200e

I received the Gold book when I bought my Serge and no, the Buchla  
doc I've read belonging to a 200e owner is nothing like it.

For those unfamiliar, "An Introduction to the Serge Modular Music  
System" by Rich Gold et al is about 110 pages of illustrated concepts  
and tutorials written in the early 1980s so it does not cover quite a  
number of the more esoteric modules and does cover some discontinued  
modules, though of course now STS is curently just building the, as  
far as I know only semi-documented M-Series. Anyway with Serge there  
is info that as far as I know is only contained in the product  
catalog (what you'd get if you asked for a free catalog before the M- 
Series). The "Gold Book" is of that era with no attempt to update it  
though it is extremely useful educational and useful as well as fun,  
hence it's reputation alongside the Arp 2600 manual.

With the 200e -correct me if I'm wrong as I don't actually own any.  
When you buy one you get I guess around an average of 2 or 3 pages on  
each module you've bought. It's certainly better than nothing as some  
module makers give you, then again I wouldn't say the 200e modules  
are intuitive enough to mostly grasp starting cold, though obviously  
some people grasp things faster than others. It's not quite up to the  
feature by feature thoroughness that say Doepfer lets you download.   
What they do tell you is useful and I guess with this yahoogroup as a  
resource one can get by.

Maybe saying this is not all that diplomatic but when I saw the  
Buchla doc I definitely got the feeling that they might get  
criticized for shortness and "rough edges" by the curious if it was  
freely available.

> although we are not distributing digital copies of "our" manual, there
> is nothing to stop anyone from making a "better" one...

mmm... well not exactly anyone, someone already owning the modules  
already would have to do that and in that case you'd probably want to  
be exploring them rather than documenting them.

nick