IK lets you build discounted bundles of the X pedals atm, might be a newsletter thing:
Works out to $920 for all four, or $230 a pedal. $280 for one, $460 for two, etc
If you can stomach downloading their installer, you can trial each of them for 7 days or something; I have X-Drive fully from the newsletter, too, though I have yet to use or download it lol…
We think we’re going to take the plunge into eurorack, but we want to DIY it so it ends up being more of a long term project than just buying a bunch of ready made modules.
We used to circuit bend stuff a whiles back, and while we’ll never be good at maths because dyscalculia, we don’t really need to understand the maths, just understand how various components go together in order to create the desired outcome.
Also our boy is an electronic engineer and if anythings too far outside our comprehension he can help us.
We feel like doing it this way will both keep the price down massively, and help with the overwhelming choice there is, hopefully DIYing will give us more insight into actually building the synth we want.
Yeah, it can definitely get ridiculously expensive, hence looking at DIY. Plus it’s kind of cool to build your own synth.
Pinging @canecreek as he does lots of diy modular.
Sounds great is an understatement. I’m super impressed by the sound quality. This is my first moog and if they all sound like this then I will have more. The noise floor/dynamic range blows away my other analog synths. It’s so loud and clean.
Anyways, still learning the synth, changing that first patch to tighten it up a bit. Got a lot more to try before I can talk about what kind of instrument it is. It has inspired 3 basslines so far, but I see a lot of people doing poly, ambient, sound design stuff with it too.
I’m building modules and also buying. When I’m not on the road touring I also work for a eurorack manufacturer. That said my system is pretty small at the moment, I’m in that phase of “what do i want this thing to be?”
Its partially a sequenced effects glitch machine, i have some sampler and drum voices and a complex osc based mono synth but if i re-patch it, it could be any number of things. In my composition primarily i’ll only write intentional sequences with the Complex OSC mono, the drum voices and sequenced effects are mainly for capturing happy accidents that i work into tracks “in the box”
Only thing I can really offer here is to be wary of Synthrotek; the owner has had a history of misogynystic and phobic comments. Whether this is still the case, I can’t say.
Some DIY videos from my bookmarks:
You can build a small pile of them for like $10 in parts. Which reminds me I need to get around to doing that 
How-to for passive attenuators, multiples, size adapter:
AE Modular from www.tangiblewaves.com isn’t DIY, or Eurorack, but it can be a lot less expensive, too, and is a pretty small format iirc.
And finally (lol… trying not to firehose you with information XD) there is also Paia’s Frac Rack DIY modules. Frac is… mostly euro-rack compatible aside from power supplies, and iirc there is a lot of DIY for the format, too.
Also relevant to ur interests:
Oh right. I hadn’t tried that X-Drive software because IK is cancer XD.
IK Software: login to your account
Me: tries all her passwords and fails. sighs greatly, knowing this is bullshit, and selects reset password
IK website: give us your email and fill in this captcha shit
Me: does it
IK website: reloads website with no kind of notification of success. Sends no email
Me: just deletes IK everything
Considering Amplitube 5 CS (the free version) takes up almost 3GB good riddance -_-
I’m also about to delete every plugin that asks me to f’ing lof in every time I load it for the first time, too.
The day hardware starts doing that is the day I stop buying new things. And considering amps exist that connect to your phone via bluetooth… 
Maschine+ asks for my NI login when performing a firmware update already… lol fuck. I take a pic of a QR code with my phone and it magicks it all away…
So ends my bitchy rant for the evening.
All I can say is after a decade of DIY module building the term “DIY saves money” isn’t true as DIY becomes more addictive than the eurorack addiction you already had, so you just end up with two addictions.
If right at the beginning you say I’m going to build 10 modules then I’m done then of course you’ll save money, but the truth is it’s an endless road.
I also got addicted to collecting components a side effect of DIY, what ever components I needed for a build I’d order double or treble for future builds.
That’s been on my radar since it came out, just not the time for modular in my life yet…
We’re going to trust in our absolute and total inibility to math to save us from this. Plus we don’t really want a big wall of synth, just something smaller.
I’ve built a lot of modular and pedals over the years. There’s varying degrees of DIY. Putting together prebuilt kits is certainly the easiest but most expensive (sometimes a huge savings, sometimes more expensive when you burn up a board or expensive part), all the way to etching your own boards and potentially designing your own layouts (which is what I do), which ends up considerably cheaper in money but not time in most cases, at least until you get a process down. Etching your own boards may sound daunting, but it’s actually easy and a huge cost saver - it’s like $20 in materials from Home Depot and Amazon to get started.
The cheapness of DIY will really come down to what you’re making. Economics of scale means that something with a ton of knobs/pots/other expensive bits can end up being just as expensive as off-the-shelf because large operations are getting them for pennies on the dollar and you’re paying full price. You also can save a good bit of money buying components in larger quantities, though it requires somewhere to store it and a plan on what all you want to stockpile.
At the very least you need a good multimeter and soldering iron (preferably variable temp). Complex projects and troubleshooting can really benefit from a bunch of equipment (bench power, oscilloscope, Variac/isolation transformer, etc) which can get pricey and take up a lot of room. At that point you’re crossing the valley into a separate hobby, like @canecreek says. Once you start doing SMD soldering and layouts, you’re good and truly fuckered 
If you don’t have a lot of experience with soldering components, I’d suggest starting with a simple DIY guitar pedal - cheaper, straightforward, smaller bill of materials and dead easy to troubleshoot, but still useful for any musician. If you’re decent with an iron and want to make something incredibly useful, build yourself a Eurorack power supply (or three) - they’re cheap, easy, and provide a basis for building other modules:
Yusynth has a great repository of DIY modules to check out if you don’t want to go with kits.
Our buoy friend is an electronic engineer, so 10000% we’ll get him to to anything to complex for us, he also liberates a lot of components from work because eurorack is based on an industrial standard.
It’s also highly probable we’ll build a few modules and get fed up. But we’d like to try at least, but even if we end up with a basic modular system and then buy commercial units it’s still worth it
I find it incredibly satisfying to use stuff I build myself. It’s a fun hobby that also has applications elsewhere in the home (I’ve repaired a couple of boards in the dishwasher and dryer lol).
At the very least, building a power supply or two would be worthwhile for anyone looking to get into it. That plus slapping together a case from plywood can save a ton of money and provide a cool playground to get into modular for not much cash.
Yeah, circuit bending used to be super satisfying
Something else to consider is a semi-modular synth if you want to dip your toe in. The Monostation already has a few CV I/O. I had an MS-20, Moog Mother 32 and A4 at one point and was playing with CV stuff and found out it didn’t bring enough joy to invest in Eurorack.
Maschine is getting an auto sampler in 2.15 \o/ F’ing finally, that’s the whole reason I have MPC Beats installed at all 
And finally it will be a VST3 plugin.
But autosampler has me excite. Apparently still a few weeks away. I honestly thought NI would save this for a paid Maschine 3 update or something.
