Buchla: Easel Command Module Instrument

This is the newly updated and keyboard-less version of the venerable Buchla Music Easel. The original Buchla Music Easel was one of the earliest analog synthesizers. Originally released in 1973, it defined the first era of commercial analog synthesis, along with the Minimoog and EMS VCS 3. Like those instruments, it was small, portable, had a semi-modular design, and included a capacitive touch keyboard. The Minimoog is in many ways the simplest of the three instruments, and has gone on to be one of the best-selling and most imitated analog synthesizers in history. The VCS 3 has also enjoyed a fair bit of fame as the Dark Side of the Moon and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” synth. The original Music Easel has always been a little bit more obscure, but has a devoted cult following among people like Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails). Don Buchla was based out of Berkeley, California, designing and building some of the earliest analog synthesizers at the same time Robert Moog was working on the East Coast. For that reason, the two designers were later known to represent the West Coast and East Coast approaches to synthesis. With the popularity of the Minimoog, the East Coast approach has became more well-known. The interesting thing is how very different these two instruments are. Keep in mind that in 1973 there were no internet forums with people commenting on different design approaches, and New York and California are physically far apart. Moog and Buchla worked on the same problem (in complete isolation from each other) but came up with very different solutions. They would later meet up, and even collaborate together, and though both professed admiration of the other’s work, in the distant early 1970s they were mostly unaware of each other. In the early 1980s, while I was attending The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, they had a Music Easel with a large Buchla Modular system, and this is where, under the tutelage of professor Peter Randlette, I began to learn synthesis. But in the mid-‘80s the Yamaha DX7 was launched, and like a lot of people I strayed away from analog synthesis and didn’t see a Buchla again for several decades. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016, and one of my neighbors and friends is Suzanne Ciani, one of the Buchla’s most well-known proponents and performers. While helping Suzanne out with some tech issues at her home studio, I got a small glimpse into her relationship with her Buchla and her devotion to it. “The Buchla is alive, it has a personality,” she once said to me. Despite my early encounters with the Buchla, I didn’t really understand this statement until I recently bought an Easel Command. As I plugged in the Easel and started fiddling with some of the suggested quick-start patches, I was pretty blown away by the sounds I was getting. The Easel did seem to have a life of its own; at the very least it felt like so much more was going on than the sum of the minimal parts in front of me. I’ve since spent probably 20 hours digging into this instrument, feeling I’m starting to wrap my head around it, and I’m excited about continuing to work with it. There is a depth to the Easel that’s hard to explain, but if I had to put it into a sentence, I might refer to it as the complexity of simplicity – that’s the beauty of the Easel. Out of a few relatively simple interconnected modules, there is a huge range of possibilities for anyone willing to dig in and learn this instrument.

I’ve been calling it an instrument and a synthesizer, but – as its name implies – this is a canvas for making and processing sound. In addition to the internal electronics, there is an external audio input on the Easel that can be used and routed in a variety of ways. The easiest thing to do is to route the audio through the Filter/Gate, then use the rest of the Easel to manipulate that path. But the Ext. Audio input also generates a control voltage based on the envelope that can be used in various ways, and you can even use the audio input as a modulator source for the Modulation Oscillator. The Easel also has a built-in spring reverb that adds a nice “dubbiness” to its own sounds as well as external audio. The input is a 1/8-inch jack, so I ended up soldering an adapter cable that terminated in 1/4-inch female to make interfacing with my studio easier.

To really dig in and explain the nuances of how the Easel creates and processes sound is beyond the scope of this review. A more detailed explanation is available on the Buchla site, from the original manual by Allen Strange. Suffice it to say that the East Coast paradigm of VCO, VCF, VCA, and ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) EG (envelope generator) is seriously fucked with here. The signal flow from left to right is not even what you’d expect from an East Coast perspective, with the oscillators being kind of in the middle of the instrument. The Buchla concept is that you have two oscillators: The complex oscillator and the modulation oscillator. While you can use both as sound sources if you’d like, the idea here is that the modulation oscillator modulates the complex oscillator using Amplitude (AM) or Frequency (FM) Modulation to create a rich evolving timbre that’s very different from the idea of starting with a complex timbre, and then filtering out the complexity with a filter. There’s a misconception that the Buchla has no filter, but that’s not quite true either. It has a Filter/Gate which can be used as both, or either or – but there is no frequency or resonance control for the filter, so if you’re wanting to do the big filter sweep thing, you’re out of luck here. Oh well. One unique aspect of the Buchla Filter/Gate design is that it uses vactrols that Don felt resulted in a more organic sounding decay. In my time with the Easel, I did find myself thinking how much I liked the dynamics of the instrument, and definitely didn’t miss the more common “East Coast” filter and ADSR topology. Besides its Filter/Gate and two oscillators, the deceptively simple Easel only has three more modules: A five-step sequencer, a Pulser, and an ASD envelope generator. The Easel seems simple, but it’s actually a deep and complex instrument – a good example of how less, when done the right way, can result in more. Another key element at play here is the random module (which doesn’t show up as a module but as a patch point), that when added to a patch makes it, well, random – and is another reason this instrument seems to have a personality. Also of note is the patching that splits the difference between a fixed normalized path and the completely disconnected “needing a bunch of cables” modular approach. I think this is another reason that the instrument can surprise new users with the complexity of sounds coming out of it. Most of the patching is done with banana jacks for CV that can be stacked and multed, but there are some audio patching capabilities on 1/8-inch jacks as well.

While on the subject of patching, let’s discuss another really big difference between the new Easel and the older models. The legacy Easels had very limited connectivity to the outside world and were primarily standalone instruments. On the new Easel Command, you can patch in a MIDI keyboard, a USB keyboard, and traditional 1V/octave CV signals. This is huge for getting the easel to play along with other instruments and players, while also an advantage for greatly expanding the controller options that can be used with the Easel. My friend Kurt Kurasaki (aka Peff) owns an original Easel but bought one of the new Easel Commands and was raving about it. “The original Easel is beautiful and unique, but compared to a full modular system it’s limited. The Easel Command has the same basic functions as the original, but the new features really extend the sonic potential of the instrument in very cool ways. They totally nailed it,” says Kurt. I had often considered investing in a legacy Music Easel over the years, but for me, the capacitive metal keyboard just didn’t feel good, and I never took the plunge. I’ve been using the new Easel with both a MIDI keyboard, a USB keyboard, and the brilliant Sensel Morph [full review soon], which has MPE implementation that works well with the Easel. Sensel has also made an overlay for the Morph that emulates the well-known Buchla Thunder controller that is super fun to play with; getting you out of any tonal rut you may have dug for yourself over the years.

It’s funny, the original manual by Allen Strange is labeled as an “Operating Directive,” and the instrument itself is referred to as an “Electro Organism.” This all sounds like a bit much to me – like Buchla devotees have been drinking their own Kool-Aid, but I have to say that after digging into this instrument, I finally get why people rave about it so much, and I’m ready for a glass of that Kool-Aid.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-play synthesizer that will always be in tune, can play noodle-y synth lead lines, and do big filter sweeps; then this is probably not the instrument for you. But, if as the name implies, you want a canvas for creating and processing sound, then this instrument will likely reward your efforts for decades to come.

Lastly, I want to mention some of the people behind this new instrument. Before he passed away in 2016, Don Buchla entered into some partnerships that didn’t always work out. A lot of people are very protective of the Buchla legacy, and there was some negative backlash at times in the last decade or two. But, in 2018 Eric Fox (of Foxtone Music in Minneapolis) took over the Buchla brand and assets as President/CEO and has worked hard to steer the company back towards its roots while keeping an eye on the current day. To that end, he’s partnered closely with Joel Davel, one of the original Buchla engineers and designers who had worked closely with Don since 1993. Joel is the primary designer of the new features on the Easel Command, and has done an incredible job of keeping what made the legacy instrument so interesting while adding a few key new features that will keep it relevant for another few decades. While this instrument is not exactly cheap, consider that its expanded capabilities are far less expensive than the legacy model. Nice work guys.