Wow Razmo, I love the way you figure all this out and keep experimenting without ever giving up. I really enjoyed reading about your adventures in sound design fairy land. Though I must admit some of the stuff you wrote sounded coming from another planet . But that is just my own in-experience coming through.
In your last few posts I did find something I could directly relate to. As a computer professional I seem to "suffer" a bit from what I would call "patch saving angst". Redundancy, backups of backups of backups, and so on is one of my themes in the IT world. So far I only own synths that can save patches to some kind of memory, which I backup of course to my laptop and Dropbox etc. Of course being able to re-produce the sounds exactly as I designed them for a track I wrote years ago can come in very handy (I did surprise my producer already a few times being able to re-produce a sound exactly as I intended and he remembered).
My next purchase though will be a low-risk departure from that. I have a Behringer Neutron on order, as far as I understand this is a nice and relatively cost effective way into some kind of modular experience. I am very interested to see how I (psychologically and emotionally) will deal with a hardware patch-able synth without any backup facility. I could always take a picture of course, but that is not the point.
Sound design for me is an integral part of composing a song. I rarely re-use a patch I created before. I just love to twiddle and dial in new sounds for a particular mood I am creating. For me the time spent in sound design is part of the composing workload .
Well, I always used a different approach to sound design, and that may also be why I'm having a problem with eurorack... I allways separated sound design and composing.... the sound design phase I really enjoy, and I like using computer editors with all parameters on the screen at the same time... this way I have a good overview of everything, and I can go into VERY tiny details in perfecting a sound... I could easily use 1-2 hours on a preset this way... i see sound design as an artform in itself, and I never created a specific sound for a specific job... that is why I always need huge amounts of available presets to browse when I'm in the composing phase, otherwise I'll not be able to find a sound that fits the score.
With eurorack, I had really much fun when designing the first sound of a track... I can not create sounds in advance in the modular world, which is both good and bad... sounds become much more tailored to the score, but after the first track has been laid down, I already have ideas for the next track, and want to quickly start playing on top with other sounds, and that's where it gets frustrating because you have to repatch the whole thing and spend too much time getting that sound right... it destroys my intuitiveness.
Then is the problem with chords/pads... these are essential for the style I'm doing... I thought I could do with just using drones or pre-programmed chord progressions from an oscillator module with 3 or more oscillators, but it's not very performance oriented... i miss to be able to play the chord progressions on the keyboard, actually performing them... modular gets a bit too "robotic" when it comes to arrangements of chords.
If I was to still have a small modular system, it would be for one purpose only; experimenting with repeating sequences and drones, and only for recording samples of it, using them in say; a Prophet X at some point, because you do have the ability to produce some interesting sounds that is not possible with standard synths... but that will not likely happen, as it requires a system of at least a decent size to create something interesting. I may very well keep my Waldorf KB37 just for this in the future, but I'd be choosing very different modules in that case, since the sounds I would want to experiment with are very different to what I have in the KB37 right now.
Right now, the only thing I'm trying to figure out is if I should get the REV2 in module or key version... I'd really like to put the KB37 aside, and only have the keys version in front of me for the next 6 months... but then I'd need both the Prophet 12 & X to be module versions if I get them in the future (probably will I think), otherwise I shall keep using the KB37 with a module version, and end with the key-change for when getting the Prophet X ... my problem is that I'm still not sure if the Prophet X will ever be available in a module form, and if it does come out, the interface will definitely be cut down like it was with the P12 module which unfortunately could be bad if it is not 100% fully controllable via SysEx... so the best solution is probably to get a REV2 module, a P12 module, and wait with the switch in keys until I have the money for the Prophet X keys.