Saluting the mighty Moog synthesizer

• Mike Barris' trenchant look at digital music (#6)

It changed music forever.

Long before the digital synthesizer, musicians created new sounds and customized them to their needs by using an instrumental contraption that seemed, quite simply, futuristic: the Moog synthesizer.

The Moog (pronounced “mogue,” like “vogue”) brought electronic sound modulation into music-making, and paved the way for the digital enhancement of music that is a fixture of today’s music landscape. Developed in 1964, the device was featured prominently in the recordings of such pop artists as Stevie Wonder and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the punk-rock group Devo and disco-queen Donna Summer. Signaling the instrument’s barrier-crossing ability, the Moog was the sole instrument on the top-selling classical-music recording of all time, "Switched-On Bach."

Many techno- and audio-philes claim the Moog puts out a superior sound to the digital synthesizers of today. This BBC news piece eloquently demonstrates and describes the Moog's function:

This past weekend, an estimated 22,000 fans of the Moog converged on Asheville, N.C., for Moogfest, a three-day salute to the instrument. The festival included more than 60 acts, panel discussions, workshops and films, but the beacon for the event was the innovation of Robert Moog, the synthesizer’s New York-born inventor. For 27 years, up to his death in 2005, Moog lived in Asheville, where he was a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina and occasionally performed publicly with his invention. The festival, which relocated to Asheville from New York this year, celebrates Moog’s “legacy as a sonic pioneer,” according to the festival website.

Click here to read about the nonprofit Bob Moog Foundation's effort to raise money to build a “Moogseum” in Asheville based around Robert Moog’s archives.

Among the acts slated to play Moogfest was Devo, a heavy Moog user whose style has ranged from punk to art rock to post-punk to New Wave. Watch Devo perform its then-current chart hit, "Whip It," and "Uncontrollable Urge" on the "Fridays" show in 1980, here:



Moogfest celebrated Robert Moog's invention with interactive sessions that used a variety of Moog instruments. At the 2005 Moogfest in New York, Robert Moog himself introduced a performance by keyboardist Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, one of the first pop-rock bands to perform live with a synthesizer. See it here:

And since Robert Moog mentions EL& P's "Lucky Man," let's listen to the recording of that tune, which concludes with a nice Moog solo:



The Moog crashed the mainstream music market in 1968 when Wendy Carlos, a New York recording engineer and composer recorded an album of pieces by Baroque-era giant Johann Sebastian Bach entirely on the synthesizer. The resulting CBS Records release, Switched-On Bach, captured three Grammy awards for Carlos and shattered classical-music sales records. Carlos went on to compose original music for the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange, which also featured several Moog versions of classical works by Beethoven and Rossini.

Watch the trailer for A Clockwork Orange, with its Moog-enhanced soundtrack, here:




How does the Moog stand up against today’s digital synthesizers? The original device was by no means perfect – its pitch was inconsistent, and its user-created sounds could not be saved the way they can in the digital age. The instrument had no “pre-set” sounds; musicians twisted dials and knobs by hand to produce the unusual noises and sonorities issuing from the Moog's speakers. But what the Moog had going for it was the continuous electronic signal through which it produced its sounds. Some audiophiles feel that signal is cleaner than the digitally produced sound, which consists of thousands and thousands of samples per second, and thus has thousands and thousands of gaps. Seen as adding weight to that argument is the existence of an iPhone app, Filtatron, a Moog audio-effects suite for the iPhone or the iPod touch.

For a taste of contemporary synthesizer rock, check out The Octopus Project's instrumental, "Truck":



During the '70s, Stevie Wonder's use of the Moog changed the face of R&B, adding to the instrument's growing stature. The singer and keyboard player's complicated synthesizer riffs held together the contrasting textures and voices that underpinned his work in songs such as "Superstition." Wonder shows himself to have a fine touch on the synthesizer in a live-in-the-studio performance of "Superstition," here:




The Moog also gave singer Donna Summer a signature sound that was unusual for the disco era: Listen to Summer's recording of "I Feel Love," here:



And here's a live version of the song, complete with Summer's robot-like choreography:





This might be a good time to introduce this week's Open Mike interview. I chatted with Fred Topinka, an Allendale, N.J., keyboard player who made music using the Moog at clubs, concerts and recording sessions. For Fred and many others, the Moog symbolized the height of creativity in music-making. "I was not inspired by any particular artist to go out and buy it," Fred told me. "I heard it on the radio, and I said, 'I really want to try that.'"

Fred got a kick out of working the Moog in with the Hammond organ he played. "I experimented with it a lot. and I saw all the different, crazy sounds I could get out of it," he said. "If we went to a club and did one song one night and did that same song in another club on another night, my Moog synthesizer  would be different in terms of the way I used it. It was not locked into any one pattern. I always wanted to flavor it differently."

Once in a while, "the guys would turn and give me this crazy look, saying "where'd you get that from?'" he said.

Fred, who played rock music, fondly remembers the Moog as being "really hands-on." Twisting knobs and dials, "you could keep that sound going and going and going, even though your hand wasn't on the keyboard at times," he recalled. "So it gave me the ability to hold that note and then change it and modulate it."

Since there were no pre-sets, "the sounds that you were creating with the Moog were really just based on your own taste," Fred said. "You could change every flavor with just a turn of a knob. It took a lot of taste. It wasn't a locked-in digital sound."

Listen to my entire interview with Fred Topinka, here.

Let's close this week's blog with one more Moog piece. Dick Hyman, best known as the musical director for Woody Allen movies, recorded some of the first commercial electronic-music albums entirely on the Moog. Here is "Minotaur," a cut from Hyman's album, "The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman":