Merry Christmas! In honor of the 200th anniversary of the writing of the much beloved Christmas carol “Silent Night” I have created an arrangement of the song on the Buchla Synthesizer. To accomplish this I used Logic Pro X to record each individual part in a multi-track project. The noise at the beginning was synthesized using the 266 Source of Uncertainty’s noise generator filtered in sequence using both of the 291’s filter. The arpeggios were made using the 259e Twisted Waveform Generator and the 250 sequencer. The bass part was made using the 259 Complex Waveform Generator’s modulation oscillator filtered at the 291e Triple Morphing Filter using the all input. The melodic and harmonic voices were synthesized using the 259 principal oscillator and the 216 voltage controlled keyboard. The vibrato like effect was made by using the 259’s modulation oscillator as an LFO in the sub-audio range. Its signal output was patched to the FM input on the principal oscillator and only enough voltage was added to the principal oscillator to create a subtle vibrato. The major scale used in the song was tuned using fzero~ in Max/MSP to achieve (rather consonant) just-intonation intervals. Reverb and delays were all processed in Logic. Because this was a multi-track project which used many different variations of one patch I have not provided a picture as on many of my other Buchla pieces.
The ratios used for the scale are as follows: 1/1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 5/3, 15/8, 2/1.