Don Buchla — inventor of electronic instruments
Don Buchla, an innovative designer of electronic instruments who helped develop the first line of modular synthesizers around the same time as his East Coast counterpart Robert Moog, died Sept. 14 at his home in Berkeley. He was 79.
The cause was complications from cancer, said his son, Ezra Buchla.
While his name was not as familiar as Moog’s outside of music industry circles, Mr. Buchla created several groundbreaking electronic instruments, including the Buchla 100, which was commissioned by the San Francisco Tape Center in 1963; the Buchla Music Easel, an all-in-one, portable synthesizer; and the fully MIDI-enabled Buchla 700.
Composer Morton Subotnick used his voltage-controlled Buchla Modular Electronic Music System (a predecessor of the commercial Series 100 synth) on the landmark 1968 recording “Silver Apples of the Moon,” widely recognized as the first fulllength album of electronic music produced for a record company.
Mr. Buchla, who composed his own music as well, also played an integral part in the West Coast counterculture movement in the 1960s, working with audio engineer Owsley Stanley to build the Grateful Dead’s immense sound system while his instruments frequently provided the soundtrack for psychedelic-era happenings such as the Trips Festival in San Francisco in 1966 and the writer Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests.
In his 1968 book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Tom Wolfe wrote about the “Buchla electronic music machine screaming like a logical lunatic.”
“I have always been outside, and I’ve chosen to remain there,” Mr. Buchla said in a 1983 interview with Polyphony magazine. “I’ve been an experimentalist since really early childhood.”
Mr. Buchla was born in South Gate (Los Angeles County) on April 17, 1937, and grew up in California and New Jersey. He studied astronomy, music and physiology at UC Berkeley, and graduated as a physics major in 1959.
While the instruments designed by Moog, who died in 2005, found their way into the mainstream at the hands of ’70s musical rock icons like Yes, Tangerine Dream and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Mr. Buchla’s creations had more subversive applications by design.
Moog labeled his synthesizer modules with practical names such as oscillators to generate tones, filters to modify them; Mr. Buchla opted for more fantastical names like Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, Quad Dynamics Manager and Source of Uncertainty. He deliberately left keyboards out of his designs.
“A keyboard is dictatorial,” Mr. Buchla had said. “When you’ve got a black-and-white keyboard, it’s hard to play anything but keyboard music.”
He worked on NASA projects, including controls for the Gemini space capsule; devised a laser-based navigational aid for the blind for RCA; and produced the sounds used by composer Suzanne Ciani to create the “Coca-Cola Pop ‘n’ Pour” audio signature, heard in countless advertisements.
“Don Buchla changed so many music and sound makers’ lives by creating instruments that perpetually bestow novelty,” composer Kaitlin Auerlia Smith, said in a statement. “I am forever grateful for his existence.”
Mr. Buchla, who served as the technical director at the California Institute of the Arts, continued to design instruments through the 1970s and beyond, devising the first MIDI-capable controller in 1987 and introducing his 200e modular system in 2004, which integrated his classic modular designs with digital technology.
In 2012, while struggling with cancer, Mr. Buchla announced that his company had been acquired by a group of investors under the name Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments. He was fired the following year, which led to a lawsuit alleging that he was forced to sign an unfavorable deal and that the defendants acted “in bad faith, and with oppression and malice.”
The complaint also claimed that the owners of the company that bears his name caused a stroke he suffered in 2014. The case went to arbitration in 2015 and reached a confidential resolution this year.
Mr. Buchla is survived by his wife, Anne-Marie Bonnel; son, Ezra; two daughters, Jeannine Serbanich and Erin Buchla; and two grandchildren. Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music critic. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MusicSF