Frankenstein patches
I've made a few attempts over the past year with being more intentional in my patching, taking cues from YouTube tutorials, trying to create "instruments" and "effects". Labeling everything, designing interfaces, placing certain things together, etc. I've learned a lot from that approach, but I always end up regressing into creating monster patches that make little sense to anyone who isn't able to read my mind. It's too much fun and I'm not going to fight it anymore.
Who else does this? Anyone ever write a whole song with a single patch and a million outputs? I'd love to hear it if you did. What's the coolest thing you discovered while combining a few modules you didn't understand? How do you deal with an endless scrolling sea of module connections(My best friend is the Utility Rack)? Tell me all about it yall.
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I am all in for frankenstein patches. Its a two bladed sword tho. What i do is as soon as i notice i am making the same patch twice i am saving my building blocks as presets. Also I somnetimes clean up my patches and ask myself if that weird ring modulation is really adding to the sound in a good way or not lol.
Lately I've been trying to train myself to do the same! I used to be allergic to saving things and revisiting old content. But especially with Drambo, I find myself rebuilding things I've already built before multiple times, so I'm making an active effort at noticing my "patterns" so I can consolidate and save them for easy re-use.
It really is a double-edged sword. Some of my earliest patches are the most indecipherable. Any attempt to clean up often leads to drastic changes in the sound and I can't always trace back to the source of the change.
I'm still in the stage where "sound design" and "songwriting" are separate processes, so I've been leaving landmarks to make things easier to follow if I'm revisiting an old project, possibly weeks or months later. So, keeping the linear format of Drambo in mind, I'll try to think of every component of a sound I'm making as a "sandwich". The bottom bun often being a labeled section or a note module, and the top bun usually being a mixer module or a track module with a mixer input. This allows me the freedom of throwing modules down with minimal planning.
Once I'm in "songwriting mode", it's very easy for me to follow my signal flow and consolidate everything into Utility racks without altering my sound. That's why I love utility racks so much. They're basically infinite mixers. And they save a ton of space for complex sounds that need little automation.
Looks like you’re on the right path, @floralprintsocks , monster patches is the way to go. But also, like you say, save modules for later. Then you’ll create monster patches but more organized :)