Modular synthesis was long dead. First the computer-controlled integrated circuits within polyphonic analog synthesizers did away with all that archaic single signal patching, and then the digital onslaught of MIDI and PCM-driven, DSP-powered synthesizers drove analog synthesis away entirely. What could be gained from building and rebuilding basic synthesizer components when you had an entire orchestra ready to go in a box? We were really stupid in the 1990s, or at least those of us working with mainstream of synthesizer technology. We valued realism and mimicry over everything else, so the simple ideas of shaping waveforms and using individual controls were brushed aside as tired and unfashionable.

While modern PCM-based synthesizers brought a tremendous amount of convenience and a vast range of sounds, something had been lost in terms of usability and character. The home-spun rave and dance music genres knew this all too well and eagerly snapped up all the second-hand analog synths they could find. These synths had bags of personality; they would cut and squelch through mixes, and they were playful and designed around hands-on experimentation rather than preset browsing. The dance music explosion created a space for analog synths, but building new ones was an expensive business. The difficulties with bulk, fragility and tuning had only been solved by shifting to digital synthesizers.

Into the void stepped Swedish company Clavia. In 1995 they released the Nord Lead synthesizer, which would ignite the realisation that software could emulate the simple circuits of oscillators and filters and do it convincingly enough that it felt like hardware. At that time, the majority of synthesizers were PCM or sample-based. DSP (Digital Signal Processors), originally used to run audio effects, were being repurposed to emulate the physical aspects of acoustic instruments to pursue "Physical Modelling" synthesis. Founder of Clavia, Hans Nordelius, discovered that this same technology could also emulate the way circuits behaved within old analog synthesizers. He called it "Virtual Analog", and the Nord Lead, striking in its red livery and unusually covered in knobs, caused quite a stir.

One good example of how physical modelling informed on virtual analog was found in the Korg Prophecy, launched the same year as the Nord Lead. It was monophonic and designed with a physical modelling synthesis engine that was also used to replicate analog oscillators and filters. A year later, Roland got in on the act with the JP-8000. It feasted on Roland's analog legacy of sound and control while bringing in some powerful new features through Motion Control, automation and digital programming. All these synths showed that authentic analog sounds were possible and even enhanced through DSP-based computer emulations.

But, while other manufacturers kept their software in the box, Clavia had other ideas: and then came the Nord Modular.

The Nord Modular

Released in 1997, the Nord Modular was a baffling departure from the Nord Lead. First of all, they'd physically shrunk the keyboard down to just two octaves, no keys at all with the rack version, but then they had this seemingly mad notion that you could edit the entire synthesis engine on a PC. Now, Windows PCs and Apple Macs had begun to make an impression on the music industry in the late 1990s. Steinberg's Cubase, Emagic's Logic and Twelve Tone's Cakewalk had all offered MIDI sequencing and the first steps of audio recording by the time the Nord Modular came around, but these were little more than note editors and had nothing to do with the generation of sound. The idea of editing synthesis on screen is something that we hadn't really seen since instruments like the Fairlight CMI, and in a very different hardware scenario.

The Nord Modular provided a completely modular environment in which to build your own synthesizer with its own user-defined signal routing, on your computer, with your mouse, and then save it and build something completely different. As I'm typing this, I'm aware that this sounds completely normal and even passé because in our computer-enlightened days, these things are easy. I mean I have a Moog Model 15 modular synthesizer on my bleedin' phone. You have to understand that prior to this moment, modular synthesis was old, huge, expensive racks of degrading discrete electronics patched together with swathes of cables that had no concept of "patch-saving". Few people had access to anything modular, and in terms of modern music production, it was archaic and long-retired. Nord Modular, for a very reasonable price, offered you a completely modular adventure playground. Epic!

The software looks pretty ropey by today's standards, but at the time it had the finest Windows 95 stylings. It contained all the synthesizer modules you'd expect in a modular system arranged neatly under tabs along the top. Select the tab, and a row of icons appeared depicting each module and all you had to do is drag the one you want into the main space. There are over 80 modules to play with including three different oscillators, envelopes, LFOs, several filters, utilities, audio effects, logic processors, control modulators and sequencers. They all have patch points, and you can drag virtual cables from outputs to inputs to craft your patch. Within the software, everything is essentially control voltage, and they used Keyboard modules to interface between CV and the MIDI notes, velocity and gate information coming into the system from the keyboard or via MIDI control.

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The editor was comprehensive and slick, and it would have been almost limitless in possibilities if it hadn't been for the lack of computational power. It's worth remembering that it wasn't relying on the power of your computer. All your PC was doing was running the editor, all the hard stuff, and all the math and processing was being done in the DSP chips inside the Nord Modular hardware. Just like the Nord Lead it had four DSP engines. Each engine can load four patches known as a Patch Group. The available polyphony would depend on the complexity of your patch and the resources available until you hit 100% DSP. As you loaded in modules, you could see the DSP meter fill and have a good idea of what's going to be possible. Part of the Nord Modular challenge is simplifying your patches to squeeze out as much juice as you can.

Once you've hashed your patch together you'll want to pull controls through to the knobs on the hardware. You have 18 knobs in total, and you can assign them via a simple right-click on the control and then choose from a list. One cool feature borrowed from the Nord Lead was Morphing. This was a sort of macro ability to control numerous parameters with a single knob or function. It was something you could easily allocate on the Lead, but then you have no way of seeing what those connections actually were. On the Modular, these were all displayed on screen, making it a far more versatile function. However, there comes a time when you need to disconnect from the computer and use the Modular like a synth. And that's the point: it's totally standalone, and provided you save the patc,h it will be there in the hardware. The only tricky bit is remembering which knob you assigned to what parameter. You could find out on the tiny LCD screen but it took a lot of scrolling.

One thing that strikes me about Clavia's approach was that they seemed to understand, before anyone else, that the mouse alone could be satisfying enough to control a whole complex modular synthesizer. If the world was moving towards virtual emulations accessed via a screen, then the hardware knobs would be largely irrelevant. This was very clear with the release of the Micro Modular.

The Nord Micro Modular contained a single DSP engine and so was restricted to the four patches of a single Patch Group, but otherwise had all the capabilities of its bigger sibling. It had four knobs on top for a little bit of interactivity but relied on the software editor for almost all its functionality. This was a year before Native Instruments released their first software product, Generator, which was clearly inspired by the Nord Modular but ran natively on your computer. Around the same time, Propellerheads released Rebirth RB-338, a software emulation of those classic Roland TB-303 and TR-808 analog machines. Paul Jubel, who was one of the designers working on the Nord Lead, co-founded Propellerheads, and it's pretty clear that his work at Clavia was fundamental in forming his vision.

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A new version of the synthesizer appeared in 2004; it was called the Nord G2 Modular. It came with an updated editor, more modules, more polyphony and DSP power. It added effects such as reverb and delay, as well as a microphone and other inputs to let you use it as a modular effects loop. They also added back in, without any sense of irony, some physical modelling oscillators.

The new version sorted out a few things. Firstly it gave greater access to the editor from a DAW, letting you pipe in MIDI control and pull out the internal sequencing into other things. They sorted out the knob assignment mystery by adding more displays to the hard and knob position indicator LEDs. This seems to be at the expense of ten of the knobs, but I guess you can't have everything. Perhaps the concept of shifting to a completely mouse-driven architecture was an emulation too far.

The G2 was great, but this hardware/software hybrid approach was swimming against the tide of computer-based virtual instruments that could run on any computer. However, the hardware DSP approach still had its supporters. Creamware had built a DSP-based hardware system onto a PCI board that you installed inside your computer. It had much prettier graphics, a huge mixer with various software instruments and a “Modular Synthesizer” clearly inspired by the Nord. TC Electronic and Universal Audio also had DSP cards and external boxes but were more focused on audio effects and dynamics processing than synthesizers. The Oasys system developed by Korg to model all kinds of synthesis; it produced the Prophecy and Z1 synthesizers, eventually ended up on a DSP card, offering a complex glimpse into almost every form of synthesizer and sound generation. However, by the mid-2000s computers were fast enough to run modular software such as Native Instruments' Reaktor, and synthesizer workstations like Propellerheads Reason without any additional DSP power at all. The G2 was discontinued in 2009.

In Retrospect

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These days I think we can better appreciate the idea of running something on some dedicated hardware. We've had all the power in the universe on our PCs and actually found that to be often crippling to creativity, and computers can still let us down. Software editors for digital synthesizers are now common place to the point that it would be unusual not to ship one with your new synth. The Nord Modular is likely to be directly responsible for that, although these are mostly fixed architecture synths, not modular like the Nord.

The Nord Modular is still popular, with a cult following of users who still run the old software on new and old computers. Perhaps the closet alternative to the Nord Modular today would the collaboration between VCV Rack and the 4MS MetaModule. It's this fantastic idea of taking the modules from the software modular environment VCV Rack and loading them onto a dedicated hardware Eurorack module. You can then load your patches without having to drag the computer around. You've even got macro knobs for controlling more than one parameter at a time—I wonder where they got that idea?

Nord awoke us from our narrow-minded focus on digital synthesis and courageously kept modular concepts alive when the industry was moving on. The Modular editor inspired many of the software synthesizers that form our accepted soundscape and regardless of whether it's by knobs or mouse, the Nord Modular reminds us that amazing sounds are available through those basic building blocks of synthesis.