Moog Music Forum

Hi all,
Tonight I got to meet and have dinner with Bill Hemsath, the originator of the Minimoog Model A. He was a nice guy and had lots of great stories. I found the accidentals mind-blowing. Here's one:

On his lunch breaks Bill would go up to his office and tinker around. Aparently his office doulbled as a junk room for spare parts. He had a crapped out keyboard from a scraped organ. It only had the bottom 3 octaves left on it (that weren't broken or pillaged), so he hacked off the frame, keeping the 3 octaves. He found a casing and sawed it down to size. Presto: the birth of small size keyboard. Since his casing was smaller, he only opted to put a few modules in there (2 Osc, a filter, etc, you get the picture). He made it just for the heck of it. It wasn't until many months later after the peak of the Switched on Bach records when business starting failing did someone suggest that they ought to start making small sized synths like Bill's toy. After much goading Bob finally agreed. Bill Hemsath, then, was the founder of the portable keyboard.
Here is a picture of Bill's Model A Minimoog (only 1 in existence)

http://www.soundofmusic.se/synth/minimo ... odel_a.htm

Bill worked on the oscillators and the powersupply for subsequent MiniMoogs leaving in 1972 to go on to Cornell because he didn't want to move with the company to Buffalo.
He had a lot of great stories and it was a rare opportunity to meet a living legend.
Thanks for listening.
Matt

This a great annecdote. Have you got anymore?

More stories:
Bill designed the power supply for the Minimoog. It was a little noisy. They had another production team member design a new one that was quieter. However, it was too quiet and made the oscillators immediately sync up. So they fell back to Bill’s design.

He told us how the fellow in charge of doing the calculations for the voltage signals into the filter miscalculated by an increment of 10 (sorry, I’m not a techy, I’m not sure what). Anyhow, when the mistake was discovered the signal proved to be too weak and anemic sounding. So, they went with the +10 mistake – which is so much a part of the Moog’s machismo.

There was another story about how after they decided to make the mini-moog, they hired a coceptual artist/designer to come up with casing ideas. Apparently they were hokey and futuristic. When shown to some interested musicians, one said "is this a joke? there!" pointing to Bill's Model A in the corner of the shop, "that's what i want."

Bill explained a lot of engineering stuff that I didn’t understand (how the ladder filter works, etc). But, he also painted a picture of his life and involvement in electronics from the mid-60s up to 1972. While working at the Cleveland Institute of Music he also would travel to all the major cities of the east coast and mid-west and Canada as part of some weird avant-garde hippy electronic music/art act. He would stop Moog’s shop for parts and gear whenever he passed through. Eventually they came to know each other well and Bob asked him to come work for him. He told us about the Ithaca, NY shop and the musicians who would pass through, about Wendy Carlos, about building modulars, etc.

He also told us a lot about Bob Moog that confirms other articles that I read. Namely that he was a bright guy who loved to tinker and experiment but didn’t have the business acumen. Also, that Bob didn’t particularly take well to other’s ideas/input.

In any case, Bill said that he would probably be back in Cleveland in a year or two and that he'd definitely hang out again.