Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook

I have had non-modular synths, but I have never owned modular voltage-controlled hardware. However, I have had a lot of fun playing with Bespoke Synth. It has a much lower barrier to entry than VCV Rack imho.

If you are wondering what everyone is talking about in this thread, please check it out:

https://github.com/BespokeSynth/BespokeSynth

Tiptop Audio has a collaboration with Buchla where they're making eurorack versions of most of the classic models. Some would be very good starter modules. https://tiptopaudio.com/buchla/

Modular synths are very cool, but it's a bit like a swimming pool: it's great when someone close to you deals with the grind so you can just enjoy it.

I talked myself out investing in modulars because I know I'll never have the patience to deal with the wires when all I want is to play. Big respect for those who can do it!

I have a probably ~$20k modular rack. It's a lot of fun to experiment with, but the fact that you don't have patch save/recall really slashes the utility.

Doing everything in a DAW is the most practical from a "business" standpoint, but it's way less amenable to creative exploration. You really have to know what you want already.

The practical compromise that works best for me is a well-designed hardware realtime synth. You have access to a small fraction of the design space of modular, but a higher fraction of the accessible design space sounds good, and you of course have patch save/recall.

Recently what I've been doing is creating modular patches, driving them with MIDI, and recording the output into my Elektron Tonverk using their on-device multisample recording. You can record samples at a bunch of different pitch/velocity pairs and save them into a multisample file.