Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer (opens in new tab)

I got to meet Don Buchla back in the '70s. My friend Will was visiting from Phoenix, and he had a company making studio mixers. So I tagged along while he made the rounds to visit potential vendors and clients.

Don had an awesome setup in his Berkeley living room. A whole ring of synths of different kinds, a Buchla Box or two, a Moog of some sort, and some new stuff he was working on.

I don't think we tripped out on that trip, but maybe Don didn't let us handle the synths enough.

On the way to Don's, we stopped in San Francisco to visit a recording studio somewhere south of Market. When we walked in the front door, no one was at the reception desk, so we wandered around and ended up in the coffee room.

In walked Art Garfunkel to grab a cup, and we got to talking. Will had his Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera hanging from his neck and asked Art if he could take his picture. "Sure! Hey, while you're here, we're doing some recording, do you want to hang out in the control room and listen?"

Well of course the answer was yes!

After a while, Art's recording engineer noticed us and hollered into the talkback mic, "ART!!! Who are these people?!?!?" Art said, "It's OK, Roy, they are cool."

Roy Halee would have nothing of it. He marched Will and me out the back door of the studio and down the steps to the street. A bit embarrassing but worth it for the experience.

I did learn one thing. Of course I'd seen the Simon and Garfunkel album covers where Art practically towered over Paul. I always thought Art must be really tall! But in person, he was barely an inch over my own 5' 8" height. I just never knew that Paul Simon was on the shorter side at 5' 2".

The things you learn when you wander into recording studios uninvited...

> He sprayed a cleaning solvent on it and started to push the dissolving crystal with his finger as he attempted to dislodge the residue and clean the area.

> About 45 minutes later, Curtis began to feel a little strange. He described it as a weird, tingling sensation. He discovered this was the feeling of the beginnings of an LSD experience or trip.

LSD is extremely potent as far as drugs go. Doses are measured in micrograms. Tylenol doses are measured in hundreds of milligrams. Many prescription drug doses are measured in tens of milligrams. As such, LSD is orders of magnitude more active than the drugs most people have experience with.

At that level of activity, both dermal absorption via solution with cleaning fluid penetrating gloves, and inhalation of particles could be viable routes of entry.

I believe it was Abbie Hoffman who in one book advocated preparing a solution of LSD in DMSO for use as a weapon in demonstrations to pacify police. DMSO readily penetrates skin, so a solution of it containing LSD is plausible as a way to dose it. No idea whether it actually works.

This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium

https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-ne...

He worked for Motown for several years as a creative director, but it seems no music that used the Electronium was ever released by them.

Scott himself was a very interesting man, having earlier lead jazz bands and some of his earlier compositions were frequently used in cartoons of the day, the most famous of which are probably "Powerhouse" and "The Penguin".

The Bay Area is also home to MIDI co-inventor Dave Smith and his hardware synth company Sequential. You can see his office and generous collection of synths from the street, if you roam around San Francisco's North Beach long enough.

>One final note: there will be no more trips with this Buchla. The instrument has been thoroughly cleaned of all LSD.

Like cleaning the Parthenon statues.

I repair DX7's for a hobby, it's interesting to see how clever devices from that era are. Time and again 'that's clever' hits me when I finally understand how some part of it works. They're incredibly sturdy too, one survived a fire, the outside was pretty grim but it still worked, and parts from that one helped to make a whole bunch of them whole again. I have it down to a pretty simple process now, the only tricky ones are mainboard failures and I still have one mainboard that I've spent multiple days on that I can't get back to life.

I'll make sure not to lick them.

BTW, Suzanne Ciani, mentioned in the article is definitely worth listening to.

Interesting story... almost a time traveling experience. I studied music and technology in college. Our music lab had some old 60’s and 70’s experimental music equipment and they were always fun to play.

I was the lab tech for a semester and had a key to the lab. Occasionally, after a night of imbibing, my friends and I would go to the lab and turn on all the workstations and arrange some very large pieces. Looking back, I wish we had hit record and taken some of that work with us. Back then though everything was in the moment for me.

It would have been pretty crazy if any of those machines had been dipped! What a trip.

On the one hand, I would love to own a Buchla synth. On the other hand, no way in hell would I want to maintain an analog synth. The closest I got was when I bought a second-hand Korg EX800, which was a digitally-controlled analog unit. Fun machine, but it was unreliable and I wasn't up to the task of taking care of it.

What does the word emulator mean any more in this context?

We all use it but there are now possibly two generations of people who never used an adm-5 or vt100 so what exactly is being emulated?

It's a terminal program. It implements the function of a command line access protocol.

This is a hoax. I very much doubt unrefrigereated LSD would stay potent for several decades.