The Rubicon, from Canadian Eurorack wizards Intellijel, is an analog triangle core VCO, capable of thru-zero frequency modulation. Originally created by Dave Dixon, it is rightly considered an analog VCO design masterpiece.

In the world of modular synthesis there are certain names that command veneration and respect, like Moog, Buchla, Doepfer, and Serge, but there are others that inspire the kind of fizzing delight and excitement that simply won’t leave you alone until you’ve filled your bedroom and half the hallway too. Mutable Instruments have been making Eurorack modules in that latter category for almost a decade, and now Clouds - the texturizing module which sold like crazy in hardware and became a firm favorite of enthusiasts around the world - is available for Softube Modular.

Braids, by French Eurorack pioneers Mutable Instruments, is not an oscillator. It sort of looks like one, with fine and coarse pitch/frequency controls, a v/oct input, and voltage-controllable tone/timbre controls. It even sort of sounds like one, in as far as it outputs audio.

Mutable Instruments call it a macro oscillator, but even that is an understatement. It’s a hugely sophisticated digital synthesis engine, able to produce and manipulate complex sounds by means of 45 or so fully-realized synthesis algorithms, featuring multiple oscillators, wavetables, filters, VCAs, ring modulators, and so on under the hood.

It's time to take control of time itself, with the Doepfer A-188-1 Bucket Brigade Device for Softube Modular. Our officially licensed software version of the BBD module represented a new challenge in terms of component by component analog modeling, and the results were worth the effort.

By passing your signal along a line of capacitors, the BBD delays your sound in time, but also degrades it with high-frequency loss and additional noise (as well as noticeable sample-rate reduction and aliasing at high delay times). This creates a warm and dirty effect, much sought after in the mid/late '70s, and still loved.