Modular Masters

About the game

A modular synth is a case full of separate modules - oscillators, filters, envelopes, sequencers - and none of them make a sound until you connect them with patch cables. Modular Masters walks you through it one hands-on lesson at a time. Your guide is Ossie, a little oscilloscope who explains each idea, and his screen shows you the signal on any jack or cable you hover over, with a tuner built in.

There are 40 lessons across four zones. The Garage is where you start, with oscillators and waveforms, pitch and octaves, mixers, VCAs and gates, 1 volt per octave, envelopes and filters, and its boss has you build the classic synth voice from scratch. The Studio gets into LFOs, attenuverters and offsets, clocks, sequencers, sample & hold, quantizers and scales, glide and voltage math, and ends with a sequenced bassline. The Lab is the advanced stuff - pulse-width modulation, hard sync, ring mod, FM, wavefolding, pinged filters, drum synthesis, polyrhythm and probability - and its boss is a drum machine with no samples. Then the Mainstage brings it all together with echoes, plucked strings made from a delay line, sidechain pumping, arpeggios from a clock divider, diatonic harmony, three sound-match challenges where you rebuild a sound by ear, a generative garden that plays itself and the final patch.

Along the way two bonus zones open up for the two big schools of synthesis. West Coast is Buchla style, with low pass gates and their natural vactrol decay, the complex oscillator, function generators that make a patch play itself and random voltage as an instrument, and its boss is Buchla Bongos, a percussion patch with no keyboard and (if you want) no clock. East Coast is Moog style, with the 24 dB transistor ladder filter, three-oscillator stacks, filter contour and glide and a filter that sings in tune when you push its resonance, and you finish it by building a Minimoog-style lead from scratch.

It's a real synth, not a quiz. There are 24 Eurorack-style modules running on real voltages (audio at ±5 V, gates at 0/5 V and pitch at 1 V per octave), and the cables are color-coded by what they carry. The goals check what you patched, and a lot of them actually listen to it too - the game renders your patch and checks the pitch, the envelope, the filter sweep or how close you got to the target sound.

Every level has three stars, so there are 150 in all - one for solving it, one for solving it without hints and one for beating the bonus. If you get stuck, HINT gives you clues and then patches the next step for you, and every module and idea you learn goes into your Codex. Once you finish the Garage, Jam mode opens up, which is a free case with every module you've learned so far, and it keeps your patch for next time!