The Performance

Last night I stepped into my home studio with a clear intention: to build a patch in VCV Rack that could accompany me.
Not just passively, but actively; a system that would respond, evolve, and flow while I played live guitar, manipulated textures, and let the machine breathe underneath.

The idea behind this little performance was to build a patch in VCV Rack that can accompany me with a drum machine, arpeggios, and pads without the need for me to control much live.
I mapped everything to my MIDI controller, and that’s how it is.

In practice:

• A drum machine driving the pulse and heartbeat
• Arpeggiators weaving patterns, shifting rhythmically and tonally
• Pads swelling, fading, and evolving as ambient backdrops
• Guitar (and sometimes synth) lines layered on top
• The MIDI controller as the conductor, triggering scenes and morphing parameters

here is the patch for free if you want to experiment with it

Why This Approach

I’ve always been drawn to hybrid workflows: tech and art, precision and chaos, control and surrender.
Working with VCV Rack lets me set up a system with rules and then override them in real time, letting the unpredictable emerge.

Mapping everything to a MIDI controller frees me from menu-hopping and plugin-clicking during performance.
Instead, I can play physically, musically, emotionally, while the patch responds beneath me.

It’s almost like composing a friend: something that listens, shifts, and moves, and I bounce off it.

The Sound

Here’s the raw take (unedited except for level balances) where the machine and I find our groove:

And here’s the video of the performance:

Reflections

In the quiet after the performance, I realised how forgiving a well-built system can be.

There were moments where the arpeggio lagged, or the pad overswelled, and I improvised a line simply because the machine opened a gap.
These weren’t mistakes, they were conversations.

Moving forward, I want to refine this setup:

• More scenes mapped to the controller
• Smoother transitions between moods
• Layering field recordings into the patch
• Possibly turning these into an ambient EP someday

But for now, this was the experiment:
the machine and a moment of midnight euphoria.

Eman

Share on: