As I was leaving my acoustic-ecology group last night, a rushing sound caught my ear. Although I was concerned about missing the bus, I whipped out my iPhone to record the sound of water pouring out of a gutter into the alley below. I recorded a little over a minute and still caught my bus.
Moments earlier, I had been sharing how I'd been experimenting with running field recordings into a software version of the Mutable Instruments Eurorack module Rings. When I got home, I AirDropped the recording to my computer and set some quick levels in Reaper. Then I fired up VCV Rack and put together the patch above.
A sample player is playing a loop of the gutter splash. Both the left and right channels are fed into instances of the Rings clone. Then a quadrature LFO crossfades between the original field recording and the output from Rings.
This seemed like a really simple patch in VCV Rack, but it involves a lot of modules. I replicated the patch in ModularGrid, and list price for physical modules to make these sounds would cost nearly $1200. Although VCV Rack lacks the immediacy of a hardware synthesizer, it is a convenient way to try out ideas and experiment with modules.














