Buchla

Buchlaïsms by Philippe Petit

Mod­ulisme is on a mis­sion to share-​publish music from like­minded cre­ative mod­u­lar­ists and help’em get some more ex­po­sure… But one has to bear in mind that be­hind each sound-​designer are those who in­vent, de­sign ma­chines or mod­ules aimed at be­com­ing our in­stru­ments. Those ge­niuses, es­sen­tial in help­ing to free our cre­ativ­ity, mo­ti­vated the launch­ing of ITA­TIOM (In­ven­tors Talk­ing About Their In­stru­ments Or Mod­ules whose name was whis­pered to me by the great Serge Tcherep­nin…).
When I de­cided to start a se­ries of por­traits deal­ing with those who are de­sign­ing mod­u­lar in­stru­ments, in­vent­ing what al­lows us to sculpt our « plas­tic sounds » my pri­or­ity was BUCHLA be­cause it is the brand which turned me on Mod­u­lar Syn­the­sis !!! Ac­quir­ing a Sys­tem 200 opened some new ways of com­pos­ing, new doors of per­cep­tion, whereas my Easel K to­tally meets my ap­proach to play­ing thanx to its im­me­di­acy being so close to the Turntab­lis­tic vis­ceral ap­proach I have been cham­pi­onning for decades.
A painter uses an easel to sup­port the can­vas on which he cre­ates his works, thus the Buchla Easel is the ideal sup­port to hold a can­vas on which I want to cre­ate sound paint­ings.
For a long time Don Buchla would sim­ply refuse to add a key­board to his in­stru­ments. Ac­cord­ing to him, the syn­the­sizer should be a tool for music and ex­per­i­men­tal mu­si­cians. A key­board would have been an in­vi­ta­tion to the con­ven­tional scale set… Buchla cer­tainly de­serves pri­or­ity be­cause of such think­ing out­side the box.

I wouldn’t call any­thing that I’ve built a syn­the­sizer. I first started de­sign­ing mem­bers of the elec­tronic fam­ily of in­stru­ments in 1962. My own in­ter­ests are in mov­ing away from any tra­di­tions. We’re tra­di­tion bound. We have con­cepts of what music is, and what is and what is not music. We have vir­tu­os­ity, that is per­for­mance tech­nique, de­vel­oped after years of study and cen­turies of tra­di­tion. We have in­stru­ments that have been re­fined and re­fined, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion. So music as we know it is rooted in a great deal of tra­di­tion, and is re­sis­tant to change on many lev­els: the in­stru­men­tal, the per­for­mance, and the lis­ten­ing lev­els.
I’m not well-​rooted in any of the tra­di­tions and I’d like to in­ves­ti­gate the sonic ex­pe­ri­ence in a very gen­eral way.

Don­ald Buchla used to in­vent elec­tronic music in­stru­ments. And though those in­stru­ments re­sem­ble what we know as syn­the­siz­ers, and work in much the same way, Buchla in­sisted that they are not syn­the­siz­ers. Each of his de­vices are part of the larger elec­tronic music in­stru­ment fam­ily. Elec­tronic in­stru­ments are a fam­ily of in­stru­ments, he claimed, just like the wind fam­ily, the brass fam­ily, or mem­bers of the string fam­ily:

I like to re­gard an in­stru­ment as con­sist­ing of three major parts: an input struc­ture that we con­tact phys­i­cally, an out­put struc­ture that gen­er­ates the sound, and a con­nec­tion be­tween the two. The elec­tronic fam­ily of in­stru­ments of­fers us the lim­i­ta­tion, if we ap­proach it tra­di­tion­ally, and the free­dom if we ap­proach it in a new way, of total in­de­pen­dence be­tween input and out­put. And in fact the ne­ces­sity of some way of gen­er­at­ing a con­nec­tion be­tween the two. Lan­guage be­comes an im­por­tant as­pect in the elec­tronic fam­ily of in­stru­ments, where it had played no part with all tra­di­tional acoustic in­stru­ments. The re­la­tion­ship be­tween input and out­put is fixed with tra­di­tional in­stru­ments; it’s to­tally flex­i­ble thanks to the rout­ing of the patch cords es­tab­lished by human in­tel­li­gence work­ing through so­phis­ti­cated elec­tron­ics. Therein lies the ex­cit­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of elec­tronic in­stru­ments: the in­stan­ta­neous remap­ping of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween input ges­ture and out­put re­sponse.

Don Buchla built his first in­stru­ment, the « Model 100 Se­ries’ Elec­tronic Music Sys­tem » in 1963 con­cen­trat­ing on the de­vel­op­ment of in­no­v­a­tive sounds rather than the per­for­mance of tra­di­tional melodies.
He was at the San Fran­cisco Tape Music Cen­ter and even if his name and in­stru­ments are not as widely known as those of Moog, Arp, or Prophet among those who know elec­tronic in­stru­ments, the name Buchla is syn­onym of the high­est qual­ity. He’s gen­er­ally cred­ited with ar­riv­ing at the volt­age con­trol mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer at the same time as Robert Moog.
Moog geared his in­stru­ments to­wards a bur­geon­ing pop­u­lar mar­ket which he orig­i­nated since his in­stru­ments were tai­lored to the ex­pressed needs of tra­di­tional mu­si­cians whereas Buchla, on the other hand, was a self-​proclaimed avant-​gardist and ex­per­i­men­tal­ist, and his in­stru­ments re­flect those con­cerns. He spoke of music in terms of lan­guage, ges­ture ori­en­ta­tion, and in­ter­ac­tive­ness ; didn’t seek the touch-​sensitivity of so many key­board syn­the­sists, but rather an al­most cy­ber­netic in­ter­face be­tween the body, mind, and in­stru­ment.

My first in­stru­ment was a de­vice that read the shape of the hand and in­ter­preted it as a wave­shape. It em­bod­ied the phi­los­o­phy that the in­stru­ment had to be highly in­ter­ac­tive with the human being who was play­ing it. It was a way of tran­scend­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of the in­stru­ments that I was ac­quainted with, which tended to be Hewlett-​Packard os­cil­la­tors, Ampex test equip­ment…

From its ori­gin Buchla’s ‘voltage-​controlled’ syn­the­sizer was a huge step for­ward that al­lowed com­posers to con­trol sounds in real time, or even con­nect to ex­ter­nal de­vices.
From then on to his last cre­ation (Marimba Lu­mina : a self-​contained in­stru­ment com­pris­ing sets of il­lu­mi­nated bars, pads and strips played using mal­lets. In­evitably, it had a few fa­cil­i­ties not avail­able on tra­di­tional marim­bas, in­clud­ing an in­ter­nal synth and the abil­ity to recog­nise which of four types of mal­let had struck any given bar, each hav­ing a dif­fer­ent, pro­gram­ma­ble ac­tion upon the sound) Don Buchla kept in­no­vat­ing and con­se­quently re­mains for­ever im­mor­tal thanx to the awe­some sounds emit­ting from his glo­ri­ous in­ven­tions.
Fur­ther­more his legacy is still going on thanx to Eric Fox who now runs Buchla USA, and Joel Davel de­sign­ing his mar­velous in­ven­tions.

Joel Davel, a well-​known per­cus­sion­ist ex­plor­ing the field of ad­ven­tur­ous music, writ­ing or per­form­ing for dance, con­tem­po­rary en­sem­bles or other lu­mi­nar­ies such as Paul Dresher, Terry Riley, Fred Frith, Alvin Cur­ran as well as many younger com­posers or cham­ber group… Eric Fox and him have replied to our ques­tions.
As an in­stru­ment builder, Davel is known as a tech­ni­cian and col­lab­o­ra­tor of over 20 years with the late elec­tronic mu­si­cal in­stru­ment pi­o­neer, Don Buchla de­vel­op­ing unique music con­trollers (such as Thun­der, Light­ning, Marimba Lu­mina, Piano Bar) and the 200e se­ries mod­ules. This also led to per­for­mance op­por­tu­ni­ties with Don Buchla.

Davel did all of Don’s cir­cuit board lay­out after 1995 and now keeps up the tra­di­tion under a new regime.

« I’ll give you a “vir­tual Don” reply.  Dis­claimer: Vir­tual Don is not Don.  It’s the Don in Joel’s head.  Some of these are quotes as I re­mem­ber them, but not ver­ba­tim.  It’s a clue to his think­ing even if some of the an­swers are ac­tu­ally longer than his no­to­ri­ously short re­sponses to in­ter­view ques­tions. »
— Joel

Where, when and how did you first be­come ac­quainted with mod­u­lar syn­the­sis?

vir­tual Don: Call it what you like, it doesn’t mat­ter much any­more, but I wasn’t a fan of the word syn­the­sis.  That sug­gested some­thing syn­thetic — a bad im­i­ta­tion (sug­gest­ing the im­i­ta­tion of an acoustic in­stru­ment.). I cre­ated in­stru­ments made up of mod­ules. 

How did you end up in­vent­ing/de­sign­ing mod­ules?

vD: Mor­ton Sub­ot­nick asked and it sounded like an in­ter­est­ing idea…

When did that hap­pen?
When did you build and/or de­sign your first sys­tem?

vD: 1963-1965 ! 
Per­haps Bob Moog had an ear­lier mod­ule, I don’t know.  But Bob told Mort I had the first full sys­tem. 
He hadn’t thought of that yet.

What was the ef­fect of that dis­cov­ery on your life?

vD: In 1963 I kept de­sign­ing other things such as the ORB, which was a mo­bil­ity aid that stood for “Op­ti­cal Rang­ing for the Blind.”  I like de­vices that give peo­ple free­dom to do what they want.  Hang­ing out with artists and peo­ple who were in­ter­ested in human per­cep­tion was more stim­u­lat­ing than any­thing else I could think of.

Do you com­pose or per­form music — or don’t you have time to do so?

vD: Yes. When­ever I could spare the time I’d cre­ate mu­si­cal ad­ven­tures with friends.

Quite often mod­u­lar­ists are in need for more, their hunger for new mod­ules is never sat­is­fied? How do you ex­plain that?

vD: Cu­rios­ity. Or maybe they don’t know how to use what they have.

What has been your most pop­u­lar de­sign (or de­signs), and why do you think it (or they) be­came so suc­cess­ful?

vD: The 200 se­ries. I’m a “de­signer.” I could de­sign your house.
Joel adds: So you are say­ing you were a com­plete de­signer and so they cap­ti­vated peo­ple be­cause the mod­ules are func­tion­ally and vi­su­ally thought out and work to­gether as a sys­tem — a com­plete in­stru­ment, yes?
vD: You could say that.
Joel adds: And they were often sold to in­sti­tu­tions like uni­ver­si­ties, so some­times they were more suc­cess­ful in in­flu­enc­ing young artists and com­posers than they were com­mer­cial suc­cesses, yes?
vD: That’s prob­a­bly true

Which do you pre­fer for mod­ule de­sign and / or use – ana­logue, dig­i­tal or hy­brid?

vD: What­ever works.  I pre­fer to give users more con­trol, so that usu­ally in­volves mi­cro­con­trollers.
Joel adds: You were a pi­o­neer in in­te­grat­ing dig­i­tal com­po­nents in your sys­tems as early as the 1970’s, so this in­te­gra­tion has never re­ally been an issue for you, no?
vD: No. But I sup­pose I wouldn’t have to hire a pro­gram­mer.

What sys­tem do you dream of build­ing?

vD: A trans­ducer that turns thought into ac­tion.

Which pi­o­neers of mod­u­lar syn­the­sis in­flu­enced you, and why?

vD: Leon Theremin had a lot of good ideas.

Do you feel close to other mak­ers and/or de­sign­ers? If so, which ones?

vD: Bob’s a friend. Though we are both gone now.

What have you been work­ing on lately, and do you have any up­com­ing mod­ules?

vD: You’ll never know. But I’m def­i­nitely work­ing on some­thing wher­ever I am.

Could you please share a playlist of some of your fa­vorite com­posers/al­bums using your in­stru­ments

vD: No.

Eric you used to run Fox­tone which was sell­ing mod­ules, how come that you de­cided to move on to dis­trib­ut­ing Buchla only?

Eric Fox: After hav­ing some suc­cess in the re­tail mar­ket with Fox­tone, I started a sis­ter com­pany called Black Mar­ket where I would work with some brands be­hind the scenes to help them grow and get ex­po­sure along with some of my own prod­ucts under the name. While that side started to also see suc­cess, I saw more and more re­tail stores start to pop up and I found my­self re­ally en­joy­ing fo­cus­ing my en­ergy on prod­uct/brand de­vel­op­ment and work­ing with the re­tail­ers over the hus­tle of fight­ing for cus­tomer dol­lars. In 2015 when my son was born, I knew I wanted to get away from work­ing re­tail be­cause it was re­quir­ing my at­ten­tion nearly around the clock… and at that time I re­ally wanted my evenings and week­ends back so I could be a good hus­band and fa­ther. With the suc­cess of Black Mar­ket I started to phase out sell­ing every brand that I wasn’t a part­ner of. There how­ever was one brand that I de­cided to keep even though I was merely a dealer. Buchla. I had be­come such a go-to guy for that brand that it felt like I ac­tu­ally was a part of it al­ready. Around that same time there was some…let’s say…dis­con­nect within the in­fra­struc­ture that had pre­vi­ously been work­ing within Buchla. Since I was so en­trenched with those guys on a per­sonal level, I would see this and pe­ri­od­i­cally bug them about how I felt how it could (and should) be made bet­ter. Of course my per­sis­tence paid off in 2017 and the op­por­tu­nity came for me to be of­fi­cially an owner, blow the whole thing up, and then get to work fig­ur­ing out how to put the pieces back to­gether and re­claim Buchla’s place in his­tory. No pres­sure 🙂

Could you tell us about the new Buchla USA? How many peo­ple work with you?

Eric Fox: While our lead de­signer Joel Davel (Don’s right-​hand-man since the early 90’s) and most pro­duc­tion is in the SF Bay area, my of­fice is in Min­neapo­lis where cur­rently four of us work. Here is where the gear comes in from pro­duc­tion and goes through final test­ing/pack­ag­ing/ship­ping with the hi­lar­i­ous Marc Doty. We also han­dle re­pairs and tech sup­port from an up-​and-coming young woman named Ash­ley Puente. Ad­di­tional de­sign­ing/en­gi­neer­ing/pro­gram­ming/me­chan­i­cal with the tal­ented Charles See­holzer who just moved here last sum­mer after being in­volved pre­vi­ously with Buchla under the wing of Joel and Don’s pro­gram­mer, Dar­ren Gibbs.
So I guess there is about 5 of us at the mo­ment in­volved day-​to-day… but don’t for­get there are part-​time pro­gram­mers and de­vel­op­ers we work or col­lab­o­rate with like Dave from Cat­a­lyst Audio (eu­ro­rack), Jon from the Human Com­para­tor (100 se­ries re-​issue), and many artists who con­sult and beta test like Todd Bar­ton, Suzanne Ciani, Mor­ton Sub­ot­nick or Kait­lyn Au­re­lia Smith. I’m very grate­ful for the out­pour­ing of sup­port and those who be­lieve in what we’re try­ing to ac­com­plish.

Do you plan to offer kits and or builds of clas­sic mod­ules from the 100 and 200 se­ries?

Eric Fox: DIY is def­i­nitely planned for the 100 se­ries re-​issue with our part­ner in crime, The Human Com­para­tor.
200 DIY is a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult and up in the air. Many of those are very com­plex mod­ules to build and It’s most im­por­tant to Buchla that users get the best ex­pe­ri­ence pos­si­ble when using our in­stru­ments!

What is the fu­ture of Buchla 200e mod­u­lar sys­tems? Can we ex­pect new and ex­cit­ing mod­ules?

Eric Fox: 200e is ab­solutely still our flag­ship. While yes we are bring­ing back some clas­sic in­stru­ments, we also un­der­stand that ul­ti­mately we’re a com­pany that has to look for­ward and con­tinue to be in­no­v­a­tive.

Are you de­sign­ing new mod­ules, new in­stru­ments? How do you man­age to main­tain Don Buchla’s legacy…?

Eric Fox: We’re al­ways work­ing on some­thing! The ex­cit­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing thing is that we’re work­ing on a LOT right now. Of course the new 208C / Easel Com­mand that Joel de­signed is about to start hit­ting the streets. Then we’ve got the 100 se­ries re-​issue that I hope to have ship­ping later this year along with start­ing on the 200 re-​issue. While those are the things I can talk about, we’re also work­ing on some new things since it cer­tainly just can’t be about purely re­vis­it­ing the past. We are in fact de­vel­op­ing some new 200e mod­ules! I can’t talk any specifics, but now that Joel has fin­ished up the 208C, he is going to start fo­cus­ing on new mod­ules…
Buchla has and al­ways will ul­ti­mately be about in­no­va­tion. One foot in the past and one foot in the fu­ture. A rel­a­tively well-​known Buchla As­so­ciate told me after hear­ing about us plan­ning on doing some re-​issues to “Don’t stop mak­ing weird shit”. That’s some­thing I feel strongly about and I think he felt a sense of re­lief when I told him that I had no in­ten­tion of break­ing away from that at­ti­tude. While some of our of­fer­ings may have some main­stream ap­peal, it al­lows us to not worry about tak­ing chances on a unique home-​brew de­sign we might only sell 25 of.

I think the best way I can help main­tain Don’s “legacy” (at least in re­gards to his de­signs) is to con­tinue on the path I’ve cre­ated by sur­round­ing my­self as much as pos­si­ble with those that were close to him. I’m so grate­ful to those who be­lieve that my in­ten­tions are good and truly want to see his art live on. My focus is on re­spect­ing the mu­si­cal in­stru­ment art­work of Buchla and con­tin­u­ing to move for­ward with the help of those who knew him best and truly em­brace the ethos of what it was about. Even some of those most crit­i­cal of the com­pany mov­ing for­ward have reached out and know they are free to share their thoughts. I take them se­ri­ously and As­so­ciates are al­ways wel­come and en­cour­aged to bend my ear. I would never learn any­thing if every­one just told me things were per­fect every day. As far as Don the per­son goes, those sto­ries and pro­jec­tions about his life will not be com­ing from me and are best told by his friends and fam­ily. I’m just blessed to be a pseudo cu­ra­tor for his art­work so that oth­ers and fu­ture gen­er­a­tions can ap­pre­ci­ate it.

https://buchla.com

Look­ing to in­ves­ti­gate fur­ther the Buch­lian ap­proach my fa­vorite ressource is The M.E.M.S. Project whose focus is to pre­serve the old sys­tems, re­verse en­gi­neer­ing mod­ules and mak­ing pe­riod ac­cu­rate repli­cas, from the ground up in hope to learn from it in a new way. The orig­i­nal boards being hand traced, scanned, and then re­traced in CAD soft­ware to trans­late the board lay­outs to ger­ber files, so fab­ri­ca­tion can be achieved. Pe­riod ac­cu­rate parts are used when avail­able to em­u­late the cir­cuit to the best of their abil­i­ties so that it stays avail­able.

https://www.mem­spro­ject.info/

When it comes to ex­plain­ing the Buch­lian syn­the­sis or the Buch­lid­ian par­a­digms Todd Bar­ton is our very best ressource.

https://tod­dbar­ton.com/2014/12/don-​buchla-musical-genius/

Highly in­ter­est­ing pod­cast de­voted to pro­mot­ing the brand…
https://source­o­funcer­tainty.pod­bean.com

For a few years Synth_Thomas has been op­er­at­ing in France, build­ing or re­pair­ing syn­the­siz­ers, de­sign­ing cus­tom cir­cuit/kit and show­ing so much in­ven­tiv­ity

https://www.in­sta­gram.com/p/CQI8qdMhEcW/?hl=fr
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https://www.in­sta­gram.com/p/CPQvzwRB83W/?hl=fr
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https://www.in­sta­gram.com/p/B-IC_cUq0rI/?hl=fr
and
https://www.in­sta­gram.com/p/B7BNoP­bI­ueh/?hl=fr

Porta­bellabz is run by Con­stan­tin Pa­pa­geor­giadis who has been of­fer­ing the very best ex­pan­sion pos­si­bil­i­ties to the Easel… My fa­vorite being the VCS3 one with orig­i­nal EMS Syn­thi A and VCS3 cir­cuits, A MUST HAVE !
http://www.porta­bellabz.be

1979 of­fers Buchla-​format syn­the­sizer mod­ules.
https://1979.ws/mod­ules/

I shall rec­om­mend the « Triple Sub­lime Assheater » mod­ule which Meta­sonix adapted to the Buchla for­mat which is of­fer­ing some very in­ter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties to change/alter your typ­i­cal “Buchla sound”.
http://www.meta­sonix.com/index.php/4u-​modules-new

Music speaks louder than words so here are 2 demos from yours truly…

https://sound­cloud.com/philippepetit/turn-​on-metasonix-defrost-the-world
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https://sound­cloud.com/philippepetit/buchlasonix-​groove