The chronicles of one man's experience building, repairing, cloning and adding to the Buchla Electric Music Box. A manifesto of a very specific obsession.
January 8, 2010
MARF making
I repaired a MArF a few years back, but nothing was like the undertaking of getting the 248-3206 from the Buchla garage sale working. I only know of a couple of these in existence and I don't know that any of them work. Someone bought the panels with only the motherboards attached. I have had them in my possession for more than 2 years. I had to design, assemble and troubleshoot the input board and 3 output boards for this beast. Each board is 14" x 6" or so, no small task. Today it worked for the first time.
Pictured is the working MArF as a reference. and the 2 panels from the double size expanded unit. A 3206 is a normal 1602 unit with an additional 4 space panel added to it. The expander adds another 16 stages of sliders and memory as well as 4 more output channels. The 6 total output channels can address the 32 steps in any way. This thing could be a 200 system's only source of modulation generators. LFOs, Envelopes, Sequencers, Quantizers, Voltage Processors are all possible. More infos to come.
Much more info to follow.
impressive! doing the impossible again!
ReplyDeleteI just wish there was something similar available now
ReplyDeletein anycase, more evidence that you are the incarnation of merlin
Merlin never had a backpack full of CMOS chips...or did he?
ReplyDeleteGood work! We stand by for more info as loyal disciples! :)
ReplyDeleteIsn't the one at Evergreen College was still up and running?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.evergreen.edu/media/musictech/images/studios/marfbig03.jpg
I believe they sold that off only seconds after they took that picture. I don't know if it works.
ReplyDelete