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To understand synthesizers, one needs to understand Bob Moog and the 1950s. Growing up a nerdy teenager in upstate New York, when the hobbyist culture around build-it-yourself electronics was at its peak, he began selling theremin kits. At 19, he founded his own company, R.A. Moog Co., and continued toying around with oscillators and amplifiers. Meanwhile, experimental musicians were similarly experimenting with surplus oscillators, filters — rudimentary parts found on telephone landlines — and recorded what they could on tape machines. By reworking these tools, Moog and the musicians were creating eerie and unusual sounds from electric currents no one had heard before, the first rumbling of what synthesizers would become.
Then, in 1963, the musician and the engineer came together; composer Herbert A. Deutsch approached Moog. “He just flipped when he heard what my breadboards could do. By the end of that session and the one that followed, together we had come up with the basics of a modular analog synthesizer,” Moog wrote in the 1988 article, “The Rise and Fall of Moog Music“. “Mind you, neither of us had any idea where this was leading.”
These first synthesizers were modular: an oscillator made the sound; a filter shaped it; an amplifier controlled the volume; an envelope generator created dynamic contour, the rise and fall of a note’s volume. Each component was housed in a discreet module, and the modules — connected by patch cables, one to the next — passed the sound and altered it. They were both impractical and intimidating, oversized switchboards covered in knobs, dials and cables. It was part instrument, part controlled chaos.
“The analogue synthesizers are monophonic, you can only play one note at a time. Think of a trumpet, or your voice,” says Jim DeBardi, media and artist liaison at Moog Music. “For someone who is creative and experimental and into the idea of taking chances…you can get lost in it. Once you sit there for 10 minutes or 10 hours, you can create something that’s wholly yours.” The following year Moog debuted his creations at the Audio Engineering Society convention, while putting himself through Cornell with a PhD in Engineering Physics by continuing to sell his Theremins.
The first synthesizers were rudimentary, the noises they produced, alien — and this distinct sound helped them catch on in film productions and commercial or radio jingles. They sounded like the 1960s idea of a UFO landing and, later, they made the chilling or psychedelic soundtracks of Midnight Cowboy and then A Clockwork Orange. “You know, you really couldn’t get stoned back then without having some synthesizer music playing,” Moog said in 2003. “You had to do things right.” Then, in 1968, Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach, still one of the highest-selling classical records of all time and made entirely with a custom Moog synthesizer. The effect was immediate. “It was like painting with a new color. If you had control you had a good chance of creating something that people would notice,” says DeBardi.
“For someone who is creative and experimental and into the idea of taking chances…you can get lost in it. Once you sit there for 10 minutes or 10 hours, you can create something that’s wholly yours.”