Moog Music Forum

Hi all,

How do you use your moog for chords? I guess since it can only generate 2 voices, you'd have to use a sampler a DAW if you wanted to make chords. What's your technique, just use another synth?

Thanks for your reply

You can polychain multiple Moog synths for additional realtime voices. If you're recording, you could just use multiple tracks to stack voices into chords.

With a Voyager, you can use three oscillators at three different pitches to achieve a chord. You can use a mod bus and the modwheel to switch between a minor and a major third. I’ve done that already.

If you have a Phatty or any 2 oscillators Moog, you can add the desired “tonal colour” with only two carefully select notes in the chord. I do that a lot when composing in band: to avoid harmonic overload, limit the number of notes each instrument is playing so that the harmonic colour is set up by the ensemble rather than each player.

You can get quasi three-note chords out of a Sub Phatty/Sub 37 by increasing the Resonance of the Low Pass Filter (and use 100% KeyTracking).

The idea is to have just enough Resonance that you start to hear the Filter Cutoff Frequency as the third note, but not so much as to block out the other two oscillators' notes.

(Shameless ad... I made a couple of tracks with the procesure I described earlier. It's called The Voyagers)

I did the whole per note sampling thing, it's a lot of work.
A slightly easier way to achieve polyphony i discovered is via the sampling/spectral synthesis plugin Iris by Izotope.
Basically i recorded long notes from my sub 37 in different oscillator configurations, and some wavetable-like slow pulsewidth sweeps.
The advantage of the iris plug is that it handles the files quite easily, has aditional modulation possibilities and you can use just a few note samples, just one , or one per octave (eg c1, c2, etc) the pitching algorythm sounds quite nice and somehow chords sound a lot more musical/ harmonically pleasing than in a per note sampler instrument like kontakt.
I give the iris a bit of a release envelope, sometimes randomise the start position or modulate sweeps through the audio file in wave-table-ish way. send midi to both iris and sub 37 so i can shape it with the envelopes and filter, route the output of the iris into the external input of the sub, and voila: a Moog PPG

the input of the sub is a bit finnicky, if you dial the levels up from say above 9/10 o clock the sound is very heavilly driven, and anything higher will sound horrible, especially for chords.
i have to crank my preamps a bit more, and there's a slight loss of dynamics, but you can get great sounds. if you layer this with the patch you recorded the waves from and set those up as an arp or sequence you can get some really lush complex harmonic patches

i've been sitting on this trick for a while in a smeagol-ish kinda way it really is a golden trick.

I use a Roland DJ-70 to turn my mono synth like my Sub Phatty into a polyphonic synth.
I sample one note and it's ok, nothing more to do, i can immediatly play it polyphonic on the DJ-70.
I love this keyboard !

I make paraphonic patches feeding a polyphonic synth into the audio input, then setting the key priority to low or high, but not last since it makes a mess.

Works fantastic with the OP-1 and my old Casio VZ synths sending them through the MF102 before going in

True, I sometimes do that too! The LP MIDI-controls a Roland EM101 (6 Juno voices but only presets) whose audio gets in the LP's audio input.
With the right envelopes, oscillator volume and note priority settings (guess what: I made myself presets of that ), it can sound fantastic. Plus the filter overdrive can get you in really dirty territories (NIN fan here...)