Posted on 10/13/2014 10:42:38 AM PDT by Squawk 8888
Back in the Olden Dayes, synthesizers were the size of refrigerators. The earliest ones filled entire rooms and, in at least one case, a complete railway car. They were hot, noisy, temperamental and devilishly hard to program. And they couldn’t do much.
Then along came Dr. Bob Moog who figured out how to tame electricity with printed circuits and oscillators. His experiments begat the first commercially viable synthesizers. But they came in pieces called modules that had to be roped together with patch cords.
What you see in the picture is a thousand times less powerful than what you can do with an app on your phone. We’ve come a long, long way.
But these modular synths are still beloved by many musicians. Synthtopia points us to this documentary celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Moog Modular.
Sweet.
Many modern bands are leading an analog renaissance e.g. Chvrches.
Topic suggestions are always welcome, and pings to music-related threads are appreciated.
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I used a phaser plugged into the keyboard, great sound..! Nothing like the Moog or Mellotron, though..
Thanks for the post.
Oh and add me, please..
You’ve been added :)
Yup - still have the album.
Of course, once Brian Eno came around everything changed....
Ah...Those were the days! :-)
Wow. Thanks for posting this. Three years after this event, I was a freshman in college and my boyfriend’s roommate had about one fourth of his small bedroom full of this stuff. I’m sending this to my husband and one of our best friends who did this stuff then too (although I didn’t know them until about two years later. Also to my two sons who are musicians and use old school electronics in their music.
“Thousand times less powerful than a mobile phone app”?
I sort of know what they were trying to say but ignorant people should not write articles and make stupid statements like this. There is no mobile app or digital keyboard that can sound like a analog modular. It is primarily the fat filters, VCFs. Some expensive keyboards approximate but not that we’ll in my opinion. Even the new analog minimoogs don’t sound as fat as the old ones. Something about the transistor ladders that is cool.
There is re-emergence of modulars that now compete with Moog. It is an expensive hobby. Many trance artists have them. Takes about 3K to get started. It’s on my wish list.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer, yea baby!
Outstanding! Thanks.
One of my 30+ stations in my Pandora mix - and among my favorites.
That was my intro to electronic music way back when. Rather influential during my formative years. Led to one highlight of getting a personal tour, in my early teens, of the synthesizer lab at the Syracuse University music college - a truly impressive experience.
Amazing that much of modern electronic music (techno/trance in particular) really doesn’t sound that much different, just with better equipment and more refined style.
There may be some analog artifacts which are hard to duplicate precisely ... but methinks the point of the comment is that a mere cell phone can produce far more sophisticated & realistic sounds with great ease.
Give app Animoog a spin. Close enough to the old boxes for most applications; if you _need_ that special tone exactly, your need will warrant the high cost for the actual old boxes or advanced reproductions thereof.
Sure I will check it out but no way it sounds like a modular. I have played on many 3-5k keyboards and they can’t do it. It is more than just analog artifacts - it is the fat moog sound itself. I am sure it doesn’t matter to younger generation players who probably have never played a 1st generation moog or arp and were raised on crap music sampled and compressed onto mp3’s. The new moog clones come close. Not practical to buy a moog modular 35 system.
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