Image: kenji1127

Saturday Synth Porn: A great shot of a vintage Buchla 100 modular synthesizer.

via the Synthtopia Flickr Group

This interview with electronic music pioneer Don Buchla is part of a series created by the Red Bull Music Academy.

Don Buchla
Buchla & Associates, San Francisco, USA

Description:

You all know about the Moog. But what about Don Buchla, the Californian synthesizer designer who’s Buchla Series 100 was released mere months after Dr. Moog’s first synth?

His electronic music equipment company, Buchla & Associates, were commissioned by avant garde composers Morton Subotnik and Ramon Sender to create something they could use in live performance – and since then he’s been creating and designing a whole range of unusual electro-acoustic instruments and deeply desirable modular synths. That includes the intriguing Marimba Lumina, the classic 1970 200 Series Electric Music Box or indeed the hot little analogue cutie, 1972s Music Easel. Buchla’s sonic toys combine a colorful aesthetic with supernatural sonic abilities. Genius alert!

This video, via Synthfool, captures a Buchla Series 100 modular synthesizer in action.

Per Buchla:

The Modular Electronic Music System is composed of functional modules, each designed to generate a particular class of signals or perform a specific type of signal processing. Each module is 7 inches high and 4 1/4 inches (or an integral multiple thereof) wide. Up to 25 modules sharing a single power supply may be assembled in a single cabinet to form a super-module.

The system employs three varieties of signals, each with a distinctly different function:

Audio signals, the raw material of electronic music, are formed by various sorts of generators (sine, square, sawtooth, harmonic) or are produced externally (tape loop, radio, microphone). In composing a piece, signals may be filtered, gated, mixed, modulated, or otherwise processed. A standard level of 0 dB (ref. 600 Ohms) is employed for audio signals within the system.

Control voltages, used to determine frequencies, envelope characteristics, amplitudes and other parameters, are generated by keyboards, programmable voltage sources and envelope generators. The standard control voltage range is from 0 to 15 volts.

Timing pulses are originated by keyboards, programmable sequencers, and pulse generators. They are used to trigger notes, open gates, or initiate chains of musical events. Timing pulses are about 15 volts in amplitude.

The rules for interconnecting are straight-forward. Any number of inputs may be connected to a single output. Timing pulse outputs may be paralleled and connected to one input. The system output may be derived from any module; output is of sufficient magnitude to drive line inputs on tape recorders or sensitive inputs on power amplifiers.

The Marimba Lumuna is a unique MIDI percussion instrument, designed by synth pioneer Don Buchla. Absolute Deviation recently purchased the remaining stock of Marimba Lumina parts from Nearfield Systems. 

Absolute Deviation was founded by long-time Buchla technician, Joel Davel. Joel has worked for Don Buchla since 1993. The company offers replacement chips and parts for the Marimba Lumina. It also plans to offer Marimba Lumina 2.5 & 3.5 models. Details are available at the Absolute Deviation site. 

Buchla and Associates has updated its website with full info on the Electric Music Box, Buchla Series 200e:

This year we’re celebrating 45 years of building bizarre electronic musical instruments. What better way to celebrate than to revisit some old instruments – namely the 200 series Electric Music Boxes, manufactured from 1970 to the mid ’80’s.

Why the 200 series?

Because it’s Don’s favorite synth, and he wants an updated version.

Updated how, you ask. Still straight analog synthesis. Still programmed with knobs, switches and patchcords. Same power supply voltages, same form factors. In fact, completely interchangeable with 200 series modules built in the ’70s.

But with some new twists.

For a few years we’ve been designing MIDI controllers (Thunder, Lightning, the Marimba Lumina, and the Piano Bar, among others). But our controllers couldn’t even talk to our own 200 series instruments (designed before MIDI was even dreamed of).

Situation rectified. Check out the new 225e. The top half is a full-blown MIDI interface that can relate every nuance of expression that your controller can produce to any aspect of the 200e’s sound palette.

The 225e’s bottom section addresses another shortcoming: how do we save a patch so that retrieval is instantaneous at some future time? Simple! Just push the store button, name the preset, and your preset is forever stashed.

Other improvements include internal MIDI buses, invisible supplies, high density modules, more voltage controlled parameters, the addition of a router for signals and control voltages, the merging of a swirler with the system interface, the addition of velocity to the dynamics manager, and a reworking of the output section of the complex oscillator.

Functionally new modules include an arbitrary function generator, a duophonic pitch class generator, a triple morphing filter, a multi-dimensional kinesthetic input port, and a pitch shifter / balanced modulator.

Select some modules, button them up in a 200e cabinet, and you’re off and running with the most sophisticated analog system ever built.

Here’s a list of the available modules for the Buchla 200e Electric Music Box:

• 201e Powered Cabinet/Box
• 206e Mixer / Preset Manager
• 210e Control and Signal Router
• 222e Multi Dimensional Kinesthetic Input Port
• 225e MIDI Decoder / Preset Manager
• 227e System Interface
• 250e Arbitrary Function Generator
• 255 Control Voltage Processor
• 256e Quad Control Voltage Processor
• 260e Duophonic Pitch Class Generator
• 261e Complex Waveform Generator
• 266e Source of Uncertainty
• 281e Quad Function Generator
• 285e Frequency Shifter / Balanced Modulator
• 291e Triple Morphing Filter
• 292e Quad Dynamics Manager
• 297 Infinite Phase Shifter

Buchla has introduced a new version of Don Buchla’s Lightning spatial MIDI controllers:

Lightning III features improvements in sensitivity, resolution, accuracy, and response time. Perhaps the biggest difference is in the addition of a third axis of sensitivity. Yes, Lightning now responds in all three directions, adding proximity to the horizontal and vertical dimensions brought to you by Lightning II.

As for appearance, not much change. The triangular remote sensor morphed to a rectangular shape; the control box stayed just about the same, and the wands are virtually identical.

Changes in software are minimal, the primary changes are to accommodate the third axis. The price is unchanged, remaining at $1995.

In the video above, Dr. Richard Scott “is suddenly attacked by a swarm of electronic mosquitos.” Fortunately, he had his Lightning MIDI controllers to wave them away.

via Matrix

Check out this short excerpt on Don Buchla, creator of the Buchla synthesizer:

One expects to discover little-known — sometimes painfully unknown — heroes in books like this, and Buchla is the Tape Music Center’s prime example. Gear heads and electronic composers know of him; there’s a great chance they’d be neither, if Buchla had not invented the equipment that was as vital to the center as any piece of music, given what it made possible. His creation is known as the Buchla box. To avoid having to run around from oscillator to oscillator trying to keep up pitch levels and reconcile the spatial relationships among various sound sources, Buchla found a way to house all these variables in one device. Classical music had entered the DIY age; anyone could compose, in theory, and dynamic wave shaping — one of the box’s many virtues — was as easy as twiddling a knob. Even the Hells Angels wanted in.

“They were a little bit associated with [Ken] Kesey’s bus and were involved in drug distribution,” Buchla informs Bernstein. “It all seemed fine to me. I got some interesting tapes from that source.”

A baffled co-interviewer asks Buchla if the Hells Angels were musicians.

“No, you don’t have to be a musician to make a tape,” Buchla responds, revealing one of the center’s key premises. You had to be a musician, or at least capable of thinking musically, to produce art. But this was a new age of musical expression, in which the long-sanctified precepts of classical repertory, with the conservatory and its exclusive trappings and exclusionary tendencies, came tumbling down. “I don’t know the background there,” Buchla concludes his commentary on Kesey’s motley crew. “I just showed up at the places with my instruments, took some acid, played some music.”

It looks like it should be a fascinating book.