I was lucky enough to have Roy’s Blue Serge in my arsenal of synths way back when. It was a fantastic machine, a brilliant collection of modules, devoid of oscillators, suggesting a rather warped view of sound construction on his part! I had plenty of oscillators on other panels, so it wasn’t an issue at all. The initial patch of what was to become “Flight Of The Atom Bee” was done on the Blue Serge. In the subsequent days and weeks I built the rest of the sounds, I used quite a number of modules, many for control voltages, others for some kind of processing. It was an alchemical, exploratory, serendipitous process …

I asked Roy to talk about the Blue Serge for posterity. I finally sold it to a friend, who then sold it, along with eight other panels, to a composer in Germany.

The Blue Serge

I am going to just put down my recollections in order of their emergence into my present-day consciousness (such as it is).

As the centerpiece of my Bachelor’s studies I had been working night and day in the CalArts electronic music studios, which were centered around two immense Buchla boxes (and several rock-solid, washing-machine sized, verybeautiful-sounding Ampex tape recorders). The Buchla was a blast to use: so flexible, an infinite palette of lovely patterns and textures. But one thing was not optimal: the sound! I don’t know why, but the Buchla tended to sound weak. Feeble. Tentative.

I remember that at one point some young composers visited from UC Riverside (?). One of them presented a tape composition made on a Moog. Though I disdained the Moog as a way too conventional machine the sounds on this guys’s piece were big and fat and juicy and powerful.

Again, I don’t know why this would be. But around this same time I heard that Serge Tcherepnin was making a modular machine similar in concept to Don Buchla’s but even more flexible and it had a muscular sound comparable to Bob Moog’s.

When I say “flexible” I mean that just about any output could be fed into just about any input and something reasonable would happen. For example, Buchla’s oscillators put out a signal in the 1-volt range — “line level”,like a CD player. And they used “audio” (grounded) cables, like a CD player. This put the “audio” signals in a different category from the “control voltages”. You could make an adapter to plug an oscillator into the”control” input to an envelope generator but nothing much would happen because all the “control” circuits had a 5-volt range.So this is all very technical but the point is that Serge’s machine used the same (ungrounded, 5-volt banana) connectors everywhere, so you could plug anything into anything else. For example, you could feed the output of a filter back into its input and it would resonate like a blown reed, just a beautiful tone. My Serge box didn’t even have any “oscillators.” I used filter feedback and envelope generator feedback as my signal sources.To buy my Serge machine I applied for a small ($1,200) student loan — a tiny fraud I justified to myself on the basis of the Necessity of Art. read more…