An analog modular synthesizer was ever me dream, last week I fulfilled this dream of mine, and ordered the pocket operator modular 400 from the swedish company teenage engineering. Like furniture from the other popular swedish company you first have to build it yourself, before making any sound with it. This took me around 3 to 4 hours. But it was worth it.
Here are some patch ideas. In the first example we simply mix the outputs of all 3 oscillators together and control the sine oscillator with the triangle output of the LFO and the pulse width of the square oscillator with the LFO square.
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mixer out → speaker right
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sine out → mixer 3
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saw out → mixer 2
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square out → mixer 1
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sine out → saw fm
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LFO triangle → sine control
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LFO square → square pwm
(I apologise for the bad video quality and bad sound quality, the setup will be improved.) The nice thing about modular synthesizer ist that they break the traditional signal path of voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), voltage controlled filter (VCF) and voltage controlled amplifier (VCA), and allow for all the creativity to culminate in experimental setups.
With the random module we can sample & hold a signal from the input. Its companionship is the noise module. We feed the saw output to the input of the rand module.
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sine output → speaker right
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envelope output → sine key
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LFO square → envelope trig
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LFO square → sine fm
We can expand the setup by using the sequencer and utilize the filter. Because the nice thing about modular synthesizers is, that the filter can be used not only in signal paths but also in control paths ;-) .
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filter output → sine control
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sequencer output → filter input