MATRIXSYNTH: Buchla 259 and 261e


Sunday, May 20, 2007

Buchla 259 and 261e

The following notes comparing the original Buchla 259 and the new 261e Complex Waveform Generators came in on the Buchla list via Ezra Buchla, Don Buchla's son. Note the reference to the 258 Dual Oscillator.

"the waveshaping circuits of the 261e and the old 259 are very very very close. they "sound the same." except that the old one is indeed hotter, and the driving sine wave is not quite as clean or as stable in pitch.

to me, the functional difference is in the mod osc section. there are tradeoffs. the 259 has nice smooth cv output and you can push it to very low frequencies with cv input. this is good. the 261e has an additional, quite radical waveshaping circuit on the mod osc itself, which allows you to crossfade between sine, square, narrow square and a kindof funky sinusoidal trapezoid. this is good too. listen to the phase locked mod osc audio output! that is not the same, at all.

phase lock behaves differently. there are more possible behaviors in the 261e, as the process can receive certain information from software-land. and these again can come out as very interestingly close spaced chaotic orbits.

experiment with frequency modulation + pitch tracking + phase lock for maximally intricate orbit-space!

we will not do a 259 clone anytime soon. oh well.

i do luv me a 258. now THAT's buildable. of course maybe not by me, just at the moment... i am busy!

-eb"

4 comments:

  1. whats the Buchla list? is there link to sign up?

    ReplyDelete
  2. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/200e
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/buchla_modular

    ReplyDelete
  3. i played with ezra about a month ago, and he was using a 258.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This isn't on either of those groups. Is there a listserv or something?

    ReplyDelete

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