
Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer - fudgy73
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/21/1960s-rock-music-san-francisco-lsd-buchla-100-synthesizer-grateful-dead/
======
Stratoscope
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...

~~~
disqard
What a neat story! Thank you for sharing.

------
apo
> 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.

~~~
adfm
And the Dead Kennedys wrote a song about it that appeared on Bedtime For
Democracy...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2M_fQnVqew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2M_fQnVqew)

------
nineteen999
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronium)

[https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-
ne...](https://www.laweekly.com/music/raymond-scotts-electronium-nearly-
changed-the-sound-of-motown-now-its-being-restored-8346526)

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".

~~~
foldingmoney
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_
cartoons. His early music was used in cartoons some time later because it
turned out to be an excellent fit, but at the time I believe his stated
intention was to 'improve jazz'.

Great music regardless. There's a cool version of War Dance for Wooden Indians
with indian dancers on YouTube.

~~~
nineteen999
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_
> cartoons.

You're not wrong. See:

[https://www.raymondscott.net/features/accidental-music-
for-a...](https://www.raymondscott.net/features/accidental-music-for-animated-
mayhem/)

I find his music to be clever, entertaining and well ahead of its time in many
respects. His music was sometimes dismissed by jazz purists of the time as
being "novelty" or "dada" jazz.

There was a documentary I saw a little while back which included a discussion
of Scott's surprise when he started receiving royalty checks again the 1990's
when Ren & Stimpy started to use a lot of his music as well.

------
akurilin
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.

~~~
WindowsFon4life
And Serge

------
inflatableDodo
>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.

------
jacquesm
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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
DX7s are far more likely to have traces of coke than LSD.

------
zigzaggy
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.

------
phjesusthatguy3
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.

~~~
cyberferret
As a big fan of 70's and 80's pop music, I had always wanted a vintage
Sequential Circuits Prophet V synth, but when I saw the maintenance required
on even that semi-modern synth, I think I will stick to the VST/AU equivalent!

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
A company called Behringer are currently making modern ultra-cheap clones of
as many vintage ultra-expensive vintage synthesizers as they can. Three models
are complete and shipping, and there are rumoured to be another fifty or so in
the pipeline - including the P5.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Behringer get a lot of flak for being "cheap" but their guitar pedals at least
are mainly just 1:1 clones of tried-and-tested vintage analog circuits. I
wasn't aware of their synths - thanks for the heads-up.

------
ggm
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.

~~~
fit2rule
The Emulator was a pretty decent early commercial sampler product:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mu_Emulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mu_Emulator)

It was called such, because it could be used to 'emulate any instrument' by
recording it, and playing back the samples ..

~~~
DanBC
E-mu made my favourite drum machine, the drumulator.

If you open it up you can lift then reseat an IC (I think it's the only one in
a socket) and you get random drum patterns and sometimes those a great.

------
mlang23
This is a hoax. I very much doubt unrefrigereated LSD would stay potent for
several decades.

