Today, I am embarking on a new year-long project to post a daily “Patch Of The Day.” A little more than a year ago, I revived a 35-year dormant interest in playing with synthesizers. I’d been exploring making music with Bitwig for nearly a year when a 2016 trip to Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina, reignited my curiosity about twisting knobs again.

Today, I have a Monster rig with more than 1,500hp of Eurorack synthesizer equipment, and as anyone can tell you, I have a learning curve ahead of me that can only be seen as extraordinarily monumental – emphasis on mental.

The idea here is to post audio and/or video snippets of patches I explore on a day-to-day basis as frequently as being in town allows. Then after a year of bumbling through this, I hope to be able to look back to this day and see an improvement on what I’m able to create. I’m well aware that what will be presented here for some time to come will be devoid of musical quality. This is an experiment of me trying to force a creative process that no matter how poor the quality, I’ll share the results in order to document how a 54-year-old man with no musical training or experience explores a complex process found in modular synthesis.

This is patch #1. To create it, I installed two new Mannequins Mangrove formant oscillators that just arrived today. I’m only using one of the Mangroves here, and it’s being modulated by Just Friends also from Mannequins, Tides from Mutable Instruments, and a Mini Slew from WMD. In addition, there is some sound mixed in from a Skorn da Bask from TouellSkouarn being modulated by the Tides, Just Friends, and a Lightstrip from Soundmachines.