Have been tempted to get Cre8audio’s West Pest lately. I have room for one relatively small synth and I’d like to have something more west coast oriented. Other option is Endorphin.es Shuttle System which costs ten times more. West Pest isn’t versatile enough and Shuttle System is quite expensive. Then I remembered I have Pittsburgh Modular’s Lifeforms SV-1 and Double Helix. My first eurorack modules. Both are on Rack Brute which doesn’t fit to current setup but I can still play with them. I could get versatile system if I build it around them without cost going too high.
SV-1 was my gateway to eurorack. It was good starting point. It was full voice. Back then only such options were Moog Mother 32 and SV-1. Now there are other options and SV-1 is discontinued. SV-1 has couple design choice which prevent it to be really good. First is sync. There is not hard sync. I have no idea what sync does but it is not hard sync. Manual doesn’t tell what it actually does and walk through video didn’t either. It just doesn’t give hard sync. I don’t know how you should use it. I honestly had forgotten it had sync option when I saw walk through video mention it. When I tested it I understood why I had forgotten it. It is useless. Which makes oscillator FM useless too. At least in way I use FM. FM knob has really small usable range if you want synth to stay in tune.
Another weird choice is to have passive splitter. V/Oct signal needs buffer. Oscillator 1 is hard wires to midi but oscillator 2 is not. This means you have to connect V/Oct output to oscillator 2 or you can it only with one oscillator in case you have Double Helix too. Double Helix has two oscillators both having own V/Oct inputs. SV-1 can’t control both oscillators alone if you want oscillators to stay in tune. All this trouble because SV-1 has passive splitter and oscillators don’t share pitch information. I understand second oscillators can be used as LFOs when you don’t connect anything to V/Oct. For this reason SV-1’s splitters should be buffered. It would allow you to share V/Oct with other modules without need of separate buffered multiple.
Double Helix is (or was because it is discontinued) Pittsburgh Modular’s west coast voice. It has two oscillators and contour section which has wave shaper and low pass gate. It doesn’t have oscillator sync. Maybe they didn’t know how to do hard sync and heard too many times how SV-1’s sync didn’t work like users expected.
If you can overcome these problems modules sound pretty good. If you build system around them you first need buffered multiple and secondly oscillator which can do hard sync. You shouldn’t need fifth oscillator but this time there is no other option. After those system needs more envelope generators. One ADSR is not enough. After ADSR was VCA. Last 6 hp was filled what I thought made most sense. Another wave shaper can do more than Double Helix’s wave shaper. This setup should be able to give what I want from west coast oriented system. It would be cheaper than Shuttle System. Haven’t decided if I would get this yet. Picture is from Modular Grid. I won’t link to rack because I might delete it later. You can find it from my profile when this is published.