Thursday, April 30, 2009

I want to have your baby, Bob Moog!


Bob Moog is the founder and godfather of modern electronic
music. Indeed, his company that he's left behind, Moog Music,
and more importantly, his education foundation Moog Foundation
are lasting legacies of a brilliant, humble man who forever changed the way music is
produced and played live. His team is as brilliant as ever, with the last Bog Moog design, the Little Phatty,
as well as the beautiful, esoteric Moog Guitar. My whole thing is this...I was introduced to analogue when I was
10 years old when one of my sister's friends' dads brought a Polymoog

and a Prophet-5

to school and demonstrated
the sounds you could get with a synthesizer by twisting knobs and doing all sorts of cool stuff. I was absolutely hooked. But now,
25 years later, I can't even get a Moog synth if I wanted to. I don't have the space and I don't have the budget. I wish
I did. Even the Little Phatty,

which Moog hailed as the "synth for the everyman" costs over a grand to pick up, and
that's just for a monophonic analogue synth. I know that everything Moog makes is handcrafted at its headquarters in
Asheville, North Carolina, which is huge. Not huge in size, but huge in that they employ Americans in America, where I reside. I do also know that one way they brought the Little Phatty down in price was to
have a Chinese manufacturer assemble certain boards to lower the labor cost. Why can't Moog build a tiny little monophonic
synth, one that looks just like a CP251

with presets, MIDI in, and voltage control. They would tell me it can't be done, but it
can, if one looks to Dave Smith Instruments, who has the Mopho,


a tiny little
monophonic synth with presets that retails for under $400US, and there's the Dark Energy

from Doepfer,
which introduces a monophonic patchable modular synth for around 500Euros that will be available in Summer of 2009. The answer to all this
is that Moog doesn't care what I think about this. They have a rabid fan base of synth fiends and guitar gurus that swear by them,
and if I really wanted a Moog sound for a budget, I could buy a soft synth emulation of some sort. I'm not even asking for all the knobs here.
I just want something small, portable, cheap, and moogy. Ghost Bob, can you help me?

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