Best Eurorack of 2023: Granular, mixing, sustaining, morphing and more
The Best Eurorack Modules released in 2023...
4,2 / 5,0 | 
The best Eurorack of 2023 ranges from the Brinta to the Endless, the Performance Mixer to the Tiptop ART system and the fat, wave morphing Acronym oscillator.
Best Eurorack of 2023
A lot of modules are released every year. ModularGrid.com is dripping with new and innovative front panels inviting you to try something new or at least a new take on something familiar. Sifting through the piles of modular devices to find something special is difficult, if not impossible, but I’m going to give it a go. There will undoubtedly be modules that I’ll have overlooked and ones which you passionately believe should be on the list, in which case throw your suggestions into the comments at the bottom.
On the whole, I’ve tried to stick to modules that were released and available in 2023. We see a lot of modules that are prototypes or pre-orders, especially around the synth shows. But if you can’t pick one up today, then I’m not interested.
Error Instruments Brinta
Let’s begin with something frivolous, fascinating and perhaps even a bit silly. Brinta is a Granular Sampler made in collaboration between Error Instruments and This is Not Rocket Science. It pulls together a number of elements to produce a real peach of a module.
To start with, it is visually stunning. The ring of colour throbs and spins its way through your patch completely delightfully. It always draws comments from people and looks amazing on your rack. The ring visualises the movement of grains from your sampled audio as it explodes, reseeds and falls away. But it’s not just some flashing lights; Brinta is working magic on your audio.
Brinta works best on complex, texture-filled sounds, so ideally, feed it your voice or an acoustic instrument. It will take it and melt it into blobs of pitch and liquified globules of sound. You can stretch the size, lean into the pitch and scan through the captured audio for harmonies, chords or random rain clouds. It doesn’t have the depth of some other granular modules, but it’s easy to get into and completely joyful to use and experiment with. It is a spinning golden-grain circle of modular laughter.
Nano Performance Mixer
We’ve had a bit of a battle of the performance mixer this year with releases from the likes of Noise Engineering, BoredBrain, After Later Audio and 1010music. But, for me, it was the clever automation features in the unimaginatively named Performance Mixer from Nano Modules that brought some special sauce to the idea.
You’ve got all the features you’d expect from a decent mixer designed for live performance. You’ve got slider level control, clickless mute switches, panning or balance control, master and headphone outputs and a couple of aux channels for effects. It’s got a very nice look to it, it’s relatively spacious, some useful metering and I really like having level control over the aux returns. As a bonus, you can have the aux channels pre or post-fader.
What makes this Performance Mixer special is the knob recording. Hold the channels “Rec” button, and you can record the movement of any knob or slider for up to 12 seconds. Suddenly your mix is being automated, moved about, and shifting all over the place. You could introduce some really interesting happenings while exploring other parts of your patch.
It has only four channels, two mono and two stereos, which is a little restrictive, but for a single case of Eurorack, it’s a perfect and creative mixer.
WORNG Electronics ACRONYM
The juiciest and most interesting oscillator to come out this year for me was the Acronym from WORNG. The look is slightly unsettling, with nothing quite lining up, but it glows in a friendly way and very quickly becomes your favourite source of sound.
Acronym’s greatness manifests in the wave morphing and the thunder of the sub-oscillator. You can pull some superb timbres from its fully analogue triangle core. The wave shapes move from sine through square, sawtooth and then into some surprisingly wavetable-like tones. The sub has its own level control, which is vital, or it could get overpowering as it’s mixed in with the waveform output. However, you also get individual outputs on two deep octaves of sub along with the sine and triangle waveforms.
However, when you mix the outputs, Acronym feels deeply meaty and delicious. Once you get modulating the wave morphing, it can take on a range of harmonically evolving roles in your rack. You also have a great-sounding sync and a thru-zero FM input that you can use to generate wonderfully metallic tones even through self-patching.
Acronym is a solid VCO that overflows in great tones and fat sounds before you’ve introduced it to a filter. It’s a keeper.
Blukac Endless Processor
I feel like I’ve been going on about this module for months. It was one of those instant, gut-purchases where you feel that there’s something potentially genius about this module. And it certainly has not disappointed.
Endless Processor is an infinite sound sustainer. You feed it any sort of sound, hit a button and it grabs the harmonic content of that moment and smears it for eternity. It’s like holding a note of sequence, or grabbing a drone from passing sound. But that’s just the start. Endless can stack up to 5 layers of sounds and across two channels of capture. You can quickly build up chords and harmonies, drop notes in and out and find textures that you never knew were in there.
Through careful modulation you can fade sounds in and out, pull in new drones, replace or add to them and shape how it’s going to go. It’s not sampling as such; this is re-synthesis that preserves the tonal character of the sound but in an endless, clickless loop to infinity.
The one criticism I had of this fascinating module is that you couldn’t re-pitch the tones. Well, Blukac has just announced an expander module that will allow for exactly that. You can have pitch control over each channel. It also adds an SD card slot so you can save your captured textures and convert them into loops for use in your DAW.
Tiptop Audio ART
It is less of a module and more of a system and a new and possibly futuristic way of working. The ART modules are not quite available yet, but I thought that this was the most fascinating and somewhat mysterious new modular technology to come along this year, which, for me, puts it on the list of the best Eurorack of 2023.
Tiptop is still having some trouble articulating what ART is all about, and I think we’re all looking forward to when it’s out there in the wild and how it works, which will start to spill out all over YouTube. Essentially it’s a system for managing polyphony in Eurorack. It comprises a multi-channel audio cable that, confusingly, uses the USB-C format and a control format that, confusingly, uses a regular patch cable. It somehow uses the very familiar but in ways that are not compatible with their normal usage.
However, what ART gives you is an inter-module control system that ensures perfect tuning, control and sync between oscillators. It can use that to generate regular monophonic audio through your system, or, via some special polyphonic modules, it can generate polyphonic audio that can then be patched with single cables through the system.
Potentially, ART can create polyphonic modular systems with no more cabling than a monophonic one and in terms of space and cost, that’s amazing.
It looks impressive, although complicated, but could be quite revolutionary.
Best Eurorack of 2023 Honourable Mentions
I could have easily included many more modules in my Best Eurorack of 2023 roundup. The Knobula Pianophonic is excellent with its wavetable potential and strange hammer modelling. RYK’s dashing Night Rider filter bank was a whole lot of fun. Herbs & Stones threw in a few modules, including a Eurorack version of the fabulous Liquid Foam. CubuSynth has an awesome Dual CS-20 filter. Clank has a shapeshifting oscillator called Proteo, which is fascinating. Intellijel made us all wobbly with the nautical-themed Sealegs. And we have two modules with circular screens, Skippy from Kaona and Magerit from Kairos, that both give you a lot to play with.
The innovation and excitement continue to flood through the Eurorack industry and show no signs of stopping.
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