Hey, Glad my journey could provide some help to ya! Honestly, it’s been a few months since getting rid of my Easel command and I don’t miss it at all. I think it deserves the praise it gets and it’s a great instrument, and admittedly I didn’t have the experience with the 218 being part of it. But I found it be limiting after the initial awe of the instrument wore off. I’ve pretty much lusted after one since getting into modular, and all my eurorack adventures pretty much were focused on getting that sound. The good (and the bad) thing about the Easel is that it’s such a honed in sound that it was pretty hard to break from that. If I could afford to have a collection of instruments, I would undoubtedly have hung on to the Easel. But I can only really afford one system right now, so I wanted something that had a little wider variance in timbre, but still a sonic signature… hence Serge (see recent comments in Serge thread)
Another thing about the Easel that I found annoying is that it’s more of a closed system, it seemed to have more in common with a mono synth, even with the variety of patch points there were some annoying workarounds I was always having to do to interface with other gear… the big thing is that some functions were only able to be triggered through internal routing and not patching, unless you added an interface to the card slot. And this is with the updates on the 208c, I can’t imagine what it would have been like on a standard 208. Basically if you are used to patching euro you will find it a little limiting.
My plan was to add more Buchla to my system, but everything is just so expensive, for example a 259 clone seems to be running at least $1200 these days, I couldn’t really justify heading in that direction.
For the price of the Easel I was able to pick up 5 4u R*S Serge modules and I have way more options than I did on the Easel. I did cheat a little and found the Donks module, which is a Buchla 292 and Easel Timbre circuit, so I can cop those sounds when I want.
