Arturia Buchla V Techno Presets

Welcome to our Arturia Buchla Easel V preset pack and guide. I love anything with a step sequencer in it, and the Easel’s small but powerful sequencer is great for techno sequences. The Arturia V Collection has some great replicas of synths and this Buchla Easel emulation is worth the money alone for it’s take on the iconic 1970’s West Coast synthesis sound design powerhouse.

Here I’m going to focus on the sequencer and it’s use in making techno sequences. The sequencer only has 5 steps maximum rather than the standard 16, but that makes it great for short polyrhythmic techno sequences.

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See also: our other techno sequences, including Arturia Jup-8 V Techno Presets. You can find all the free Ableton presets here.

Buy our packs at our Shopify store, use this code for 60% off: SBCOM60STWD

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How To Make Techno Sequences in Arturia’s Buchla Easel

Here’s a step by step guide to setting up a sequence patch in Arturia’s Buchla Easel VST….

(See the downloads section below for the free presets).

Step 1 – Set up the sequencer

The Buchla Easel’s sequencer is really short compared to the standard sixteen steps you get on most sequencers but it is plenty enough for a techno sequence. You can set it to 3 or 5 for techno polyrhythms. You want to sync it to the clock at 1/16 as well so it’s in time with your track. The 5 switches turn the steps on or off, they can be good for rhythmic effects. The sliders at the bottom set the pitches. It is a fairly simple sequencer, but great for modulating the Buchla.

It can be used to modulate almost anything on the synth. You just need to use the blue cables. There are 2 outputs for blue cables and you want to take them out and plug them into the black inputs under the oscillators. This means that the sequencer will then modulate these parameters. You want it to modulate the pitch of each oscillator, but also set it up to modulate the other parameters too. You can set the amount of the modulation with the sliders above each black input. We’ll tweak these in the later steps, but for now get these 4 plugged in: the pitch for each oscillator and the modulation amount for each.

Step 2 – Set up the Envelope Generator

In this step you want to set up the Envelope Generator to be triggered by the sequencer, set it for short gate times, and connect it to the Low Pass Gates to gate each of the notes short. This is important as you want to be able to control the lengths of each step.

I set the envelope up so it it triggered by the sequencer on the top switch. So it’s like a 303 – the envelope opens and shuts for each sequencer note. And the switch under it I set for ‘sustained’.

Ok, now for the weird part, the envelope on this is upside down. Instead of turning the sliders up to open the envelope you turn them down. In others words if you want 0 attack you make sure the attack slider is at the top. No idea why they did it this way, but that’s how it is!

I take the orange cable outputs, and wire them to the modulations of the Dual Lo Pass Gate. So now the envelope will control the shape of each note. The Dual Lo Pass gate and be like filter envelope, an amp envelope or both combined. It’s a bit strange on a Buchla as they’re combined, but you can change the settings and hear what sounds best. I turn the volume down for each channel and set the modulation levels to taste while tweaking the Attack, Sustain and Decay of the envelope. You can see my settings in the image below.

Step 3 – set up the oscillators…

There are two oscillators on the Buchla Easel, one is the main oscillator (aka the Complex Oscillator) with a ‘timbre’ slider for wave-folding. This is basically a harmonic folding of the wave that goes into it. The more you turn it up the more harmonics are added until it is almost noise. The Timbre settings above have a big effect on the sound, you can tweak them to hear the effect it has.

The other sound source is the Modulation Oscillator which can be an LFO, but when you switch the ‘range’ to ‘high’ it functions as a second oscillator. The Modulation Slider sets the amount of modulation on the complex oscillator. It can do FM, or AM. You can change these in the switch above, and hear how they sound. I set the sequencer to modulate the amount.

I set the sequencer to modulate the pitch for each oscillator and the Modulation and Timbre.

Step 4 – Go back and tweak everything

There’s a lot of different moving parts, go back and tweak them and find a sweet spot. You want to change the notes of the sequencer, the length of sound that gets through the gate. And the pitch and modulation/timbre settings and the amount they are modulated too. You also want to tweak the oscillator settings until you find something you like.

At this time you want to think about how you would automate and build the sequence and what parameters you will tweak.

Then you can automate or record the movement of different parameters for an evolving synth. In my opinion the best things to automate are the envelope settings and modulation amounts for how much the sequencer effects the other modulations. Turn it, and if it sounds good: tweak it!

You can see this in action in the video below.

Step 5 – set up the effects

The main synth has a built in reverb, but if you click ‘Advanced’ in the top right hand section of the synth you get a load of built in effects, of which you can choose two. I chose the Delay in ping pong mode for some stereo width, and I add the Reverb here as it has more options.

I hop you found this useful, get the presets below and see our other posts on techno sequences.

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Arturia Buchla Easel V Presets

You can get the 5 free Buchla Easel V presets in the downloads section below.

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Arturia Buchla Easel V – Video:

Here’s a rundown of how I made the 5 techno sequences in Arturia’s Buchal Easel….

Please subscribe to the youtube if you haven’t yet: youtube.com/@studiobrootle 

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