Sunday 8 December 2013

The Warren Burt Serge/Driscoll Synthesizer


Warren Burt, one of the early pioneers in Electronic Music is among my favorite composers.
Many of his early works from the late 1960s & early 70s used the Moog Modular and Buchla 100 synthesizers. In 1973, he built his first Serge synthesizer.

Many of his recordings can be found on his website: Warren Burt.com.

Warren emigrated to Australia from his native America in 1975 to teach at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia). He still lives in Australia, in beautiful country Victoria.
Over a period of roughly 10 years, he put together 3 Serge synthesizer systems of which this one (built between 1977 and 1983) is the last.


It started with just 4 panels, but when I purchased it in 2013 it had grown into this12 panel beast.

The 12 panels are made up of 3 Julian Driscoll panels & 9 Serge panels.

The top two boxes of six panels are the earliest and consist of the following modules:

    Box 1:
  • 2 Original Oscillators
  • 4 VCA
  • 1 Triple Waveshaper
  • 1 Phaser
  • 2 Dual Analog Shift Register
  • 3 New Timbral Oscillators
  • 1 Triple Wave Multiplier
  • 1 Original Serge VCF
  • 1 Extended Range VCF
  • 4 Interface Convertors
  • 2 Handmade VC Low Pass Filters (Ladder)
  • 2 Dual 3in-1out Mixers
  • 3x Dual Processors 

    Box 2:
  • 2 Dual Positive Slew
  • 2 Dual Negative Slew
  • 2 Smooth and Stepped Function Generators
  • 1 Dual VC Slew Generator
  • 1 Peak and Trough
  • 2 Envelope Generators
  • 1 Triple Bi-directional Router
  • 1 Triple Comparator
  • 1 Schmitt Trigger
  • 1 8x Interface Connectors
  • 2 Homebrew Joysticks
  • 1 Mic Preamp
  • 1 Ring Modulator
  • 1 Homebrew Dual Additive Programmer
  • 1 Quad Panner
  • 1 Original VC Filter 




And some pics of the rear of these two boxes:

These panels are currently being restored by Andrew F of NonLinearCircuits.
Andrew has a blog devoted to the restoration.



     


     

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