[bodge5000]

Personally I'm not sure I'd use VCV rack as an entry into subtractive synthesis, simply because there's so much to modular synthesis it could be hard to untangle one concept from another. That being said, I think it is a great intro to synthesis as a whole.

For me, it was the microbrute which really taught me subtractive synthesis, simply because of how stripped back it was, I couldn't just add a new module to cover up my bad sound design. Though obviously that's far less accessible (£150 hardware synth versus free software you can load up right now), I'm sure there'd be a middle ground. I know iOS is really good for its synth ecosystem, maybe there's a nice subtractive synth there.

[Crunchified]

I did exactly that as well. I wanted to figure out what a synthesizer does/is, so I bought a MicroBrute and had a great deal of fun with it.

So much fun, in fact, that I bought a MatrixBrute not terribly long afterward. Now _that's_ a monosynth to last me a lifetime!