the synth that
refused the piano
when bob moog was selling his synthesizer to keyboard players in new york, don buchla was in berkeley making the opposite argument. why a piano keyboard? why fixed pitches? why scales at all?his synths had touch plates, source-of-uncertainty random voltage, complex oscillators with FM built in, lowpass gates instead of separate filters and amps. this room is buchla's argument as an interface.
two coasts, two ideas
moog built the synth as an extension of the keyboard tradition. buchla built it as a rejection of it. by 1967, when subotnick made silver apples of the moon on a 200-series buchla, the machine was already philosophically opposite to a moog: no keyboard, no presets you'd actually save, no fixed pitches, lots of random voltage, an interface that demanded you patch your own signal path.
the lowpass gate is the hero. on a moog, the VCF (filter) and VCA (amp) are separate, each with its own envelope. on a buchla, they're combined: one envelope opens both at once. so a "bonk" happens when the LPG snaps open and shut — bright when loud, dark when quiet. you can't disconnect the two. it sounds like nothing else and you can't fake it on a subtractive synth.
suzanne ciani turned this rejection into a career. she made every commercial sound effect you remember from 1980s television on this thing — coca-cola pours, AT&T jingles, atari boot-up sounds. live performances were her playing the patch cables.
try this: load silver-apples, hit the DRONE plate, then turn RANDOM up to 100%. don't touch anything else for 30 seconds. that's the buchla compositional ethos: set up a system, let it play itself.
the people on the machine
don buchla refused the keyboard. touch plates, source-of-uncertainty, complex oscillators. west-coast synthesis became a philosophy more than a sound — and a radically different lineage of musicians.
go listen
first record commissioned for vinyl by a record label that was made entirely on a synthesizer. all 200-series buchla. listen to how the rhythm and the timbre evolve at the same time — that's source of uncertainty doing its job.
ciani's live performances on a 200 series, recorded but unreleased for 40 years. zero presets — every patch built live with cables.
modern west-coast palette. a buchla music easel doing things subotnick wouldn't have imagined.