Suzanne Ciani 4 Buchla patch setup and techniques in VCV

[DaveVenom (Dave Benham)]

Hello @pyer

In the thread below, @karlderletzte asked if the Quad Voltage Controlled Envelope Generator model 284 could be patched up in VCV.

Any idea to patch this? or any existing module

Hello, i read (modularsynthesis.com) about the Buchla 284 Quad VC Envelope Generator Modul, that it is designed this way: "The 284 is an interesting design. It is comprised of two AR envelope generators operated in a loop fashion. The first envelope generator is for the delay and duration and the second envelope generator is for the CV output. At the end of attack of the first envelope generator it triggers the second envelope generator and remains in a hold. At the end of attack of the secon…

I checked out your amazing patches, and noticed you use Nysthi Dual Envelopes to construct the functionality, but it doesn’t seem to be the best fit. I don’t have access to hardware to compare, so I was restricted to investigating via AI (risky, I know)

Am I correct in the following differences from the hardware?

• Missing delay functionality entirely
• Nysthi allows Attack to end prematurely if sustain is on and the gate is short. It also allows retrigger in the middle of the decay stage. But AI is telling me all stages always go to completion in hardware, and there is no retrigger functionality.
• There is no attenuverter for the control voltage, and the polarity seems to be inverted. AI is telling me that positive CV shortens all stages proportionally, and negative CV lengthens them.

I went ahead and created a couple emulations using my new Venom Envelope Factory module. One is a fairly complex patch emulating the quad functionality, with a PatchMaster UI and Venom patch bay. The other emulation uses a single Envelope Factory to emulate a single EG (just missing the CV attenuverter). Assuming the differences I noted above are correct, then I think I have created very close emulations of the hardware.

I posted the emulations in the link below.

Any idea to patch this? or any existing module

I patched up a complete emulation of the Quad VC Envelope Generator. I believe it is faithful to the hardware from a functionality standpoint. I did indeed use two Venom Envelope Factories per EG as you suggested, so the architecture is fairly close to the hardware as well. Buchla 284 Quad VC Envelope Generator.vcv (10.1 KB) Here is the user interface and patch bay that represents the complete module: [Screenshot 2026-09-22 222134] And here is the functional internals that should not be touc…

Perhaps these 284 emulations could be useful in future work exploring Suzanne Ciani techniques?