"... some industry veterans (including Michael Marans, former Keyboard tech editor) have acquired Buchla & Associates, with Don Buchla now acting as Chief Technology Officer for a new company, Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments. They have some really exciting plans for new products that Don's wanted to do for a long time, and now has the resources to do so."
I checked with a source and this one just might be true. No formal announcement on the Buchla site. Note this is speculation until confirmation.
This one in via Soviet Space Child.
"At the 2012 NAMM Show, several interesting announcements were made about electronic music legend Don Buchla, above, and the future of his electronic music instruments:
His company, Buchla & Associates, has been acquired by a group of investors, who are creating a new company Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments. Buchla wil be the Chief Technology Officer of the new company. The organizational change will bring design, manufacturing, sales and marketing resources to Buchla. The intent is that, by freeing Buchla from some of these areas, he’ll be able to spend more time to ‘introduce more innovations in music technology’, expand the Buchla product line into new areas and make his instruments available to a wider range of musicians.
Buchla also introduced a new modular synthesizer, the Buchla Skylab. The Buchla Skylab is a compact and slightly more affordable configuration of the Buchla 200e modular line.
Finally, Buchla announced that, after 50 years of not making a keyboard for his synthesizer [Buchlas aren't known for piano style keyboards, but he did have polyphonic keyboards with velocity and aftertouch in 1971 - 237/238 in 1971, touche in 1979 and the 406 in 1983 - see the Buchla 406 here.], that there will finally be a Buchla Keyboard controller. The Buchla Keyboard is currently in early stages, but don’t plan on it being a standard control keyboard. Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments expects to release a keyboard design that is as different from other keyboard controllers as its modular synthesizer is from other modulars."
Update 1/26/2012 via Ross Healy of Vicmod:
"The 3 owners are Aussies all working in the music equipment business and huge synth lovers. Lewis Chiodo, John Fuller, Danny Olesh are the new owners of Buchhla Electronic Instruments. Michael Marans is CEO in the US. Their intention with Buchla Electronic Instruments is to keep the brand as cool as it has been in the past allowing Don to do what he excels at ( creating/ designing). I have no doubt this will be a brilliant future for our beloved Buchla and Don/ Ezra etc. I have known Lewis for 12 years and believe me this guys LOVES synths/ playing synths since he was age 5."
Marans was at NAMM five or so years ago working at the Waldorf booth discussing the Stromberg and clearly didn't know what he was talking about. It was like he'd barely even read the proposed specs list. I hope he was just having a bad day, and things go better with Buchla.
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