[sdiy] Fw: Re: New Buchla! [a nice story from the nord modular list]

[nN AAt e e]

this was posted by Howard Moscovitz of http://www.electro-music.com ... it's
a nice little story.

> I used to work for Don Buchla in 1972. My job, one of them, was wireing
> up modules that looked exactly like these. What memories! Don had HUGE
> Buchla 200 system set up in the main room of his factory with a quad
> sound array. I would spend hours setting up self-playing patches (the
> word "noodle" wasn't used in those days) on that system. There would be
> sounds spinning around the room because there were modules that made
> this kind of thing pretty easy to do. Sometimes the patches would play
> for days in the background because nobody would mess them up (most
> people that worked for Don at the time weren't musicians, at least not
> electronic musicians. I think many of them were into guitars, banjos,
> and rock music). Then, spontainoulsy,  Don would unplug everything in
> order to patch in some new prototype he was working on. I was pretty
> attached to those patches and it was painful to hear them be pulled
> appart.. After he was finished testing, the synth would sit there for a
> while and I'd get to build another noodle. When I would finish, he'd
> stand and listen for a few minutes. Usually he would nod - he rarely
> said anything. What fun. I dreamed of a way to save the patches though.
>
> One day he came in with a new delay line module he made from newly
> available bucket brigate memory chips. These were the first CCD chips.
> The clock was of course voltage controlled. He messed around for a few
> hours and called me over an said, "What do you think?". Well, all I
> heard was some Beethoven playing. It sounded like Beethoven, pretty good
> fidelity; I didn't see that there was anything to think. I said, "Oh,
> well, I like Beethoven, I guess, but Bach is my favorite." Then he
> pulled out a patch cord that was sweeping the clock with a sawtooth and
> the pitch dropped several semitones. I about fell over. That was the
> first time I had ever heard real-time transposition. It was an electric
> moment for me. Suddenly all kinds of possibilities were created. I
> congratulated him for being the first to develop this. He acted like ti
> was not a was a big deal. This was years before Eventide or anyone had
> this on the market. He is amazingly modest. I played with that module
> for hours before he took it from me in order to hack it up for
> improvments. He was working on circuits to make one violin sound like a
> whole section. We were working on a project called the Electric Symphony
> Orchestra, but that's another story.
>
> Oh, sorry for going off down memory lane. This topic has a big impact on
> me.
>
> --Howard

http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=19518#19518