The Keyboard the Builder Distrusted

Don Buchla spent the 1960s and 1970s building synthesizers with no piano keyboard at all. His famous modular instruments were arrays of bare touch plates — copper panels you pressed, swiped, and hovered over, letting the body speak in voltages instead of equal-tempered fingerings. Buchla genuinely believed the standard musical keyboard was a compromise, a relic that forced performers into preset, pre-wired habits. He said so. Then, in the late 1970s, he built the Buchla Touché — his final attempt at a "mainstream" polyphonic performing instrument — and it has a 61-note piano keyboard on top of it.

That contradiction is the whole story. And underneath it, stranger still, he kept the touch plate.

A compromise he never quite made

The Touché is Don Buchla reluctantly meeting the market. He wanted a performing, polyphonic instrument that working musicians would actually accept, and working musicians in 1978 wanted keys. So he built eight voices with three oscillators each, and a conventional piano keyboard for the front. But he did not abandon his philosophy — he buried it. Beneath that keyboard sits a three-way touch-sensitive controller plate for the continuous, wheel-like expression he always preferred: pitch bends, modulation, timbre, the gestures a fixed keybed cannot carry. The compromise was not one thing or the other; it was both, stacked. A keyboard on top for the notes the market demanded, a touch plate beneath for the notes Buchla actually believed in.

The instrument is less a resolution of that argument than a freeze-frame of it — the builder at the exact moment he gave ground, keeping his own instrument alive underneath the one he was selling.

Program it through a separate screen

The HCI part is stranger than the irony. The Touché is a hybrid analog/digital machine, and its computer is programmed in a proprietary language Buchla called FOIL — "Far Out Instrument Language." Here is the detail that makes it a museum piece: the instrument has no display big enough to show its own programming state. To program it at all, you have to connect an external monitor and watch what you are doing on a separate screen.

That makes the Touché a two-surface creature in a single body. The front panel is for immediate, physical parameter setting — reach, touch, turn, play. The monitor is for understanding what the machine actually holds — state, patches, sequences — because the front panel cannot show you that. One instrument, split across two very different ways of knowing it. Thirty-two patches are instantly available, more stored on cassette, and the computer can record riffs and play them back in real time. The performance lives on the keys and the plate; the programming lives on a screen a few feet away.

In the museum's terms, this is a rare thing: an instrument that does not trust you to see inside itself. Nearly everything else here that a musician touches shows its work on its own face — the PPG Waveterm draws waveforms on its own CRT, the Roland MC-8 displays its typed notes on its own little readout. The Touché refuses. It keeps its interior deliberately illegible from the front, and makes you look away to understand it.

Four of them, ever

Only about four Touchés were ever made. That is not a footnote — it is the texture. The instrument sits chronologically between Buchla's early keyboardless touch-plate modules and his later MIDI gesture controllers (the Lightning and the Marimba Lumina), and it is the moment he let the compromise in. You can hear in the design itself the argument about what an instrument's interface is: a thing you play, or a thing you think with. Buchla wanted both and could not quite have both in one body, so he split them — keys for the fingers, a plate for the body, a screen for the mind.

I love the Touché because it is honest about the ambivalence every good interface carries. The builder who distrusted the keyboard built one anyway, and then quietly made sure the keyboard was not the real point. Four instruments left the shop carrying that argument. Three of them may still exist, each one a small monument to a designer who could not decide — and refused to pretend the decision was easy.