I decided to go ahead and order Jumbler. Even if I decide it can’t replace Silhouette, there are other ways to make it fit — lots of utilities it can perform, if not quite to the same extent as those other modules. There’s also Katowice, Legio, and Univer Inter that could be set aside. However, I’ll make sure to leave plenty of time for deliberation before selling off anything. (Katowice for instance might be great in feedback loops with Jumbler. If I want to do a JF/Multimod patch with the A-130-8, Jumbler could rearrange the assignments… and so on.)
I did consider just saying “that’s a cool module but I don’t need it” — that would absolutely have been a valid call. But I decided to go ahead and indulge that curiosity. Jumbler is just such a chameleon. The most obvious thing may be routing several modulators to several destinations and then changing them up. But it can act like Nearness; it can rotate stuff circularly in stereo; you can use it as a switch, scanner/crossfader, waveshaper/distortion, even just a single VCA. It’s a matrix mixer but with macro control. Very likely, feedback patching will be rewarding.
The album is ready to go tomorrow morning. I’m pretty happy with it, and also eager to take off those creative restrictions and just play.
There have been a couple of more thoughtful than usual threads lately at MW, even in the midst of pre-Superbooth announcement excitement. One is “Have you ever experienced magic with your modular?” Why yes. The other is “A philosophical question,” which is about the idea of choosing modular over other synthesis methods to have more control. Most of us agree that’s not what we’re looking for — there’s a certain relinquishment of control, a collaboration with the machine’s behavior and a de-emphasis of perfectionism that seems to come along with embracing modular, at least as a mindset. Modular does allow more control in the sense of taking off the training wheels and safety nets, freedom from the restrictions of MIDI and plugin/host architecture etc… but it’s also just kind of inherently messy. Noisy, imprecise, a Wild West.