I am talking about Pittsburgh Modular’s Lifeforms modules. I am trying to give them fair change but they keep constantly give disappointments. I am at point where I think I will keep one of them in set up because it fails in a cool way. I started modular journey with Lifeforms SV-1 and later got few other Lifeforms modules. I am slowly starting to think they are not for me. There always seems to be something preventing me from getting functionality I want. Mostly the reason is there is no linear FM.
Double Helix has there oscillators which could be used as LFOs. Two can be frequency modulated. It could create complex modulations. If there only was linear FM. Exponential FM changes speed too much. So much wasted potential. Contour section is nice but you can get other nice things in space Double Helix takes. It is nice module but it doesn’t give me what I want from this case. Case has three other oscillators. Two more plus LFO don’t make sense. It would work better on other case which don’t have other oscillators. And I have SV-1 for Pittsburgh Modular sounds and it has similar limitations.
SV-1 is the module that fails in a cool way. It has problems picking note off messages from midi when note off and note on come too close to each others. You can make cool broken sequencing with that but it is annoying when you have to do some tricks make it play correctly. I made Max for Live device which separates note off and note on times enough for SV-1 to work correctly. But that means only one of SV-1’s six midi modes is usable when sequencing back to back notes. I don’t remember it having this problem before and haven’t heard others having it. The problem is only with sequencing back to back notes. It could be perfect combination of everything. Other synth don’t have this problem when I put them in place of SV-1.
I considered getting something else to replace SV-1 but it is pretty hard to find combination of modules which would do the same things in same space. 2+2 mixer is pretty useful. SV-1 has many things I like. Problem is usable range of controls for things I want to do is pretty limited and it has few design choices I really don’t understand. One of them is putting same LFO out from two different sockets. It would make sense if it was different waveforms but it is same waveform in both sockets. Every time I start to like SV-1 there is something breaking the mood.