Book Progress Report 1

It´s summer, and summer is “book writing time”. This year´s summer book is volume 3 of my trilogy about making generative music with modular synths, and following the suggestions of some of the members of our rofilmmedia community I´m going to report how this e-book is developing here on our website. I´ll do so every Wednesday. Thank you all for being interested in my work and for showing so much sympathy.

The whole book is drafted by now, so that I´m deep into writing the individual chapters, producing the videos to each chapter (and even each paragraph more often than not) and into setting up the patches in VCV Rack and saving them as presets, ready to get downloaded with the book.

The book is divided into two large parts, each of which containing individual chapters and sub-chapters (well, that´s how books look like).

The first main part deals with certain advanced patching techniques like multi-level random switches, triggers and gates, or complex scale modulations, or how to handle random polyphonies etc.

The second main part contains “real” projects. I´m setting up large patches, explain each individual step, describe my intentions, show even dangers, possible mistakes, pitfalls and dead ends. Each of these projects follow a different approach.

There are more “improvised” ones, meaning the patch develops more intuitively and without having a clear concept in mind when starting, but rather making decisions “on the fly” while the patch is developing.

And there are opposite approaches with structures clearly and detailed worked out (on paper) before touching even a single patch cable.

And there are patches that are telling stories, some of which are even running parallel to a video, I mean a real one with a storyboard etc. (all material will come as downloads with the book).

One of these projects and two of the chapter of part 1 are completely written and all material is produced.

All in all there are 60 pages (A4), 49 video clips, 52 patch presets and 73 graphical illustrations finished by now.

Everything indicates that I can meet the planned release date of the e-book (end of August).

Enjoy your day!

Rolf