Virtual Easel (2016)

Virtual Easel is a weird digital approximation/adaptation of the Buchla Music Easel, for use as a performance instrument and digital composition tool. Not a 1:1 recreation of the instrument in the digital domain, but close enough in design principle to maintain the general Easel workflow. The most obvious change is that the 218 has been replaced with a more 217-like interface, but many other liberties have been taken both to facilitate functionality in the digital domain and to add some useful tools not easily possible in an analog instrument—preset recall, global randomization, etc.

Virtual Easel was assembled in Spring of 2016 to explore some of my own personal interest in the design philosophy of the classic instrument and to better explore the concept of preset memory and software modularity as a form of virtual instrument "metaprogramming," an extension of the concept Allen Strange discussed in the original Music Easel user manual.

Assembled in Max/MSP. Virtual Easel was retired in 2017 in order to develop a more streamlined UI. Its successor, Virtual 208, was completed in late 2017.