Hi David; I really appreciate you doing this! Hope you are doing well today.

I've always been intrigued by your use of the Nord Modular (I miss mine!). Can you talk a little about how you use (used?) yours, what kind of patches you enjoy, etc? Any tips or tricks?

Thanks again!

hey donglekong,
the first album that was heavily built upon the nord modular as a central piece of gear and sound design was "studio pankow - linienbusse" with born under a rhyming planet and rawell.
i bought the micro modular because it was relatively cheap. and i was very impressed by some of it's preset patches.
of course, i had gathered a fair understanding of substractive synthesis and some basic fm.
also our setup at the km20 studio in the nineties was all analog pre midi cv/gate stuff which in a way is not much different from modular nowadays, just not in a (euro)rack, but patching independant units.
the sound of the nord was good and still is good today - the sine waves sound surprisingly round, given the fact that they are stepped at the current sample rate (96khz?).
however, most of all using the internal sequencing and (cv) modulation options made it really so special for us.
a shame that the nord modular version 1 didn't output midi data from the internal sequencers - it would have been dope to use them with other synthesizers on top of the built in dsp.
some people were really remarkably skilled at the nord modular, like sven röhrig, benjamin brunn, deer, cristian vogel, speedy j...
i still recommend it to this day, as it allows you to inexpensively dig deeper into modular synthesis and it is a great preparation for the "real" modular hardware world - you learn a lot about the simpler logic or function generating modules that are very effective and usually rather inexpensive in a modular setup. (compared to oscillators and sequencers).
perfect for self generating, algorythmic, constantly permutating patches.
last not least, the patches can be stored and you don't need to bring the computer when taking the nord modular to a gig, it works standalone after patching has been done with the editor software.
the editor might be a bit buggy and the unofficial betas for osx keep crashing but the nord itself never does and since all the virtual wiring is stored and processed within the nord's internal dsp, even after a computer/editor crash, i never lost a single patch.
still an alltime favorite of mine.