The rabbit hole

I've wanted to "get into" producing music for a long time, but it never felt like something I could grasp. One day I stumbled upon modular synthesizers in a random Youtube video and immediately got curious. I started by playing around with VCV Rack, a software based emulation of modular synthesizers and fell in love with the idea of building systems that used logic and signal processing to produce sounds. It took me a while to wrap my head around the different concepts surrounding the topic, but I'm glad I was able to keep up my interest. I then dived into the deep rabbit hole of hardware modular synthesizers, more specifically, Eurorack.

VCV Rack simulating an Eurorack setup with digital noodles

This journey helped me understand that making music does not necessarily have to have anything to do with notation, instruments, song scructure, recording, DAWs, theory and certainly not with what we hear on the radio or anywhere else. It can be about exploration, experimentation, chaos, surprises, logic systems, weird bleeps and bloops, programming, engineering and simply playing around. When the method of making noise itself is entertaining, it does not really matter what kind of "music" you end up creating in the process.

Modular synthesizers opened up the music hobby for me and I doubt I'll ever see the bottom of this rabbit hole.

Current case

I'm still relatively new to this hobby, so I'm only playing around with my first case for now. I built the case myself so that I could better understand the electronics and power conversion happening inside. It's just a small 84HP 6U rack, but it has taken quite long to fill up.

I'm currently working on building a few more DIY modules but have no room to install them, which of course means selling something to make room funding a new case by selling some of my organs.

An almost up to date picture of my first case

Another one

The next case needs to be both larger and more portable, which is why I've decided to spend way more time in the planning phase. I started by researching commercial cases as well as a bunch DIY projects to figure out what has been tried and what I could apply to my case. I then moved on to prototyping shapes on paper / cardboard as this allows fast and easy iterations.

I have since moved on to designing the case in software. I decided to start with Blender because it's my go-to the superior 3D software and I was curious about combining the CAD Sketcher plugin with geometry nodes.

A view of the CAD Sketcher interface with a silly amount of constraints.

While it worked nicely in the beginning, I started encountering weird and inconsistent issues as the model got more complicated with multi-part constraints. I was expecting this as the CAD plugin is still early in development. In any case, I'm very happy that there is some CAD development happening in the Blender scene.

I will most likely complete the design process in FreeCAD.

Blender's geometry nodes taking care of extruding the sketches, duplicating parts and arranging an adjustable hinge.

My current plan is to have two identical 126HP 6U parts hinged together to form a folding case. When opened, both of the parts should stand at an angle that allows comfortable patching and playing. Ergonomics are important as once you start noodling around, the whole time-space continuum will invert on itself and hours vanish in the blink of an eye.

To complicate the build further, I want the case to be closable while patched. This means leaving a suitable gap between the racks when the parts come together without introducing any ergonomic or structural issues.