I just wanted to tell you all that I was in the presence of MOOG History last weekend - the Model D minimoog that was used to create the sound associated with all of Duracell’s commercials (3 notes - ‘bing-bong-bing’). The sound is still used to this very day.
I needed my friend to diagnose a special pedal of mine. In exchange, he asked me take all the knobs from the mini up to the kitchen and give them a good mild soap and tooth brush treatment. He’s doing some routine maintenance to it before it goes to it’s new home. It’s apparently being donated to Monmouth University.
My friend was very active back in the 70s when it was popular to mofify minimoogs. He created all sorts of mods including tuning lights that flashed an LED diode to the ‘beating’ between OSC 1 and whichever other OSC you had switched on. It worked very well at most major intrivals. It allowed you to tune your mini in the dark on stage without making a sound. So cool. That one would be useful even today! Other mods were a deticated LFO that freed up OSC 3, an extra envelope generator that you could do things like routing the pitch of the OSCs through the filter (think ELPs Hoedown) and sync swithes.
Yeah, that’s odd. Never in a million years would I have made that connection. If I had given it any consideration I would’ve thought it was some '90s era ROMpler. Shows you what I know.
The LED “beat tuning” mod is very easy. You just route the square waveforms to an XOR gate, then to the LED driver. That’s how they did it on the Polymoog. Yeah it’s only effective for near unison tunings.
I never thought of that - very cool. The only thing is that on stage you’d have to perform that task every time you need it, or build it into the patch if the routings are available.
Shame Moog didn’t stick this particular mod right where that big hole is where OSC 1’s frequency control would be. From what I understand, it’s actually just a couple of jumper wires to get it to work.
Are you sure the next to last mod you mentioned was an extra envelope? It sounds like a contour mod, where the filter eg can be routed to ctrl the pitch of osc 2 and/or 3.
These mods sound like the Ron Rivera ones. Any connection? He also did the additional lfo, dual sync, and beat tune that could be used for unison,
chromatic, and harmonic intervals, and a bunch of other things.
When last I heard, he still lived and worked in the tri-state area, thats been a minute though.
No, this guy is Doug Slocum. His company was Synthetic Sound Labs. I only remember that it was 3 knobs that could be used to control the pitch of the Oscillators now that you’ve clouded my mind!! I’ll have to get Doug to get in here an answer come questions.
Actually the Moogseum. It was delivered in May 2009 at the Moog factory by myself and it’s former owner Tom Coppola where we donated it to Bob’s daughter Michelle. I’m really proud of how it came out. Quite a bit of work and a complete cabinet refinishing (red mahogany stain) and custom copper name plates.
