The Synthesizer Underground Is Thriving, and Buchla and Friends Proves It
Buchla and Friends 2026 in Los Angeles offered a snapshot of where electronic instrument design is headed, and the answer is: everywhere at once. Reverb's Jake made the rounds at the annual gathering, which has become a pilgrimage site for modular synthesizer enthusiasts, boutique builders, and the kind of hardware designers who would rather route a signal through 33 inductors than open a laptop. The show floor revealed an industry that remains stubbornly, gloriously physical even as artificial intelligence begins to creep into its workflows.
AI Arrives at the Pedalboard
The most provocative debut arguably came from Polyend, whose new Endless pedal platform puts a large language model directly into the effects design process. Venus Theory, the YouTube creator and musician who demonstrated it, framed the AI angle with characteristic self-awareness:
Everybody's favorite thing in music right now, AI. But not that kind of AI, as I am famous for complaining about on the internet endlessly.
The concept is straightforward: a standardized hardware pedal that can run custom DSP effects, generated either by an onboard LLM or coded manually through an SDK. At a street price of 299 dollars, with 20 LLM tokens included for generating 10 to 20 effects, Polyend is essentially selling a blank canvas with an AI assistant built in.
If I want my own custom pedal, my options are commission one or spend 5 months building one myself that still won't work.
The counterpoint here is obvious: generative AI producing DSP code is still in its early days, and there is a meaningful difference between an LLM approximating a granular reverb algorithm and an experienced DSP engineer building one with deep knowledge of filter topology and signal flow. The 20-token bundling also raises questions about the long-term economics. If the LLM becomes essential to the workflow, musicians may find themselves paying recurring costs for what was marketed as a one-time hardware purchase. Still, the open SDK and the ability to edit generated code in a standard development environment suggest Polyend is at least hedging against lock-in.
Generative Drums Without the Screen Addiction
Allen Instruments debuted Sprum, which its founder Justin Delay described as a hands-on alternative to the screen-heavy interfaces dominating modern music production:
This is the world's first hands-on real-time generative and audio reactive drum machine. It knows the entire world of music theory. It is instantly going to be able to give you beats and jam with it in real time.
The instrument's audio reactivity feature, which listens to whatever is being played and generates responsive drum patterns, represents an interesting middle ground between fully autonomous generative music and traditional manual sequencing. The emphasis on physical faders for controlling per-drum intensity suggests a design philosophy that prioritizes tactile interaction over menu diving.
Still a hands-on minimal screen experience.
Whether Sprum can deliver on the promise of real-time musical intelligence remains to be seen. History is littered with hardware that claimed to understand music theory but produced results that sounded more like algorithmic exercises than musical performances. The updated version shown at the booth, with larger buttons and a small display for BPM readout, suggests the team is iterating based on real user feedback, which is a good sign for a first-generation product.
The Beautifully Impractical
Not everything at Buchla and Friends had commercial ambitions. Eternal Research showed the Demon Box, a device with 33 inductors that responds to electromagnetic frequencies and outputs audio, control voltage, and MIDI. The demonstrations involved waving motorized magnets, drills, phones, and television sets over the inductor array to generate signals.
Any speaker you hold over the top, you can actually get the audio into the Demon Box wirelessly. And the inductors will output signals that will follow the amplitude of that sound.
Running on just 5 volts of USB power, the Demon Box occupies a category of instrument that exists somewhere between serious tool and performance art installation. It is the kind of device that makes synthesizer culture fascinating to outsiders: genuinely inventive, aesthetically committed, and completely unconcerned with whether it fits into anyone's existing workflow.
Heritage Meets Iteration
Studio Electronics brought the SE3X, the latest version of their flagship SE1 programmable rack synth, which now includes Moog, Roland, and MS-20 filter emulations among its 32 discrete hardware filters. Mark from Studio Electronics described the platform with evident affection:
This is a platform that refuses to die. It's just gorgeous sounding. It's through hole. It's discrete.
The persistence of through-hole, discrete analog design in an era of surface-mount manufacturing and digital emulation says something about the market Buchla and Friends serves. These are buyers who can hear the difference, or at least believe they can, and are willing to pay for components soldered the way they were in the 1970s. Whether that distinction holds up in a blind listening test is a debate that has raged for decades and shows no signs of resolving.
The Modular Ecosystem Keeps Expanding
ALM demonstrated Pamela's Disco, a 4 HP module that syncs modular systems to CDJ turntable equipment, bridging two historically separate performance worlds. The Stem Ripper, an eight-channel multitrack recorder with a digital mixer expander larger than the recorder itself, hints at modular systems growing complex enough to need their own internal mixing infrastructure.
Genki brought the Catla, a five-voice analog synthesizer inspired by Icelandic basalt columns and volcanic eruptions. Terafones showed the Nimira, a chord instrument built around the circle of fifths with walnut enclosures that double as transducer speakers. Thomas Adam Billings, its solo creator, captured the spirit of much of the show floor:
I'm a big music theory nerd and I really wanted to make the circle of fifths an actual physical interface.
The 1010 Music Bento took the opposite approach, packing sampling, granular synthesis, drum pads, multi-sample playback with 24-note polyphony, and a full effects chain into a single touchscreen device. It represents the maximalist end of the spectrum, where one box tries to do everything.
Vibration as Medium
Perhaps the most unusual exhibitor was Crescendo Research, which builds vibrating floors and furniture designed to let users feel bass frequencies through their bodies without damaging their hearing. Ben Aldren explained:
We love seeing people try it out for the first time because so many people haven't tried anything like this and it just brings the music into your body.
In a show dominated by devices that produce sound, a company focused on how sound is physically experienced offered a useful reminder that the listening experience extends well beyond what comes out of a speaker.
Bottom Line
Buchla and Friends 2026 confirmed that the boutique synthesizer world remains one of the most inventive corners of the music industry. The show's range, from a one-person operation building walnut chord instruments to Polyend shipping AI-powered effects pedals at scale, reflects a community that values idiosyncrasy over standardization. The creep of AI into instrument design is real but, at least for now, it is arriving as a tool rather than a replacement. The builders at this show are not interested in making music easier to produce. They are interested in making it stranger, more physical, and more personal. That impulse is worth paying attention to, even if the resulting instruments appeal to exactly five people.