Description
This system is a complex and sophisticated modular synthesiser featuring original Buchla 200 series modules from the 1970’s, Buchla 200e modules from the 2000’s and a few clones from Verbos and Sputnik. Unlike any other instrument in the MESS collection. This is where you will come face to face with electronics of the psychedelic kind. Along with Robert Moog’s Moog synthesizer, Buchla helped revolutionize the way electronic music and sound is made. Buchla’s original modular electronic music system was the result of a San Francisco Tape Music Center commission by composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick in 1963. Subotnick envisioned a voltage-controlled instrument that would allow musicians and composers to create sounds suited to their own specifications, and Buchla designed a modular system that made it possible. The 100 modular series was installed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1965 and later modules were offered through the musical instruments division of CBS. The Buchla 200 series replaced the previous model in 1970 and represented a significant advance in technology. Almost every parameter can be controlled from an external control voltage.
Throughout the 70s, Buchla went on to experiment with digital designs and computer controlled systems and in 2004 he returned to full-blown modular design, with the hybrid 200e system, which uses digital microprocessors and converts to analogue signals compatible with the original 100 and 200 series modules. One significant difference between Buchla’s approach and that of Bob Moog was his separation of the signals used in synthesis into three distinct classes. First, there were the audio signals, which could be generated by oscillators, or injected into the system from devices such as microphones or tape machines. Secondly, there were the control voltages.
Finally, there were timing pulses, which we nowadays call clocks, gates, and triggers. By today’s standards, the audio levels were quite low (about 1V peak-to-peak) and the CVs and pulses were rather hot, with a maximum voltage of around 15V, but the strangest thing about them was that Buchla used different types of sockets for each class, so that you couldn’t interconnect them. In contrast, Moog saw every signal as simply a signal, without differentiation, and it was this approach that would later become the overriding model of analogue, subtractive synthesis.
