I’m playing a bit of a thought experiment here. If I wanted a six voice Groovebox with swing that could do snappy percussion envelopes and have a ton of LFOs, which modules would you go with?
Disclaimer: I love the look of Pamela’s Pro Workout for either clocking and sequencing or crazy LFOs.
first thing i’d do is go find a used monomachine and buy it.
you will not emulate a monomachine in eurorack. you can do 6 monosynths in eurorack pretty easily though. you just need 6 of each - oscillator, filter, envelope, vca
make noise maths or function make really snappy shapes that can really thump or be smooth and delicious.
new quad lfo from five12 looks like a good choice for modulation but you can do modulation from anywhere and make it sort of be like an LFO with things like sample and hold or malekko voltage block etc.
you’ll need FM, wavetable, etc for oscillators… you can do lot’s of nice FM w/2 tri core oscillators or equivalent digital FM oscillators. get a wavefolder (random source serge wavemultiplier is the way to go)
tiptop Zdsp with relevant cards for reverb, delay etc… or some other FX unit that can do delays and reverb and weird stuff.
i know exactly what kind of modular i’d make if i got back into it but it’s not a monomachine emulator.
your sequencer will be a more difficult choice. probably a winter modular Eloquencer would be most comparable for tha ttype of sequencing. their plankton Zaps percussion module might be useful for that kind of sound as well.
i’ve been out of modular a while so i’m just riffing here. you’d have to see what’s current/available and all that to make choices that are reasonable or even possible.
You can’t perfectly encapsulate a monomachine, but you could come close with a few MI plaits or Behringer Brains. Especially with recent updates using dx7 algorithms for FM.
TBF, it might be cheaper to find a 2nd hand monomachine tho to replicate all of the functionality that the mnm offers(which i wouldn’t have expected i would ever say )
I think Plaits module shares the ideology of “multiple engines” and became sort of mini-standard (there are at least 3 hardware engines which use it’s code), but it’s only 1 voice oscillator.
Recreate the voices in Percussa SSP or Poly Beebo (both have Plaits clone afaik)
Combine with Digitakt, midi-to-cv converter and maybe QPas and Maths for filtering and modulation - you’ll probably get some rough approximation regarding the sound and workflow, maybe too rough
Digitakt + Syntakt + Digitone - all share some pieces of MnM DNA. But the sound and engines are different and still no 3 LFO and that double filter. Newer FM on Digitone is powerful, but probably won’t sound close to the low resolution 2Op madness/goodness on MnM… Rough single cycle engine - also difficult to emulate.
The price would be close to current price of MnM.