Some pics from the
Buchla booth. Click on them for the super size shots. Note the first two are from my Canon Rebel T2i and the rest are from my iPhone 4S as the battery on the Canon ran out.
Featured at the booth were the 200e system and of course the new Buchla Music Easel, The Electric Music Box. The design of the Music Box is essentially the same as the original, and will actually come with a reprint of the original manual pictured below. The last image in this post is of Don Buchla, the man himself.
I had a little hands on with the new Easel and lets just say out of every synth I tried at NAMM this year, this is the one that made me feel the most like a little kid in a candy shop. It brought back that sense of childlike wonder you rarely get when you've become extremely familiar with most forms of synthesis. For those of you not familiar with the Buchla paradigm, although there is overlap with traditional subtractive synthesis, the approach is different. Buchla's systems invite you to explore sound in a way that you might not on standard OSC to Mixer to Filter designs. Instead of attempting to re-create specific and often somewhat predictable sounds, these systems are more like electronic sound labs. This might sound silly, and I mentioned it to Don, but his systems remind me of what you might have thought synthesizers were when you were a child or when you were first introduced to synthesis - magical boxes that allow you to morph and explore sound rather than a keyboard that emulates known instruments.
The more you become familiar with the standard building blocks of synthesis (oscillators, filters, envelopes, LFOs) the more predictable it becomes. The focus tends to be more about creating or targeting a specific sound and then playing notes with that sound. Not so much on a Buchla. Yes you can play tonal music on a Buchla, but for me, and definitely on the Music Easel, the experience was more about exploring the entire system and the manipulation of sound over time. Yes you can approach other feature rich synths in the same way, but the Buchla just leads you there. This is why people that love Buchla are willing to shell out more for them. If you are curious about why that is, I encourage you to check out the
Buchla website, and of course the Buchla label below to see what others are doing with their systems. Keep an open mind. Buchlas are all about synthesis and the manipulation of sound. They were
originally designed for the composers of Musique Concrete.
