AS 248
Sequencer

Updated 06 November 2026. Built it in v6.1.4. See notes below. Enjoy! 

Here is something new - I am obsessed with the musicality, and complexity of Don Buchla's various modular devices. The, once rare Buchla 248 MARF is no exception. After looking at the most excellent Suzanne Ciani Buchla Cookbook interpretation in VCV Rack by Pyer and many hours of careful analysis and play with the performance patch I started to explore what might be done to simplify it and made then  made my own interpretation as a Bitwig Studio preset. At no time have I utilised an LLM in this process. My approach was to capture as much of the intuitive musical control as possible, and to keep it simple to perform. You can expand on the arbitrary programmable portion through Bitwig's extensive routing and modulation options and go far beyond what my preset is doing.

This is my Polymetric Polyphonic Spaceship of the Mind.

New in v2.1
This new preset uses two parallel 4x16-step tone sequences which can be accessed in a variety of ways. Use the Selector to set one of the four rows. You can adjust these tones to taste. I made my own musical melodies which were clumsily interprested from Suzanne Ciani's unique melodic sequences. The two channels (A & B) can be run at indepenant clock speeds and in different modes. The sequencer FX Grid patches utilise a Stack Spread of 3 to provide additional tonality and chord voicing options.

Spread reveals extra playheads. I've set the preset to have 3, but you can adjust this to taste. Click on the background of the patch to reveal the settings in the inspector panel.

Speed controls playback across three different clocked note-length types: undotted, dotted, and triplets. Spd Spread uses Stack Spread to offset one playback head to be at a lower position and the other at a higher one. In this way you can span across undotted, dotted and triplet to access unsual polymeters.

Offset controls the playback start position. Spread uses Stack Spread to offset the playback ahead and behind the current position. Interesting playback spacing can be achieved which reveal a wealth of chords, tones and arpeggiations.

Length adjusts the overall length of the sequence from 1 to 16 steps.

Vertical converts the sequencer to a per-step arpeggiator across the 4 sequences. The arpeggiator is based on random addressing of the sequences. This can be weighted by adjusting the Steps device in the grid and modifying to taste.

Free Run switches playback out of clocked and into something different. This uses the height of the blue Steps Grid Device to adjust a per-step note duration. Lower values are slower. Higher values are faster. Adjust these to find what fits best. Be careful about adjusting the speed while in free run mode. Offset Spread can get the playheads into some unexpected tangles and this may not behave as anyone expects. You have been warned.

Taking a look at the grid patch we can see that there is a Custom button which bypasses the phase counter and uses a curves device instead to access the phase of the sequence. You can adjust this to cycle over a region as the patch includes, or you can make any arbitrary set of steps to phase address each step independently. 

Also within the patch are gates that you can toggle each step on or off. There is also a speed selector gate sequence which when off, doubles the duration of the corresponding step speed when in either free run mode.

Below this are three different AFG Modulators which can be mapped and configured however you like. I have chosen 5, 9, and 23 steps respectively in bi-polar mode as interesting, musical modulation starting points. Adjust and save the results as your own preset. The output of each of these modulations sources are attenuated by n/5 Att, n/9 Att, and n/23 Att.

Now back to the main controls.

Algo selects one of 5 different FM waveforms of the Phase-1 Oscillator.

Octave adjusts the tone range of the voice. 

Num. controls the numerator ratio of the Oscillator. (need to reprovision)

Denom. controls the denominator of the Oscillator. (need to reprovision)

FM uses a sine oscillator to modulate the phase of the carrier (Phase-1 Oscillator).

FM Fold wave folds the FM modulation source.

Attack adjusts the attack of the Pluck VCA, Decay controls the decay of the Pluck VCA.

There are two different Sources of Uncertainty: Chance 1 and Chance 2. Chance 1 uses probability to trigger a Sample & Hold LFO to generate a random sequences of modulation control signals. This can be attenuated with Chc 1 Att. Chance 2 uses a probability to trigger Dice to produce a different flavour of random values to modulate controls signals. This can be attenuated with Chc 2 Att.

Reverb Mix routes the output into an AS Reverberator which is my personalised preset of a multi-band reverb like the Lexicon 224.

AS 248 Sequencer v2.1 (Bitwig v6.1.4+ PolyGrid Preset)