Monotrail Tech Talk Throws Down: Five Days, One Modular Track, No Nonsense

Monotrail Tech Talk, usually known for his crystal-clear modular tutorials, has decided to swap the whiteboard for the patchbay and see if he can actually crank out a track on his modular setup in just five days. No endless faffing about—just a hard deadline and a camera rolling. He admits he’s missed making music, and this series is his way of forcing himself back into the creative pit, all while letting us watch him sweat it out. There’s a refreshing honesty here; he’s not pretending to be some modular messiah, just a bloke with a rack and a plan (sort of).

What’s brilliant is that he doesn’t start with a blank slate—because who does, really? Instead, he kicks things off with a rough sketch at the piano (no virtuoso nonsense, just enough to get the juices flowing). The challenge is simple: five days to go from nothing to a finished track and a full video about it. If you’ve ever stared at your modular and wondered if it’s possible to actually finish something, this is the series you didn’t know you needed.

The heart of the track is a four-note bassline and a five-chord arpeggio, with F# acting as the anchor point. It’s not rocket science, but the way the chords and bass notes shift against each other keeps things from getting stale. Monotrail sketches out variations—arpeggios that rise, get stuck, and then tumble back down—giving the track a sense of movement without turning it into a maths lesson.

He’s not precious about perfection, either. Some ideas get chucked, others get twisted until they fit. The result is a core musical idea that’s simple but flexible, ready to be mangled by the modular’s unpredictable nature. It’s a reminder that you don’t need a PhD in harmony to make something interesting—just a few good notes and the guts to mess with them.

Here’s where things get tasty. Monotrail patches up two fusion oscillators through a stereo filter for the bass, modulated by a slow, rising envelope for that dark, brooding vibe. The lead is a single oscillator through a low-pass filter with a plucky envelope, spiced up with random modulation and a dash of noise on the frequency for extra grit. It’s not about pristine sound design—it’s about character, and this patch has plenty.

As the track evolves, he adds a third voice—a sine oscillator with wave folding, bandpass filtering, and enough random voltage to make the whole thing wobble in stereo. There’s a mixer, macro controls, and envelopes all over the shop. It’s a glorious mess, but it works. This is modular patching at its best: part science, part happy accident, and always a bit unpredictable. If you want the full patch breakdown, you’ll have to watch the video—words can’t do justice to the knob-twiddling chaos.

With the clock ticking, Monotrail moves to recording and a quick mix. He’s brutally honest about the results: the intro could use more detail, and the bass and lead sometimes trample all over each other, turning the mix into a muddy puddle. The random envelope on the lead gets a bit out of hand, and the ending lacks focus. It’s not a disaster, but it’s not a polished masterpiece either—and that’s the point.

He doesn’t hide behind fancy mastering tricks or endless tweaking. Instead, he slaps on some EQ, a hard limiter, and calls it a day. The process is more important than perfection, and the whole exercise leaves him more excited about making music than he’s been in ages. It’s a proper punk attitude: get it done, learn something, and move on. If only more modular heads had this much self-awareness.