Bob Moog

One of the technical pioneers of modern music, Bob Moog, died this week. He was 71. He had been diagnosed with brain cancer in April, 2005, and had been receiving radiation treatments and chemotherapy. Dr. Moog was well-respected and is undoubtedly being well-eulogized by more talented folks and, more importantly, folks who knew him well.

Bob Moog didn't invent the synthesizer (although it's commonly attributed to him), but he was the first to break the idea of electronic audio synthesis successfully out of the realm of an interesting electronics experiment and put the concepts into the actual hands of people who could do something with them—musicians. Moog started off building theramins—one of the first wholly electronic instruments—but built his first modular synthesizer for fun while pursing his Ph.D. in Engineering Physics at Cornell. Modular synths in those days were cabinetted collections of knobs and dangling patch cords where players did things like connect the output of an LFO to the input of a VCA and using the ADSR envelope generator to change VCF frequency over time. Great, powerful things for their day: I recall they won Wendy Carlos some Grammys for Switched-on Bach and/or The Well-Tempered Synthesizer which sound quite quaint today. Yet for all the sales those albums made, most folks in recent generations were probably exposed to Moogs via popular music produced by the likes of Herbie Hancock, Yes, Stevie Wonder, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Devo, Kraftwerk, or (more recently) Nine Inch Nails.

The concepts modular synths embodied—subtractive synthesis, envelopes, oscillators, filters, resonance generators, waveforms, sample-and-hold—were brought into modern musical vocabulary by Bob Moog and, probably most significantly, his smaller monophonic Minimoog units introduced in the late sixties and fetching astonishing vintage prices today. The Minimoog changed music. Almost everyone—no exaggeration, everyone—had to at least respond to the sudden presence and musical contributions of the Moogs, if not embrace it outright. We still live in its shadow.

OK: like I said, Bob Moog will be lauded by words more capable than mine. Here's what I thought was great about Dr. Moog: while he was concerned about the actual techniques of producing sound electronically, he was always equally concerned about how musicians would produce that sound. He once said in a magazine interview I read as a teenager (and I wish I could find a reference to it online!) that he was as appalled by the mess of knobs and patch cables in the giant modular synths as anyone. Compared to the beauty and simplicity of a flute or violin, those synthesizers were the results of engineering, not producing music. And the sad fact is that today, the panels and interfaces of everything from Korg Tritons to Roland rack-mount gear to the hottest samplers are creations of either hardware engineers or software engineers—and, often, such as the case of the Triton, appalling combinations of both. They're like trying to make music by using the ass-end of a credit card reader at a supermarket.

So Moog put thought into controllers, too. Having experience with theramins—which he continued to design and build for 50 years—may have been a big influence: compared to any instrument, acoustic or electronic, theramins have one of the most elegant interfaces imaginable: they respond to the motions of your hands in the air. You don't even touch a theramin—which can be disconcerting to musicians accustomed to receiving tactile feedback from an instrument—but after a few moments it's like magic. Moog built theramins with pitch antennas which were musically useful, rather than which merely produced sci-fi sound effects.

Moogs synths used traditional piano keyboards, but even Moog's little choices made sense on the original monophonic models. Like low-note priority (where the sound played corresponds to the lowest pitch being depressed) which makes musically useful phrasing possible. High-note priority could have worked too, but most-recently-pressed phrasing would have been a nightmare. The Minimoog introduced wheel controllers on the left side of the keyboard to change modulation and pitch. And let me tell you, despite all the talk from Korg and Roland engineers that joysticks or ribbons or sliders or knobs are more natural or musical…they're wrong. Those wheels are more playable and musical than any pitch or mod control device I've used since. (And at this point I've used most of them.) Recent updates to the Minimoog (called the Minimoog Voyager) introduced a trackpad-like control surface which let players control signals using not only left-right and up-down motion, but also via the area in contact with the pad. Kinda cool.

So, thanks Bob. Not just for putting vast new auditory palettes into the world, but for trying to provide tools by which people could make music with them.

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