Bob moog soundsource problme4/19/2023 ![]() Over the next couple of years, he made a small fortune by selling more than a thousand Theremin kits for $50 each.īy 1963, Moog Music was up and running. He had grown up with the '50s sounds of the Barrons and Raymond Scott, and being both more than averagely bright and also famously inventive, at the age of 19 he published a design for a theremin in an electronics magazine. With an engineer father, and a mother who made him spend hours practising scales on the family grand, Moog was already fascinated by sound and by electronics. Photo: Roger Luther / All these sources were a direct influence on the young Robert Moog. Herb Deutsch working on Bob Moog's prototype synth in 1964. And maverick genius Raymond Scott had made a fine career producing bleeps and burbles for advertising and cartoons, using a monstrous room full of home-made valve-based music hardware. Outside of academia, Bebe and Louis Barron's eerie soundtrack to the film Forbidden Planet was far ahead of its time, and is still bafflingly impressive today. One of the most successful projects was the RCA MkII synthesizer at Columbia-Princeton University, which was a kind of very crude modular, and a major influence on what was to come later. Not wanting to be outdone by these esoteric European efforts, the US was busy playing catch-up. ![]() Academic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis were notorious for spending years working in studios stuffed to the ceiling with old-fashioned lab test equipment, obsessively layering overtones onto hand-edited tapes, to produce music that typically sounded like a saucer full of angry aliens with 400 fingernails each, colliding with a room full of extra-squeaky blackboards. But its most distinguishing characteristics were that it was supremely inconvenient to work with, and the results were unlikely to appeal to a typical music lover. By then, electronic music technology had already had a long and varied history. To understand why, it's necessary to backtrack a little and look at what was happening in electronic music in the early '60s. So it's a bit of a surprise to find that in some ways, the original Moog modular isn't actually all that good. ![]() And Dr Robert Moog wasn't just the innovating force behind the instrument - he also created many of its properties, and defined the terms for almost everything that happened next. It's no exaggeration to say that virtually every synth ever mentioned in this magazine is a direct descendant of those original Moog designs. Not only were the sounds these machines made completely original, but the technology behind them led to a flood of entirely new music styles. Synthesizers, and especially the original Moog modular, were amongst the most important new musical instruments of the 20th century. Photo: Roger Luther / īob Moog's name is forever associated with the synthesizer - but why? We take a trip back in time to explain the story of the man and the modular systems that provided the basis for nearly all modern synths. Three complete modular systems are visible in the background.
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