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<br>Over the last year I've fallen in love with making music again, and it's all thanks to modular synthesisers. But to understand why this is such a big step for me, you need to know just how surprising it is that I'm now "in to" electronic music. I've always been "into" music, but I used to be really into music. I played in lots of bands, tried my hand as a session musician, tried to start a record label, ran a music blog (for, like, years!). But in 2013 it all sort of fizzled out. In retrospect, I ran out of steam. On paper things were going in the right direction - I could legitimately call myself a session musician, I sold a couple of commercial compositions, and I even had a song of mine on the radio (that £6 royalty cheque was a Big Deal, let me tell you!), but I never really saw enough success in any area to persevere.<br><br><br><br>Except, maybe, the blog - that worked and was fun. Making that blog was so fun, in fact, that 12 years later I now have a pretty decent career as a frontend engineer making things for the web. But the "music" aspect soon fell by the wayside. I shuttered the blog in 2013 I never looked back, focusing instead on frontend engineering. For a long time I was more interested in writing code than writing music. A couple of my projects touched on music but the focus was always on the technology, never on actually creating music. The Web Audio API featured heavily in my CodePen tinkering and I built a whole conference talk around my experiments recreating a guitarists' delay pedal in JavaScript. But at no point was I making music. Not even in private or just for fun. If I remembered, I'd run a few drills on the guitar to maintain my muscle memory but I wasn't ever composing or creating anything new.<br><br><br><br>This story hinges on a single moment: I saw something and was instantly hooked. But the groundwork for that one incident was laid over a long,  [https://wiki.mubk.top/index.php?title=User:TeresaMansom Titan Rise Supplement] long time. How did I get into electronica? It's a big leap for an ex-musician who always focused on acoustic instruments (heck, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the evolution of English folk music, and my post-grad thesis was an extremely contrived deep-dive into the "album" as a medium). But there were two things that lit the spark of interest that would ignite into a full-blown obsession with modular synths: GAS and the Web Audio API. GAS - a.k.a. Gear Acquisition Syndrome. As in, "oh boy, those new Strymon guitar pedals have triggered my GAS. RIP my bank account". Guitar pedals are a fantastic introduction into the world of modular synths: small units that do one thing to an audio signal. It already sounds very "modular", am I right?<br><br><br><br>And I've always loved guitar pedals. In fact, my GAS covers all guitar-related gear. Microphones, audio interfaces, cables, pedals, the guitars themselves. I'm not going to lie; I get just as much (if not more!) pleasure from owning all these nice shiny things than I do from actually using them. The second factor that paved the way for an interest in modular was the Web Audio API. A side effect of playing around with using JavaScript to create and manipulate audio was that (almost by a process of osmosis) I was exposed to concepts and terms that originated in the world of hardware synthesisers. VCAs and VCOs became part of my lexicon, along with more familiar concepts like filtering and mixing. Bit by bit, without even being aware of it at the time,  [https://www.tcs.ch/de/der-tcs/sektionen/bern/content/kurse-fahrtrainings/gutschein.php?sp=https://worldaid.eu.org/discussion/profile.php?id=1089193 Titan Rise Supplement] I was learning how to synthesise sound. So what was that single moment that opened my eyes to the world of modular synths? Quite simply, it was a YouTube video.<br><br><br><br>I've kept a weather eye on Andrew Huang's musical adventures for a while, but I stumbled on his Modular Synthesis Explained video while looking for something cool to include in my newsletter. Specifically, the shot of his mega system at work at 15:30 mins touched something deep inside me. I didn't know what it was, or what it was doing, or how it worked, but I knew I wanted one for myself. Andrew has made lots of videos about his eurorack system over the years (it's fascinating to see the system grow over time) and he's made some fantastic "explainer" videos. YouTube, it turns out, is a great place to ramp up your GAS to extreme levels. Why has modular made me fall back in love with making music? I'm about a year into my modular journey at this point. It was twelve-ish months ago that I first learned what a modular synth was, and another few months of research and obsessive YouTube bingeing before I bit the bullet and bought my first modules.<br>