Dan Slater's Buchla Pages

Dave sent in the following links to Dan Slater's Buchla pages. Note the URLs are web archive. I tried going to the original URLs and they are gone.

site one
site two

Interesting note by Reed in the comments:
"Not long ago a 60-something rocket scientist visited my studio, looked at the Buchla & said, "that looks like what we used to simulate missile flights!" He said even after digital computers became the mainstay, the analog computers were much more accurate and a lot more intuitive to program. In his opinion, the digital ones took over because it was a lot quicker to recall earlier simulations... no messy patchcords, etc., but at the same time a lot of finesse was lost.

Sound familiar?"

Buchla - New Flickr Shots

Ezra Buchla by javan.


My sanctuary by ica~icarus.



Buchla 200 Touch Surface Controller by antfactor

Turning a Fixed Filter Bank Into a Modulated Filter

JH posted the following to AH. He gave me the ok to put it up here. Title link takes you to a 7M WAV. Enjoy.

"I've just finished an experiment of using two Frequency Shifters to turn a Fixed Filter Bank into something animated, modulated.

A drone sound from the OB-8 is sent to a first Frequency Shifter, which shifts the audio signal up by a variable amount of Hz.

This upshifted signal is sent thru a filter bank (MAM vocoder, with a rather thin-sounding setting with all even channels up and all odd channels down.

This filtered signal is shifted back down with a second Frequency Shifter, by the same amount of Hz that the original signal was shifted up.

First you hear the very thin sounding unshifted signal - just the OB-8 drone processd by the vocoder filter bank.

Then we start to modulate the Frequency Shifter with the Joystick.

link ( 7 MByte - I tried mp3, but it was no good)

Please note that there is no filter modulation! The filter is fixed all the time (static formant filter) - it's the signal that is modulated!

Sorry for the rather low quality of the unmodulated sound - I just made this experiment at 1 am after finishing the hardware. :)

Background about this project: link


Let me know if you have ideas what else could be processed with this. I'll certainly try reverb, and all kinds of fixed filters.

JH."

Voyetra 8 Soundbits

Title link takes you to a 1.5M zip of Voyetra 8 samples sent my way via Dr. Georg Müller.

Update via the comments (source found):
"Tony Clark did those. link."

Dr. Georg Müller mentioned he did not remember where he got them from and they were not his.

What is this?

Ross sent me the following:

"I recorded these 2 tracks off the radio in the mid 80s, and have no idea who it is...can you pass on this web address to see if anyone can help me solve the 25 year puzzle?"

After listening to them I'm actually curious myself. If you know please post in the comments.

Live 6?

Title link takes you to some screens you can click on for more details before they were pulled. Via Didier. Also check out CDM.

Update on the Stolen Buchla

Previous post. More details:

"You may have heard, but the College's beautiful Easel was stolen sometime around the 29th or 30th of June from it's studio. This instrument had etching and a steel label fixed to the power-supply cover. It was stolen without it's cover.

We are looking into a suspicious person who showed up to take my summer class. A Ben Katz from California, who claimed to have a Roland 100 and an AKS from 'estate sales' was here for the week, and disappeared the same day as the Easel. We have the campus police seeking him. If you have any information or hear of any easels on the market, it may be ours. If anyone knows of this person, please forward information to me or campus police 360 867 6832 atten Pam Garland garlandp (at) evergreen.edu

Please distribute this information to any and all possible places to help us recover this instrument. I have been teaching with it for nearly 30 years, and cannot believe it has been stolen."

Thanks

Peter Randlette
The Evergreen State College
LIB1402 TESC
Olympia, WA 98505
360 867 6279
pbr (at) evergreen.edu

WMS 1020A Analog Sequencer

Title link takes you to more shots pulled from this auction.
"1970s vintage WMS model 1020A analog sequencer, serial #D10218, and accompanying power module #100-D. This unit is in very nice to excellent used cosmetic condition and 100% fully functional plug-and-play condition. All jacks on the unit are 1/4" and it runs on 117V US voltage. WMS (i.e. Wasatch Music Systems) was a very small 1970s US company and I believe they were based out of Utah.

This unit is so incredibly rare that I haven't ever seen another for sale, though I'm guessing they made at least 17 others... my logic being that the serial numbers likely started at 1020x (due to 1020 being the model number). It's very cool and very flexible. It has many of the features of the great Arp Sequencer like random mode, a voltage controlled clock that can be normalled to the second voltage row and individual outputs for each row with parallel and serial mode. Serial mode is particularly cool on this one because the A/B outputs both flipflop at the end of the row (with LEDs!) so both outputs functionally serially and opposite each other. Though it is missing a couple of important features of the Arp (quantizer and gate busses) it has a few bonuses of its own, like the negative voltage outputs, switchable V-trig / S-trig gate output to drive pretty much any kind or brand of synth with cv/gate inputs, and of course 2 extra steps per row. And it is much smaller than the Arp Sequencer. All jacks are 1/4" and the "Carry" output is a reset trigger output so you can use it to restart your other sequencers in your setup. Other functions should be fairly self-explanatory if you've used analog sequencers before. One thing that's a little weird at first is that both voltage rows are at zero when they the knob marker is on the line... this means that zero for Row A is at 6 o'clock while zero on Row B is at 12 o'clock. Oh, and check out the killer fake wood (plastic) end cheeks with relief WMS logo on them!"

Jamming with Roger Manning Jr. on YouTube

via ben shannon illustrator.

PAiA Fatman Plus

This one in via Brian Comnes. More pics here.
Update via Steve in the comments:

"Hey, that's mine. You should see the original which that was rebuilt from. A nice, rusty metal box, but it all was unlabeled and it didn't actually work."

http://www.nuxx.net

Another update via Steve:
"Sorry, took me a bit to reply. I just added a switch to sync the VCOs, the subharmonic generator(s), the new case, and a couple of other things. I figured that made it a 'Plus' to the current synth. I wanted to keep the original name since it's still very clearly a FatMan, but I wanted to differentiate it somehow.

-Steve"