via ericcoleridge on this electro-music.com thread: "Following the tradition here of people posting pictures of their progress, I'm submitting a few pictures of my first 5 panels, not long ago delivered from Schaeffer. There are a lot of small problems, errors of mine, but all in all I'm very happy with the way they are coming along. I'm completely(?) done with 2 of the 5. I've assembled tons of circuit boards, many of them home made, alot of CGS stuff and others, that I'm now trying group into various modules. I'll probably attempt a dual 259-style VCO next. These panels are:a Control Voltage Processor and Mixer (Fonik and CGS)
a Control Voltage 'Array' with Noise, Pulse, Mixer, S+H, Analog Shift Register (MFOS, CGS)
a Dual Band Pass Resonator, with mix (Fonik and CGS)
a Quad Low Pass Gate with Mixer (Fonik and CGS)
and a Quad Function Generator (Topp)"
see the thread for more.
it reminds me of a dream where things are similar to reality and yet endearingly different. lovely, people who either dream of or wake up to buchla might agree.
ReplyDeleteit's like an alternate Buchla universe :)
ReplyDeleteIt's sort of fun to imagine what the world might be like if Buchla had become the dominant synth paradigm instead of Moog.
ReplyDeleteI think we would all be driving hover-cars.
Chris Muir
It would be a multiple arbitrary world of uncertainty.
ReplyDeleteThe Buchla stuff seems great but if its really so great why isn't anyone making Euro Rack format modules of a similar design. I mean, there's like 187 versions of the Moog filter.
ReplyDeletePlan B & Doepfer come to mind. Wait, why am I answering this? Since when does greatness equal number of mass-produced copies? A lot more Moogs were produced back in the day, so more people were exposed to them. Plus, it was easy to make the jump from pianos & B3's to Moogs, and Moogs were a lot more commercial-music-friendly. The Moog filter is part of the pop music audio Zeitgeist. You can't do anything from "Here Comes the Sun" to "I Kissed a Girl and I Like It" without a Moog filter.
ReplyDeleteThe recorded showcase of Buchla music is a lot tinier, mainly because instead of going to a music store you had to enroll in a graduate composition program to get your hands on one. People whose lives were changed by hearing Morton Subotnick or the Columbia-Princeton crew make up a much smaller percentage of the population than people who got turned on to the Moog-laden tracks of Switched on Bach, Pink Floyd, Georgio Moroder, ELP, P-Funk, Madonna, Gary Numan, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Gershon Kingsley's "WGBH" logo, etc.
The Buchla thing is its own world. Touchplates, separation of audio, CV & pulses, different flavors of randomness, pingy vactrols. And, for the love of God, the physical layout of the modules.
Serge stuff is a hat-tip in terms of architecture, but the sound of a Buchla is unmistakeably its own marimba plucked rubber band vocal siren thing (or banjo, if the modules end in "e").
Oh wait, hang on. Buchla invented the analog sequencer. There are a couple ripoffs of that design, be it Eurotrash or the Moog 960.