Underdog Electronic Music School: Semi-Modular – Your Gateway Drug to Eurorack Mayhem

Let’s be honest: full modular is a money pit and a time sink if you’re just starting out. Underdog Electronic Music School wastes no time laying it out—semi-modular is the way in if you don’t want to end up with a pile of useless modules and zero sound. The video kicks off with a cheeky drinking game (take a shot every time Oscar says ‘synthesis’), but the real point is clear: modular can be overwhelming, and semi-modular gives you a fighting chance to actually make music, not just collect shiny panels.

Oscar drops a car-building metaphor that actually lands: with modular, you’re buying parts and hoping they’ll drive. With semi-modular, you get a working car, but you can still soup it up with new parts when you’re ready. No more buying a sequencer and realising you can’t even make a sound. For beginners, that’s a game-changer. The message is simple—get something that works out of the box, but leaves the door open for future chaos.

Enter the Moog DFAM—a semi-modular beast that doesn’t care if you’re a newbie or a seasoned patch pirate. Oscar shows off how the DFAM can live in its own case or be yanked out and slammed into a Eurorack setup, ready to play with others. The setup’s dead simple: power it up, plug in your audio interface, and you’re off to the races. No menu-diving, no firmware updates, just pure, hands-on filth.

The DFAM’s architecture is classic: two oscillators, a filter, an amp, and a step sequencer that’s always eight steps—no more, no less. It spits out loopy, bleepy, percussive sequences that don’t care about music theory. Quantised melodies? Forget it. This thing is for dirty, atonal grooves and dissonant messes—exactly what you want when you’re building a bunker-worthy beat. And with those patch points, you’re just a cable away from total sonic mayhem.

Why stop at DFAM? Oscar plugs in the Intellijel Plonk, a physical modelling module that instantly multiplies your sound palette. Instead of just using the DFAM’s built-in oscillators, you can hijack its sequencer to drive the Plonk, opening up a world of new textures. Suddenly, you’re not just stuck with triangle and square waves—you’ve got hand drums, metallic hits, and all sorts of weirdness at your fingertips.

The real magic comes when you start patching the DFAM’s pitch and velocity outputs into the Plonk. Now, every step can trigger a new sound, with evolving pitch, decay, and more. Oscar keeps it moving, swapping cables and tweaking knobs, showing just how quickly you can go from basic loops to complex, evolving patterns. It’s modular without the misery—plug, play, and get lost in the groove.

Next up: the XAOC Sarajewo delay. Oscar patches the Plonk’s output through the Sarajewo, and suddenly everything gets a whole lot deeper. Echoes bounce, feedback spirals, and the groove takes on a new life. The Sarajewo isn’t just an add-on—it’s a portal to dubby, psychedelic territory where every tweak can send your sound into orbit.

Oscar’s advice is spot on: keep one hand on the feedback knob, or risk blowing your speakers (and your eardrums). The Sarajewo’s controls are immediate, and the results are wild—speed up the echoes, crank the feedback, and you’re in full-on rave mode. But honestly, you’ve got to watch the video to really feel the chaos. Words don’t do justice to the swirling, feedback-laden madness that erupts when you start pushing this delay.