Please, forgive my ignorance. I see the patterns in some of these videos are quite short - is there a lot of modulation going on in VCV Rack to keep it flowing? Im extremely unfamiliar with modular, interested but scared of the rabbit hole lol.
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Hi! Great question, I don’t do “overwhelming” lots of modulation really. Sometimes on the melody I introduce some randomness to get it floating. These are pretty quick 30 min sketches. I should try to expand and modulate more!
Hey VCV is free, so pretty cheap rabbit hole, unless you fall to deep and go hardware that is… 
I thought VCV Rack was a paid thing to use as a VST? I just worried about spending tons of cash on the paid modules too. It does sound beautiful and im fairly sure im going to have a look soon.
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you’re right, the VST is paid. however you can route via bridge I think… ? 
There’s also Cardinal (and if you’re insane and don’t mind the crashing, PlugData)!
I actually do feel inspired by your pieces so maybe I’ll have to do some Renoise / modular experiments later today myself 
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It’s not renoise or VCV (rather Voltage Modular), but I finally got my dream setup to work. This is only a test run, lol. Will have to do more with Renoise just to make it theme-appropriate
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super cool!!!
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Here’s a DAWless version. The audio started skipping once I started recording because all of my setups are potatoes, but I’m still interested in piping everything out through Renoise (and then maybe separate VM instances?).
I’m not sure how flexible Renoise is with incoming MIDI signals like this, but that could be a fun deep-dive
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Very nice! 
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Still needs renoise, but continuing onward in the direction inspired by this thread. Seems like a cool way to live jam, it’s kind of amazing how many free tools like this exist everywhere when you’re tuned into them
Finally, a proper addition (featuring Redux).
Basically I built an automated hit extractor powered by Redux – it’ll cycle through all the hits and record them one by one without any additional user input. This is really handy when you’re sampling analog gear (that’s what I used it for) or something that you want rapid, precise resampling with.
Some of the modules used are mine, but I also had to create a little ‘helper’ module for the voltage-to-semitone converter because it took up less space than multiplexing through all the values needed. Probably because I plan on using this setup a lot, lol
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This one just helps me bang out drum loops – my giant macro modules (they stick out like a sore thumb) just select the note from Redux (which is slicing all of the kicks and snares respectively in each VST host) so that you can bash out quick drum loops on the drum sequencer. You can change the hits on the fly like this without having to even open up the Redux UI, so that means faster loop generation!
Oh yeah, and that gray counter helps loop 32 steps and stop recording, so the whole recording and saving to disk stuff is just automated. All you have to do is pencil in some notes, hit play on my weird little playhead (far left) and it’ll record 32 steps, or two total sequences of the loop so you can import it into Renoise.
I wish I could share rigs like these with others, but unfortunately it’s all a mixture of paid (from other developers) and unpublished modules I’ve personally made that can only be transferred if I get a dev license on their platform. Maybe I’ll have to start developing modules for VCV Rack so I can just give those away, but VCV is so damn janky. Cardinal is slightly better, though, so I wonder if that’s doable.
[Edited so I wasn’t posting 3 consecutive times]
You can never have too many attenuated macros. When you really need to FSU, that is.
Originally I made these because I thought Patcher (yeah, what did I expect) would respond to a few CV ins, but apparently it only knows what a CV out is. Maybe I’ll find a way to repurpose these for Renoise
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If you don’t like Cardinal, you can also do a simple connection using any virtual MIDI driver.
I made a tutorial some time ago, before the release of VCV 2.0 (back then, there was no VST version).
The main downside is that you’ll need a third way to record the audio from both VCV and Renoise. You can use VMBanana, BlueCat Connect, Rolling Sampler, stereo mix through Reaper, etc… Many ways to approach it. If you have an audio interface with different outputs/inputs, you can also route VCV through one output and feed it back into input 3/4 and grab it in a Renoise channel using the #Line Input device.
In this test patch I’m using both Renoise and VCV as sound sources. The first one for the sampler (drum hits), which will trigger VCV modules (the melodic parts). The melody is a simple Sample & Hold from Turing Machine and some modulation from Permutation to cycle between different oscillators everytime the drum hits:
BTW here’s an older post with more info regarding how to record the audio if you don’t have an audio interface:
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You could theoretically use something like Virtual Audio Cable to at least record from one to the other. Or if you’re already using a MIDI loopback, just being able to record and play back the MIDI recording itself is sometimes good enough (depending on the project and uses, of course)
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Yes, in the post I linked I also point that 
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Recorded another weird one that I might upload if I deem it interesting enough with some heavy usage of Redux in a similar patch / cab setting. Or, maybe I’ll just do another take tonight with a few Redux instances because ratcheting the fuck out of chopped breaks is awesome
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Very cool mate, like it a lot.
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Redux actually is a lot of fun to trigger like this, with the random gates selecting different VST instances. I don’t know what the future implementation of Redux is going to exactly be like, but if it allows for black-boxing MIDI (input and output in real time) that’s going to be one hell of a drug. Using Redux to control Redux instances would be absolutely hilarious.
(Technically if it only allows for interfacing with the DAW transport, that could still be cool. I wouldn’t mind punching in data that way and retrieving it later since there are many ways to get in between that process)
Falcon allows for that now, though, so maybe I should incorporate their MIDI scripts into a Redux-triggering clusterfuck of sorts. They’re stackable and everything
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Not Renoise (yet!), but I’m kind of interested in the MIDI Output device right about now. Multiple instances of Renoise seem to work in order to trigger separate channels of the same loopback device, but the hard part is syncing each Renoise instance with each other. If anyone has some ideas, this is going to be crazy
(Yes, I’m still thirsty for that potential Redux MIDI output function. That would be a serious gamechanger!)
OK, this one is proper Renoise material
Going ahead and updating my post as per the 3 consecutive posts rule.
I was trying to come up with a way to integrate either renoise or redux into this setup – Bitwig has awesome Note FX containers, so I kind of wonder what it would be like to send MIDI into Renoise from here or something. Or, maybe triggering drum machines loaded with Redux? I’ll find a way, if it’s the last thing I do!
Also I haven’t even tried to pipe modular into Renoise, which is a very valid option. I’m not sure how to be mindful of the step size and all of that stuff before it plots notes everywhere but something tells me there’s an emerging workflow in there if I hold it under the microscope for long enough.