Exploring the weird and wonderful Arturia Buchla Easel V
Arturia Buchla Easel V – The Weirdest & Most Unique Synth Plugin Ever?
For those who don’t know much about the history of synthesizers, there were two major driving forces behind what we know as synthesizers today.
Bob Moog was creating synths aimed at more musical applications, while Don Buchla was creating more unique and eccentric instruments.
One of Don Buchla’s most iconic designs is the Easel – it’s unique design used additive methods to create tones, by FM and wavefolding basic waveforms, while other popular synths at the time were starting with harmonically rich saw waves and subtracting frequencies with filters and other methods.
This unique concept forces the user to think outside of the box, and leaves a huge sonic palette to be explored. Of Course, you could always run the signal through a filter to process it, but synthesizing your sounds from the ground up is the core idea here.
Another unique feature in the Buchla Easel is the 5-step sequencer, you can set it to pulse in 4 or 3 steps, however, the default of 5 forces you to usually make interesting polyrhythmic stuff. This synth is an absolute powerhouse for Techno bass and rhythms.
Can it FM?
The Arturia Buchla Easel V also captures the original synths modularity with its banana-jack system, you can patch any of the modulation sources to any of the parameters, the sequencer is great for creating repetitive sequences or you can create random modulation using the white output jacks.
For psytrance synth sounds the Buchla Easel is fantastic, it does a really nice FM sound – and the modulation oscillator can be switched into LFO mode, which quickly turns your FM sound into a high-pitched squelch.
There are tons of variation here, I suggest hitting record and just playing around with the patching and “cherry-pick” the best results!
On a side note, the plugin is currently on special at 50% off, check it out here.
For an in-depth walkthrough on how to create these sounds, check out the tutorial video here:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/RORWuDAHGyI”]