Free Republic

If you remember guys like Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman and Rick Wright playing keyboard devices the size of refrigerators, you’ll love that Moog, the pioneering synth company, has gone back to making some of those monsters. Behold this glorious synthesizer porn.

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...

One of the great paradoxes of modern popular music is the endurance of the guitar. After all, electronic music has now been generally available for a half-century – and logic would suggest that with its wide range of effects (including synthesizing the sounds of traditional instruments), its programmability and editing, and its plummeting price, that the guitar, that ultimate refinement of analog music creation, would by now have gone the way of the harpsichord.

AC Entertainment has officially announce the dates for MoogFest in Asheville, NC. The festival will take place Oct. 29-31, 2010. Confirmed headlining artists include Massive Attack, MGMT, and Thievery Corporation. These will be joined by more than 25 additional artists performing in multiple venues throughout downtown Asheville, including the Asheville Civic Center Arena, the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, and Asheville¹s renowned world-class club, the Orange Peel. ...attendees will be able to participate in workshops, engage with artists in panel discussions, enjoy visual art exhibitions, installations and film screenings, and play with a variety of Moog instruments...

RALEIGH, N.C. - Robert A. Moog, whose self-named synthesizers turned electric currents into sound and opened the musical wave that became electronica, has died. He was 71. Moog was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, detected in April. He died Sunday at his home in Asheville, according to his company's Web site. A childhood interest in the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, would lead Moog to a create a career and business that tied the name Moog as tightly to synthesizers as the name Les Paul is to electric guitars. As a Ph.D student in engineering physics...