![]() Aside from that and the Theremin documentary, I haven’t been in any films. It was shown around the world where it was seen by millions of people, but the USA did not allow it to be shown in this country. It contained five minute segments on six different inventors, one of whom was me. It was called The Visionaries and produced in the ’70′s by the United States Information Agency. Have you been approached by anyone in Hollywood? When can we see a Bob Moog film biography? Everyone I know thought you were great in the Theremin film. When you’re not at work in your workshop what do you like to do? do you have any hobbies or pastimes? I have some hand sketches that I made as part of our development work, but the formal drawings were kept by the people who took Moog Music over when I left. The VCF didn’t come for another couple of years.ĭo you still have the original blueprints of the your first synthesizers? Next came ADSR envelope generators, envelope followers, and a simple keyboard controller. With that amount of stuff, a tape recorder, and some simple mixing and equalizing equipment, you could make a variety of new sounds that seemed absolutely amazing at the time. My very first prototype (early 1964) consisted of two VCO’s and one VCA, period. The VCA is, I would have thought, at the heart of the instrument but how did you decide what to build next? Was the whole system developed at the same time? ![]() I once had the pleasure of playing a modular Moog synthesizer in a studio in London and remember wondering which module actually came first. It’s a more complex way of making musical sounds than you would normally find in an electronic organ of the ’70′s, but it was a lot simpler than our synthesizer technology. The early ‘string synthesizers’ used conventional electronic organ technology in combination with ‘bucket brigade’ analog delay lines which time-shifted the tones, then remixed them to simulate string ensembles. ![]() Is this a particularly easy sound to create? One of the most popular sounds produced by early mass produced synthesizers seems to have been the sound of strings. Orchestral instruments have formant characteristics that are very different from sounds that are shaped by our filters. In fact, the filters that we developed were distinctly electronic-sounding. We kept telling people that our equipment was designed to make new sounds, not to emulate existing orchestral instruments. Only after our synthesizers became commercially important and our customers wanted to produce conventional melodies did we realize that we would have to clean up and stabilize our voltage-controlled oscillators.ĭid you ever intend for the synthesizer to become a constituent part of an orchestra, purposefully trying to develop filters that would in some way emulate existing orchestral instruments? That didn’t bother us at the time, because we were working with composers who didn’t care that much about pitch accuracy. The only thing was that the pitch wasn’t very accurate in the early prototypes. The first circuits were pretty simple, actually. What were the major technical problems you encountered when designed the first prototypes? I worked with a lot of musicians, and each one made his or her own contribution to our synthesizer design technology. I got into designing electronic music composition equipment because I liked working with creative musicians, people who were always looking for new ways of making music. Published on January 29, 2002.Į: Was there one defining moment while developing your first synthesizer that you realized it had the potential to radically change the way music is made?īob Moog: No, there was no one defining moment. PIANO 1, among hundreds or maybe thousands of different tracks and across genres, is something that allows modern listeners to abstract a unified notion of the “’80s sound” from a diverse and eclectic repertoire of songs produced in the talks with synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog about how he radically changed the way music is made, and the tools he used to do it. ![]() The web of connections created by the use and re-use of DX7 presets like E. PIANO 1 by combining ethnographic study of musician language with visual analysis of spectrograms, a novel combination of techniques that links acoustic specificity with social context. PIANO 1 also encapsulates two crucial aspects of a distinctly ’80s sound in microcosm: one, technological associations with digital FM synthesis and the Yamaha DX7 as a groundbreaking ’80s synthesizer and two, cultural positioning in a greater lineage of popular music history. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent-heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986-but the timbre of E. The ’80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a “sound” that is somehow unified and generalizable. ![]()
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