OK, I'm not a Buchla expert, but I can see an immediate reason it was hard to do "Carlos music" on them. The VCOs have NO straight 1V/Oct inputs! On the dual 258s, there are 2 exponential FM ins (both on reversing attentuators, with a coarse AND a fine adjustment) and on the linear FM. just a straight attenuator. I suppose the thinking was to use the combination of Coarse/Fine attenuators to get to 1V/Oct, but this is a doomed operation. The actual circuitry is a straight-forward 726 heater expo converter, a hand selected hi-frequency track resistor (about 3M) with LM741 CV mixers (ugh). It's obvious from looking at 1/2 of the modules that Buchla loved the military surplus stores :) The boards are a hodge-podge of decent 1% RN resistors mixed with carbon comp. The VCO trimmers are not precision, but cheesy ones. Every board uses different transistors. Trimmers are use in some modules (the frequency shifter has like 8 of them), but I guess I'm not into the 'West Coast Sound'. I think a 1V/Oct input with a 10-turn trim would be nice.....and knowing Don, he probably did this *on purpose* to cause 'interaction' to 'find your own center of VCO happiness'. Whatever :) I would have use a switched pot, so that you had a choice of fixed or variable tracking. Guess they were out that day when he went shopping :) Paul S. break time
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Buchla VCOs
2003-06-07 by Paul Schreiber
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