Building my Eurorack Part 1

Hello and welcome back to Adam's Tech Page after a long hiatus.  Sorry its been so long.  This time I'm going to write about my latest project/obsession: Eurorack!

In case you don't know what Eurorack is, it is a standard of modular synth that is now the most popular. The height of the modules are a fixed amount of a little over 5 inches and is measured units.  Standard modules are 3u.  The width is measured in horizontal pitch or hp.  One hp is about .2".  The depth varies quite a bit depending on the design of the module itself.  Power for the modules is provided via ribbon cables that deliver +12v, -12v, and +5v.  Modules use (or don't use) any or all 3 voltages; again it depends on the module.

I started considering a Eurorack myself mostly because of all the crazy cool modules that were constantly being released.  There are a ton of module manufacturers too, so there's basically a module for anything you can think of.  My original plan was to buy a starter system, such as the Pittsburgh Modular Foundation 3.1+ (see below).  It gives you all the synth modules you need to have a subtractive synthesis system with a few extras.  The plus part of it is that it has a whole empty section to add more.  This is pretty pricey to get all at once so I started considering building it a bit at a time.  So that's what I did.

I decided to build my case since I like doing that sort of thing.  Like you'd expect, there are tons of really cool, useful, and bizarre cases out there.  So I started looking for images I liked to help my decisions.  At this point I found it very useful to save all of my research somewhere as I went.  I used Pinterest to do this, but there are a million other ways you can too.  Using Pinterest is helpful in the sense that you can access it from anywhere and give and get more ideas from other users.  Here is a link to my Eurorack board:
https://www.pinterest.com/fishman77/eurorack-ideas/

I ended up deciding to make a suitcase-style portable case with 9u of 104 hp each.  I wanted to have plenty of room to grow and not have to build another one right away.  I found deciding the depth of the case to be rather tricky.  It's possible to make very shallow cases, but that limits what you can put in it.  I ended up using 1x6 boards for the frame so the internal depth is around 5.5".

Deciding what power supply to use also had to be an early decision.  I ended up choosing the TipTop Audio Zeus Studio Bus (see below).  I wanted something that could handle most anything and had plenty of amperage.  The Zeus Studio Bus is powered by an external power supply through a module that has a power switch and input for the supply.  You can chain 3 Studio Buses off of one power supply.  So that's also what made me decide on 3 rows for sure.

There are quite a few places to get the Eurorack hardware and rails.  The rails are known as vector rails.  Some places let you decide how many hp you want and they will cut them to length.  I got mine at Thonk, a DIY synth store in the UK.  One thing I liked that they offered were aluminum mounting brackets to screw the vector rails into.  This made it much simpler to get the height of the pairs of rails exactly right.  The other choice to make with vector rails is deciding how to screw the modules onto the rails.  You can use sliding nuts or a threaded strip in the rails.  I went with the sliding nuts because it lets me put the modules exactly where I want them.  Also, I didn't like the idea of potentially stripping out a screw on the threaded strips.

So, vector rails, end brackets, sliding nuts, 2 lengths of screws, circuit board standoffs, and one of the Zeus power boards were all ordered before starting to build the case.  Check out the pictures below to see the progression of the case.

In my next post I'll discuss some of my Eurorack modules and how I came to choose them.  Thanks for reading!  Oh, here is the rack in it's current state:

The Solution's Live Rig

I'm going to start by talking about our live setup.  We haven't played a lot of gigs recently so we are trying to change things up a bit and get ready for a couple gigs we have scheduled.

There have been several incarnations of The Solution's live setup.  We used to use Cakewalk Sonar and then switched to Ableton Live, which we still use now.  Most of our sequencing used to be done on the Roland XP-50 and/or the computer triggering hardware rack modules.  We would bring that with us live and run the sequences live with the modules.  This setup required us to bring a lot of stuff with us, including a rack-mount computer and monitor.  There have been various lighting and video setups as well, as you can see in some of these photos.

More recently we have been trying to bring less equipment and have the ability to do small gigs with just iPads, etc.  We have programmed a few songs on the various Korg iOS apps and performed them live along with guitar and a keyboard controller.  Those are fun to do, but it's time to revamp our larger setup a bit and prep all the songs.

Steve and I analyzed what we want to do and not do in performances and what would make it the most fun for us and the audience.  In general, playing more parts live and less fuss with software were two of the main points that came up.  Here's what we came up with for each of our rigs:

Steve will be playing the Roland XP-50 for his keyboard.  We are just using internal sounds, mostly for piano, strings, etc.  He is also going to have his iPad running the Akai iMPC app.  We are loading in samples for him to play directly from the recordings.  So far these have included percussion samples, vocal samples, and synth parts.  The iMPC app is a really great sample player and makes it pretty easy to load in samples.  It also comes with a lot of great sounds.  One thing we discovered is that the files you load in have to be 44.1 kHz, not 48 like we usually deal with.

I will be playing my Roland A-70 controller for my keyboard.  I'll have 3 synths with me to trigger: a Moog Slim Phatty, Moog Minitaur, and the Korg Triton Rack.  The Phatty and Minitaur with be used for monophonic sounds and bass and the Triton rack with cover all the polyphonic sounds.  I've got it set up so each of them has their own MIDI output from the A-70 and each song will have its own patch on the A-70.  When I switch to the song, the synths changes to the correct patch as well.  I'll probably have Ableton Live switch my patches for me on the A-70.

That brings me to the computer.  We use my MacBook with Ableton Live 9 for the audio and MIDI playback.  We separate each recording into 8 tracks that run together to make the song.  These include  drums, percussion, bass, synth 1-3, and vocals 1 & 2.  When we mix down the songs to these 8 tracks, that is when we choose what part we are going to play live and make sure that part gets a track all on its own.  In the master Live file, we have those parts deactivated.  Having the parts separated make it so we can remix and add effects live to the individual parts.  We also sometimes loop sections to make them longer.

For Live control I use the Novation Launchpad, and Remote Zero SL controllers.  The Launchpad is for triggering clips and samples and the Remote Zero I have programmed for filters, effects, volumes, and lot of other fun things.  I can write an entire post on our controller programming someday giving all the details.  Between the synths, controllers, and singing that gives me plenty to do when we play.

Our audio is all run through our Presonus StudioLive 16.0.2, which also functions as the audio interface for the computer.  Each synth and vocal has its own channel and we use the mixer's effects for the vocals.  I'll possibly incorporate another effects processor for the Minitaur and Slim Phatty since they don't have internal effects, but we'll see.

So that's the rundown.  Other projects that are in progress include incorporating and programming lighting, which we haven't done in a while  I'm using the Enttec DMXIS controller which can be inserted as a VST plugin in Live.  The details of that is also for another post.

You may be wondering, why all the hardware synths and no soft synths?  We have used software synths live quite a bit.  Ableton Live does not make it easy to use their synths in the live setting because there is no good way to switch patches, and having a dozen plugins running in the background all the time isn't ideal.  Most recently I used the Liine Kapture app and the Kapture Max for Live plug in.  What those do is capture all the selected settings for your Live set and then recalls them with the press of a button or clip.  It worked fine, but it was quite cumbersome to set up and every time we wanted to change some settings, we would have to recapture the scene.  This is mostly why we are going the hardware route.  I also like playing hardware synths live a lot better.  The latency is there with software synths no matter how good the settings are.  I have nothing against software synths; we use them in our recordings all the time.

Hope you found this informative and as always, if you have questions or comments, just let me know.  Thanks for reading!

Welcome to the new Adam's Tech Page

Hello everyone!  I'm Adam from the electronic/pop band, The Solution.  On our old website I had a section that discussed all technicallties of our studio and live setup.  It seemed to be fairly popular based on the number of email questions I received about various equipment and such.  Well that website got replaced and the tech page was out of date, so I'm starting a new one.

I will use this space to write about music technology and our personal experience with it.  I hope you find it interesting and informative and if you have any questions, feel free to write.  Enjoy!
Find all our links on our official website: www.thesolutionmusic.com

For starters, here's a pic of our newly redone studio: