The Moog Modular Synth

Robert Moog didn't set out to be a musical revolutionary. He wanted to be an engineer. From the age when most boys were playing with bikes and cap guns, Robert Moog wanted to fool around with electronics. His parents indulged his interests, and he and dad George spent long hours in the family garage in Queens, New York, building electrical equipment. At 14, Robert developed his first electronic instrument. It was called a theremin.

After high school, Moog went on to Columbia University and eventually earned a doctorate from Cornell. While he was still in grad school, Moog developed his first electrical synthesizer. The machine enabled musicians to create a spectrum of sounds, from distorted musical notes to sounds that were eerily human and sometimes reminiscent of animals, sound changed all by turning a dial or sliding a lever.

Robert Moog was the first to design several types of compact synthesizers of moderate price that supplied an extended range of possibilities for sound manipulation. In addition to VCO’s, which produce sine, square, sawtooth, and triangular waves, the Moog synthesizer contained white-noise generators, attack and decay generators (controlling a sound’s onset and fading), voltage-controlled amplifiers, and band-pass filters and sequencers.