A REAL Moog

[anoteoftruth]

I think we should really give more credit to the people that are designing/testing/assembling/repairing and everything else at Moog music right now..

We all have a lot of respect and admiration for Bob Moog.. There's absolutely no questioning that.. I could go on forever about how true that is, but I think we all know how we feel about him.

Having said that, I have a immense amount of respect and admiration for the Moog team today. I personally am not one to question their skill or determination or ethics in their work. I have a feeling that they understand Moog's philosophy, design, and theories, better than any of us do. They live with his memory everyday, and worked alongside him. I trust that if anyone is going to make instruments that Moog would approve of, it would be the people working at MM now.

Also, with saying that.. Let's realize that Bob Moog was a man.. He was a brilliant man, who reached his vast potential in a lot of ways during his lifetime.. he was extremely creative, and found success with it.. So let's not forget that there are people working at MM now that are incredibly talented and have vast potentials to reach now.. Let's not limit our expectations from them.. they are going to do some very amazing things in the coming years that I'm sure for the most part we'll all love and buy.

Will every future product fit the bill to you as looking exactly like what you'd expect from Bob? Probably not, but that answer would be relative, and the question is unreasonable.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I have complete faith in all of them.

[rodion]

think about mr. steinway: he died long time ago but steinway piano factories keep on producing amazing musical instruments. the same goes for enzo ferrari and the current ferrari cars.

well, for sure it would have been much better to have doc Bob Moog around for some more years. but great men are those who after innovating are able to lay down solid fundations for people to keep on innovating from where they had to leave.

[anoteoftruth]

well, for sure it would have been much better to have doc Bob Moog around for some more years. but great men are those who after innovating are able to lay down solid fundations for people to keep on innovating from where they had to leave.

I completely agree.

[Electrong]

Lots of good points here, the main one being that the people at Moog music are those supremely qualified with carrying the torch. I'm sure Bob's own hard fought right to use his own name again is fresh in the minds of those at Moog Music. There is a lesson as Kevin pointed out that every other "big" synth company (actually including Moog Inc.) learned, that you can have big ideas and some ideals as well but you have to have a good business sense of it, otherwise the company will go under. Bob was always somewhat conservative-minded and that is a good mindset to use when entering into a new product line.

About the Model D.. There is no comparison, whatsoever between the sound of a maintained Mini and a Micromoog or certainly a Polymoog. They're all nice instruments though.

[MarkM]

My point is this: I hope Moog Music revitalizes some of Bob's old instruments - the Polymoog, the Micromoog, etc.
Moog Music, bring out some of Bob's old classics. Give us something with his fingerprints all over it, and not just instruments with his label on them.

I hope they don't. I want to see Bob's instruments evolve. Moog Music has some great people at work, and I would like to see them continue to use their imagination and come out with new and innovative instruments which will inspire musicians to produce sounds yet imagined. I hope Moog continues with its incredible quality and customer support. The Moog guitar, the Multi Pedal, The Freq Box. . . stay the course and challenge us with more innovative creations!

[Voltor07]

The Voyager, Little Phatty, Taurus III, and Moogerfoogers have the fingerprints of Bob Moog all over them.

Was the new Taurus planned before Bob passed? I thought it was after.

The other thing is, Bob Moog had absolutely nothing to do with the Taurus I, which the Taurus III is based on. The original Taurus was designed by Dave Luce, as was the Polymoog. To say the Taurus III has Bob Moog's fingerprints all over it is like saying Laurens Hammond's fingerprints are all over the Suzuki-Hammond products.

[Kevin Lightner]

Don't forget the ARP Avatar! That was a pretty serious dagger

Absolutely!
Arp wrongly thought that since the guitar market was so huge, if they could gain a foothold there, their sales would skyrocket.
But this was an incorrect assumption and the Avatar fell far short of what guitarists wanted.
Regardless, Arp was already busy developing their polyphonic Avatar, the Centaur.
See: http://www.syntronics.us/images/JK%20Centaur1978.jpg
(Arp folded in 1980 and this pic above is from 1978.)

Had Arp continued development of the Chroma and never ventured into the Avatar and Centaur, they might still be around today.

[EricK]

TAO,
Interesting thread. You have a lot of different opinions from all types of people, who have used Moog and other synths in all types of ways but one similarity is that we are all thankful for Bob Moog and his inventions continue to bring happiness to our lives.


Eric

[anoteoftruth]

we are all thankful for Bob Moog and his inventions continue to bring happiness to our lives.
Eric

Could'nt have said it better myself!

[Klopfgeist]

I don't want to see reissues of any instruments, or a new direction, I want to see Moog continue in the same direction it has always been going: moving forward. I know the T3 is a "reissue", but it is also a pioneering synth in that it fuses an older synth engine with all these modern features, and builds upon the instrument in many significant ways. I don't think Bob would be very happy if Moog Music Inc. decided to only produce MicroMoog and PolyMoog reissues, nor would that be a logical next step.

[anoteoftruth]

I don't want to see reissues of any instruments, or a new direction, I want to see Moog continue in the same direction it has always been going: moving forward. I know the T3 is a "reissue", but it is also a pioneering synth in that it fuses an older synth engine with all these modern features, and builds upon the instrument in many significant ways. I don't think Bob would be very happy if Moog Music Inc. decided to only produce MicroMoog and PolyMoog reissues, nor would that be a logical next step.

I agree. I think they should look back and learn from some of the instruments that we remember and love, and some of us still use... Take the good, leave the rest, move forward. I of course am hoping for a polyphonic Moog, but in no way am I hoping for a reissue of the "polymoog". A little itty bit of me is hoping for a poly moog based of a memorymoog (just because it looked so amazing, tho i never got to try one in the flesh) but I would be disapointed if it was a memorymoog clone. I'm looking forward to see how they can push the envelope, bring analog synthesis forward in our time.

[peterkadar]

I agree with everything that's been said here. One of the reasons that I am excited about my T3 is because it's a great concept from back in the day brought up to today's standards. Like my LP, which works great, btw.

I think Kevin is right on the money about the problem surrounding polyphonic analog gear in the marketplace.

Again the general idea and love I have for Moog gear is both the awesome sounds from the past and present, but also the innovation to bring things into the future.

[Christopher Winkels]

A few thoughts.

Polyphonic instruments didn't necessarily kill all the old synth companies; they merely contributed to bad situations. Let me expand on that.

1. A modern company isn't going to have the same issues of voice control, patch storage, digital parameter control, etc, if only because computers have thousands of times better price:performance ratios than they did 30 years ago. Those early synths had a lot of money just tied up in the processors.

2. ARP died in the very early '80s, in the middle of a recession with a bad/dysfunctional management team and poor QC. There is an argument to be made that they were on rocky shoals and would've been headed for the scrapheap even if none of the company's money had gone to developing the Avatar/Centaur. Their IP was certainly good enough in that Rhodes got two synths (the Chroma and the Polaris) out of what was left. Polyphonics clearly didn't kill Oberheim, since they soldiered on for more than a decade after introducing their first polyphonic 4-voice/8-voice systems (followed by the OB-X, OB-Xa, OB-8, Xpander, Matrix-12, Matrix-6, etc). What killed them, as Kevin alluded to, was more likely relentless cheapening of the line near the end, their singular focus on analogues at a time when no one wanted them, and Japanese encroachment on the marketplace. Sequential's first major synth was a polyphonic; that was bread-and-butter for the company for the first few years. When did they go under? 1987, just as another stock market crash was about to get under way with concommitant effects on available R&D cash. That, and moving to higher-end digital sampling as their main product focus at a time when the Japanese and E-mu were already in the market in a big way (and Ensoniq was already swallowing up the bottom end of the market with the Mirage).

3. No need to reinvent the wheel. I don't think anyone would be disappointed if there was nothing new in a Moog poly, so long as the quality of the end product was high.

4. Manufacturing is frankly cheaper today (adjusted for inflation) than it was three decades ago. SMD, the preponderance of CNC machining and laser cutting for things like end cheeks and front panels, desktop graphics design, and low-cost overseas-made components all contribute to this. Worried about inventory? Farm it out to another company. Yes, I make it sound easier than it is, but there are other options than merely doing it in house with a '70s era technology and supply chain mentality.

I think a possible business case for a polyphonic would be to make it affordable to the initial purchaser by following the LP model of having only a small number of knobs, intelligently laid out on the front panel to control costs (though I would probably move some of the menu options like noise, filter poles and secondary modulation to the front panel as well). Modulation sources that don't themselves generate audio signals (LFOs, envelopes, etc.) can be strictly digital. I know a lot of people wring their hands over digital versus analogue envelopes, but I frankly don't hear enough difference in well designed ones to worry about. That reduces the hardware part count significantly without detracting from the audio chain.

Give it very limited polyphony (perhaps as few as two voices to begin with - I leave this up to the product planners). Then allow for significant "modularity" in the number of additional voices. Picture a system not unlike the original OB-series Oberheims in which one can buy the shell of the instrument and a couple of voices for a price that's much smaller than what one would pay for a big 8 (or more) voice system. As funds permit, the owner can purchase more voice cards, pop open the lid, and plug them in. Sure, a six or eight voice system may cost you four or more grand in the long run this way, but you initial outlay might be less than two thousand.

And regarding the "real Moog" thing: I loved my old Moog Source back when I had it. Bob Moog had long since left the company when it was released, but I've never heard anyone not call it a real Moog. And conversely, I wouldn't be surprised if Leo Fender, Laurens Hammond, or any one of several other notable instrument designers didn't have a few "off" products that were either cynically done to generate cash flow at the expense of some brand equity, or were noble attempts that failed due to foresight. Not all products by legends are legendary.

[Electrong]

Without being privy to their books, I would venture to guess that the moogerfoogers are still highly profitable items for Moog. All this talk of moving into Polyphonic territory may sound like a nice idea, but it may not be a realistic one from a business perspective. There are already several new products in production, and every new product costs money in advance. Your idea about the voice cards sounds suspiciously like the old Oberheim OBM-X.

[Kevin Lightner]

1. A modern company isn't going to have the same issues of voice control, patch storage, digital parameter control, etc, if only because computers have thousands of times better price:performance ratios than they did 30 years ago. Those early synths had a lot of money just tied up in the processors.

I somewhat disagree.
Neither the expandable SEM based Oberheims nor the Polymoog had CPUs.
What they did have was reams of wiring and huge numbers of calibrations that all had to be done by humans.
This is why I feel polyphonics, if not killed, very greatly contributed to the demise of these companies.
It's always the labor.
The cost of the calibration trimmers in a Prophet V cost far more than the Z-80 cpu chip it had.
And though trends went towards sampling, a technology that depends on CPU chips, the cost of the CPUs wasn't the problem any longer.
Memory chip costs and programming were.

Consider the Alesis A6.
One adjustment trimmer inside and hardly any wiring would suggest a less labor intensive instrument.
ie: cheaper to build.
But the costs of the human programmers was staggering.
Consider two programmers, each at $120K/yr for two years.
That's close to a half-million dollars.
Design and manufacturing of their ASIC chip took hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
So while one might save money by creating envs or LFOs in software, someone still has to program that software.
The instrument is cheaper to build, but costs a fortune to design and debug.
Yet, here we are with those initial costs already paid for and Alesis still cannot make a profit by producing the A6.
There's just not enough sales to even cover the support necessary on such a complex instrument.
Repairs cannot be done by most field service centers and so Alesis must sell entire boards or wholly replace instruments deemed faulty.

Farming things out can also open a huge can of worms.
Take for example, the recent Apple Imacs. (Intels, G5s, etc.)
Designed by Americans, but to meet the price point, assembled in China.
There, poor quality capacitors are installed that often last a fraction of the time caps would in other products.
But repairing these computers is highly labor intensive.
So Apple gets an initial sale and makes a profit, but two years down the road, the machine fails.
Now where is the customer?
He has no warranty left and labor for repairs is very high.
His only option is to replace the computer (with another made the same way) or pay a tech to install quality components.
He has to pay later for where Apple cut corners earlier.
Had Apple used US or Japanese components, this might not happen, but they'd have never been able to price things as low as they did in the first place.
So when these units fail it's usually outside of the warranty period and Apple makes another sale with the customer paying again.
That's the crux of the problem.
One either has to go to digital and hire pricey programmers and chip designers or they have to go to analog and hire pricey labor for assembly and calibration.
If they skimp on parts, the devices fail too soon.
If they skimp on programming, their support depts are overburdened.

Some people may recall Heathkit.
They'd offer products at cheaper prices as kits.
But they found that supporting all the problems caused by kit building ate into their profit.
Heathkit is now gone.
Even MOTM realized offering kits cost them more money in support.

Building up the synth via expansion to add polyphony is a good idea in theory, but often falls short in practice.
There's no end of offerings Roland has made where they promised expansion and dropped the ball later.
The OBMX and Chroma also adopted this idea, but the companies themselves went out of business soon afterward or dropped the products altogether.

So I don't think there's any one thing to blame or any one technology or manufacturing method that's perfect.
But I've seen lots of companies start out with great instruments and in order to meet their price point, start cutting quality.
With no free lunch available, no matter what idea is employed, it still places a burden on the customer to keep their instrument running trouble-free for a reasonable amount of time.
Not an easy problem to solve.

Perhaps a company should build a basic shell of a poly synth and then open-source the project for 3rd party developers?