the traditional oscillator or filter modules. It’s even possible to use a sequencer module as a very crude wavetable oscillator.
Even with a standard subtractive layout, I feel compelled to do something weird with it. One of my favourite things to do is route another oscillator to control the filter cutoff using high resonance; it can go from making crazy burbly sounds to sharp overtones. Also, if you make your own resonance by feeding the output of a filter back into its input, you can put things in the feedback path, like overdrive, phaser, wave wrapper etc… and get very weird/interesting results.
If creating a patch in real time in front of an audience is part of the performance itself (as I’ve often seen in hardware modular setups), then a full-sized Nord Modular with lots of knobs and/or a keyboard would be useful.
I wouldn’t go this far, as adding and removing modules causes a gap in the sound (and still can’t be done without the editor), but yeah the self-contained rack version is definitely more convenient…
This is very interesting albeit seems like the supporting software is quite archaic. I get the impression it would require too much programming? Also, dont you prefer using wires instead?
There’s no programming involved. It’s literally dragging virtual wires from module to module. Real physical modular is great, but sometimes I want to just keep adding oscillators, LFOs, having 20 different destinations from one output, etc. Also being able to save entire modular configurations to a patch on the machine is a definite benefit! As I’ve said earlier in this thread though, I probably will have a real modular setup at some point.
