Don Buchla

The San Francisco Tape Music Center, with Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, commissioned an instrument from Buchla, and the 100 series took shape in 1963–65. He saw no reason to tie electronic music to twelve notes per octave and had players touch capacitive plates instead. Where Moog subtracted harmonics with filters, Buchla generated them with complex oscillators and wavefolding, and his lowpass gate produces the characteristic plucked tone.

The difference got its name later: East Coast versus West Coast. The 1973 Music Easel was an attempt to fit everything into a briefcase. When Eurorack took off in the 2010s, West Coast modules suddenly became fashionable, roughly fifty years after Buchla had thought them up.