About this manual

The origin of this manual | How to use this manual | Credits

About the origin of this manual

For all the (pre-) buzzusers that are interested in the abouts concerning this manual, I decided to give a little explanation on how it came into existence.

In one way or another, I have always been concerned about making buzz more understandable for new users. Being pretty involved in the newest developments around Buzz, I was one of the first to hear about the manual that Sine909, the author of buzztrack.com, had been working on. I was at machine developer Zephod’s place at that moment, he was working on EKKY, one of the first stereomachines.

I talked to Sine909 about the lack of good information for new users before, and he agreed with me on that. So since Zephod and I already did a good job on other stuff before, he sent us the first version of the official buzz 1.2 help file, as we promised not to spread it.

When reading the manual I noticed a huge amount of good formulated information, Sine909 did a very good job. There were a lot of errors in it though (mainly spelling, grammar and linking), and I agreed with Sine909 to write down all the mistakes in order for him to correct them, finish the last topics and bring out the official version of the help file, together with the final version of Buzz 1.2. Version 1.2 wasn’t finished yet, but as we all hoped, it would be finished soon by that time.

Since I usually haven’t got all the time of the world, it took me two months (and 22 pages Times New Roman 12 pt. ;-) to write down all the mistakes.

But just when I was finished, Oskari, the author of Buzz, had two hard disk chrashes, and he lost all the source code for Buzz 1.2. He predicted not to be able to continue on it by any means. This made Sine909 give up the whole Buzz 1.2 concept and together with that the whole concept of the help file. He wasn’t the only one, of course nobody was really charmed by the situation, pretty imaginable. I remember Zephod changing his nickname to Zeph\dead for more than a week. He really did a lot of work on Buzz and gave up a lot of social life for it.

I didn’t want to let go of all the time everybody (and of course I) put in Buzz, so, encouraged by Djlaser, I decided to continue on the manual, hoping that Oskari would be able to recover the data on the disks.

DJLaser decompiled Sine909’s .chm file for me, and I corrected all the errors. I figured that the manual would need updating later on, so I decided to put it online. I made it a little navigating interface and uploaded the html files.

So, yep, the result is what you are currently looking at. I surely hope that new buzz users will use this manual and have enough patience to really read, comprehend, and most important, try everything that’s written here.

About the way this manual should be used

I doubt that in a quick glance anybody can comprehend the power of Buzz. Friends that started learning Buzz with this manual usually first tried buzz, loaded some songs, played them and said: .. hey it is cool, it works, but rather give me my midi studio.

After that I tell them how to use their midikeyboard with buzz, tweak some parameters and load presets of a machine like the voidsynth. Then they start jamming and won’t stop anymore :-)

About credits

This manual would most definitly not exist (yet) if not the following people wouldn't have put trust, involvement and effort into the development of it.

I want to thank:

Oskari , for Buzz

Sine909, for collecting and writing down almost all information.

DJLaser, for technical support, encouragement and keeping track of the progress

Zephod and Apo, for the fine-tuning.

Regards, Thev