• Audio
  • Video
  • About
  • Blog
    • Published Work
    • Instructional Stuff
      • Audio Instruction
      • Music Business
      • Music Instruments
      • Music Genres
      • Programming And Such
    • Music Thoughts, Rants, Randomness
    • Production And Song Stories
  • Store
  • Contact
  •  

switched-on-bach

What the hell is a Moog?

February 8, 2016 by Aaron
Musical Instruments, What The Hell Series
analog, analog synth, electronic, moog, music, robert moog, switched on bach, synthesizer
Bob Moog with his inventions

OMG! A Moog! Is…a synthesizer. You see one pictured here. Moog is actually pronounced “Mohg” – hey MOE-g! But many people say “mooooog” – like a cow with a g. Incorrectly. Just so you know 🙂

Third Option isn’t Moog-centric per se, but it’s a key component in the history of electronic music.

The Moog synth – or series of synths, was invented by a cat named Robert Moog, who, well, you also see pictured above.

There’s a lot of technical, complicated ways to describe a Moog synthesizer, and instruments like it, but for the lay person I think it can best be described like this: It looks like an old telephone operator’s console, where you can plug different wires all around (called patching, which is why the telephone operator would say “I’ll patch you through” and is also why when a musician refers to a certain setting on a synthesizer, they refer call it a “patch”), and end up making a sound kind of like this.

Yeah I know. But you can see it being cool right? Sure you can. This is where “synthesis” and any kind of electronic music was born. Now when you just have the big ‘ol patch module and it’s just constantly buzzing, there’s not too much use for that. But attach something like a keyboard, which was an arbitrary choice btw, and you can now tell it to stop and start and change the pitch and stuff and wam! You can make stuff like this.

Or this: Switched On Bach which was done all on Moog synths. This was incredibly fascinating back in the day, trust me. I remember this being one of the first CDs my parents got when a CD player finally came into our house.

The point, mainly, is when you hear someone talk about a Moog, and you think “WTF?”, just know that it is a synthesizer, kind of the father of synthesizers, and that it sounds like a big ass buzzsaw unless you do something cool, in which case it can sound like a lot of cool stuff, like changing the pitch, whether you’re dealing with a sine wave or a sawtooth wave (what the HELL?), changing the attack, the release, modulation, etc etc etc!! Also know that it’s an ANALOG synthesizer (ooh I just thought of my next “what the hell?”), which is different than a DIGITAL synthesizer (oh the what the hell’s are piling up). Analog synthesizers came first. They use actual electrical signal to make noise, as opposed to using 1s and 0s to communicate to (or from) a computer chip how to make noise.

We’ll talk about those soon, I promise. 🙂 (or do I?)

— Aaron

Latest Posts

  • Mastering Good Stage Organization
  • 13 Books Every Musician Should Read Yesterday
  • The Abbey Road Trick and Friends
  • Start With the Drums: Cleaning Up Your Stage Sound from the Ground Up
  • 6 Tips for Audio Mixing on the Go

Archives

  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • May 2022
  • February 2022
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • March 2020
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • February 2018
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • October 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • February 2016
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • November 2006

Follow and Listen

 
 
 
 
 
 

2022 © Copyright @ NQuit Music –  All Rights Reserved – Website by nquit.com