West-coast & Buchla synthesis: complex oscillators, LPGs, touch

This module builds one whole artifact: a playable West-coast voice that sounds plucked and organic rather than filtered and buzzy. In real practice — an ambient or generative live set, a Buchla-flavoured Eurorack rig, or a software emulation in VCV Rack — this voice is the workhorse for bell-like, marimba-like, and burbling textures that East-coast VCO→VCF→VCA chains struggle to produce, because loudness and brightness move together the way they do on acoustic instruments.

The arc starts conceptual: the adding-vs-subtracting map of the two lineages gives you the design language you’ll need when you narrate the capstone. From there you patch in stages, each with a JIT how-to pointer. First, animate a simple wave using “A complex oscillator pairs two oscillators so one FM- or AM-modulates the other” — dial modulation depth from vibrato into sideband territory until the spectrum blooms. Next, replace the VCA with the circuit in “A low-pass gate couples amplitude and brightness on one control voltage,” striking it with short pulses to hear the vactrol’s natural ring-down; the 292e’s combo mode shows the canonical Buchla implementation. Then swap keyboard-style ADSRs for the two-stage shapes in “West Coast systems favour two-stage AD or AR slope generators,” and drive the whole voice from touch or a random source. The founding story — a 1963 Tape Music Center commission — plus signal-type conventions and the no-keyboard philosophy let you explain why the patch looks the way it does.

Required atoms are exactly what the capstone cannot be done well without: the contrast, the three voice blocks, the Buchla founding history, and the context you must narrate. Supporting atoms — colour-coding, 1.2V/oct, touch voltage sources, curvature shaping, interface theory — deepen fluency and hardware literacy without gating the build. Drill FM depth, LPG striking, and slope timing inside the full patch until they’re automatic.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

adsr-envelope

note("c3").s("sawtooth").attack(0.01).decay(0.1).sustain(0.6).release(0.3)

_{strudel-0205 · CC0}

{ Saw.ar(220) * EnvGen.kr(Env.perc(0.001, 0.2), Impulse.kr(2)) * 0.3 }.play

_{supercollider-0013 · CC0}

fm-timbre

note("c3").s("sine").fm(4).fmh(2).fmi(3)

_{strudel-0204 · CC0}

osc (midicps 24 * (1 ~~ 4 $ osc 110)) >> audio

_{punctual-0006 · CC0-1.0}