Robert Moog -- Rhymes with Rogue. And "In Vogue"

The man who brought the synthesizer to the mass market has been acclaimed and cursed for that contribution to music. Synth legend Moog is back with a soulful new machine.

Moog's first machines were large and unwieldy, with prices and service requirements that limited them to music's elite experimentalists. In 1968, Wendy (then Walter) Carlos' "Switched On Bach" album took Moog's synthesizer sounds to a much wider audience. Introduced in the early 1970's, his compact MiniMoog was priced and sized for the working rock band, and the rest is history. The synth revolution was on a roll, propelled by the same exponential improvements in electronic technologies that drove the PC boom.

But the synth revolution rolled on without Robert Moog, who sold his company in 1974.

This year, at age 69, he has returned to the synth market with the MiniMoog Voyager, a handcrafted update of the original, now fitted for computer control. According to a recent feature in WIRED magazine, Moog believes that many musicians got tired of the digital sounds that now dominate the synthesizer market. "[Musicians] started telling us, 'I sure wish I could get a MiniMoog.' Not just one or two or a dozen - we heard it from hundreds."

Continuing to draw on advice from such keyboard veterans Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Rick Wakeman, Moog reintroduced the MiniMoog -- an old-tech, analog, hardware-based synthesizer -- with few changes. The case includes walnut instead of vinyl, but the guts -- the soul -- are the same as ever.

The March/April issue of ArtistPro looks deeper at Moog's life and career. Born in New York in 1934, he started building hobby kits with his father at age 10. At 14 he built his first theremin -- the pioneering electronic instrument familiar to fans of 1950s sci-fi movies -- and started designing them while in high school. He founded his first company, the R. A. Moog Company, in 1954 while still a physics undergraduate at Queens College. He added another B.S. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from Cornell.

His first synthesizer designs came in 1964, and his business became a full-time one. At that time he started his practice of working closely with composers & musicians -- his customers -- so that he and his engineers could understand how the instruments were actually used, and what artists dreamed of being able to do.

When he got out of the synth business in 1974, he moved from upstate New York to the even more tranquil mountains of North Carolina. His Big Briar Productions quietly continued to make theremins, analog effects modules, and MIDI control interfaces. With the development of the Voyager, the company became Moog Music, once again bringing his pioneering name to the front.

Check out Moog's web site

Read the short feature on Robert Moog in the July, 2003 issue of WIRED

Browse the ArtistPro magazine containing the profile of Robert Moog

Read a bio of Robert Moog in Salon

Hear a theremin (and read a fascinating biography of its inventor, Lev Termen)