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Comments
@BroCoast That's a regular bump for me too!
Always love network news coverage of counterculture shenanigans. Reminds me of sex education VHS's at school
Yep and if you know how to program a DX7 and then look at a Buchla 100 series that often came with 6 sine/saw oscillators well it's easy to see why I say the DX7 is in a way an evolution of Buchla. People don't know that Yamaha engineers were aware of Buchla and that it influenced their instruments.
The Synthi 100 had linear FM input like Buchla? I don't know much other than the VCS3
@BroCoast @Max23
I have the good fortune to get up close and personal with a VCS3 on a regular basis through a client. The Matrix allows for FM but I believe it's exponential FM much like many of the other modular and semi-modular synths of it's day. FM wasn't part of the design strategy for the instrument in the same way as it was with Buchla, but the Matrix allows so much patching freedom, that audio rate modulation became something of a goto use case for many.
The user manual makes no mention of audio rate modulation or FM, the closet is gets is when describing the built in Ring Modulator (link for the manual below).
Through the years the VCS3 has garnered a reputation for being hard to tame (many say it's only real raison d'etre is wacky sound design). In reality it's not so hard to program but many find it hard to get their head round the matrix. For my money, it's a far more musical beast than most give it credit.
For what it's worth, Arturia have made a killer facsimile with their Synthi emulation.
https://encyclotronic.com/synthesizers/ems/ems-vcs3-the-putney-r222/
http://dl.lojinx.com/analoghell/EMSVCS3-UserManual.pdf
I've been noodling this evening with one of my favourite FM tools, the Intellijel Rubicon. Intellijel certainly weren't the first to design a through-zero FM oscillator, but they definitely created one of my favourites.
And pairing it with Mutable's Clouds is such a rich vein to tap.
Saw the the news on the Buchla 700 inspired synth earlier this year. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. Considering there where so few physical units made, it's going to be near impossible to assess how successful the emulation is. The FAQ links to a few underwhelming track examples but it seems the developer Jonathan Schatz worked for Buchla for a few years on 200e era systems.
This link is interesting as it's a launch event for the 700 and includes sound examples and an interview with Don.
https://archive.org/details/OTG_1988_03_21
If he has the skinny on the 259e Twisted Waveform Generator's approach to waveshaping things get very interesting indeed!
However, the developer states in the FAQ:
He's not using any of the original source code, so it will be interesting to see if he manages to capture the essence of the 259e's waveshaping tonality (apparently, it's the same algorithms in the 700 as in the 259 and 259e). As was mentioned earlier in this thread, it's the Buchla approach to waveshaping that often provides much of the individual sonic signature in Buchla devices. Even if the developer gets that wrong, a 12 voices, 4 operator FM synth with waveshaping and editable wavetables is a compelling architecture. Really hope it doesn't end up as vaporware.
@jonmoore : re:waveshaping; as I understand it, the schematics for Buchla's analog circuits were made available when he released his synths. I realize that doesn't apply to the 259e and the 700.
There is a paper by an NI honcho about digital techniques for replicating it.
It is a shame that there hasn't been more interest by developers in applying his approach. There are umpteen million pretty good implementations of Moog-style ladder filter but very few (and none on iOS that I know of) implementations of Buchla's wavefolding. Which has such a special character.
Apparently Softube nails the 259e. The ArturiaEasel sounds pretty good but doesn't quite nail the wavefolding (though it does sound really nice)
It's a lot harder to emulate digitally. Also there are a million circuit diagrams/math analyses of Moog style filters out there (there's literally a github where you can download all the public domain algorithms for it), whereas there's nothing really like that for Buchla. Though I did find a nice paper on the Buchla low pass gate.
I have no idea whether the iVCS3 nails the VCS3 sound not owning one (though given how crappy the construction of those things are, I would expect two VCS3s to sound pretty different as well), but I do think it's a great analog modelled synth. There are some little details that it just does right.
Sure, don't have an original to compare. But it sounds/feels like an analog synth, even if it maybe doesn't sound like a VCS3. The filters for example, and also the way that modulating oscillators sounds.
As I mentioned Buchla's analog schematics are out there. You can find some discussions out there of people debating whether certain resistor and diode values are correct. But if think the pool afficionados of the Buchla wavefolding sound is probably orders of magnitude smaller than people that are familiar with the sound of Moog's filters. Even among professional synthesists and sound designers people are surprisingly ignorant...often treating wavefolding as if all wavefolding sounds more or less the same.
I suppose there is more than just having a schematic in hand to get the modeling accurate.
iVCS3 is very different to a VCS3 but that doesn't make it a bad synth it's simply not a very close emulation. Judged on it's own terms, it's fine.
An easy test for those that haven't been exposed to real VCS3 is to create patches with the same settings in the new Arturia Synthi (same thing, different clothes) and in iVCS3. The Arturia is very close to a real VCS3/Synthi. The Arturia is available to demo if you don't already own it.
Another really great synth based on the VCS3 is the XILS-Lab XILS 4. It's not as accurate as the Arturia emulation but it's been massively expanded beyond a VCS3 that the point that these days it barely resembles the same architecture. Yet again, judged on it's own terms it's a great polysynth.
https://www.xils-lab.com/products/xils-4-p-148.html