January 24, 2022 • 51 mins
In the 1950's, engineer Bob Moog started to tinker and build his own electronic instruments. Little did he know that his invention, the Moog Synthesizer, would revolutionize music for decades to come. Featuring Michelle Moog-Koussa, founder of the Bob Moog Foundation, and former Moog Music engineer August Worley.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ephemeral is production of I heart three D audio for
full exposure. Listen with that phones. Human beings have been
building musical instruments for tens of thousands of years, chasing
different timbres, textures, and ranges possible in the acoustic world,
(00:32):
and then in the twentieth century a whole new pallide
of sounds emerged. This is a MOG synthesizer. MoG's were
the most popular and innovative synthesizers of the nineteen sixties
and seventies, and they were the first synths to be
widely accessible by musicians across the world. Nowadays, MOG Music
(00:56):
is a very different company, but they still create new
keyboards and sounds. If Emeral producer Trevor Young took a
trip to MOUG headquarters to learn more about these machines
and the history behind their creation. Let's say I'm walking
(01:21):
through the mosium in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm surrounded by keyboards, synthesizers,
and all sorts of other gadgets that I'm not smart
enough to recognize, but they're letting me play on some
of the synthesizers here, and I'm getting a personal tour
from a very special guest. Hi, I'm Michelle moe Kusa.
I'm the executive director of the Bob Mog Foundation and
(01:43):
the Mosium. I'm also Bob MoG's third daughter. We walk
around a corner to find a huge collage taking up
an entire wall all about Mog Synthesizers founder Bob Mog.
What we have here is kind of some arises his legacy, innovation, creativity,
(02:04):
and inspiration. There's a little passage here that says, welcome
to the Mosium, where Bob mogs life, work and legacy
come alive to inspire curiosity and creativity and to give
us insight into one of the electronic music's most important pioneers.
So kind of the crowning the back of the Moxium,
(02:25):
we have an immersive half doome that teaches people how
electricity turns into sound when it's traveling through a circuit board.
So this is essentially the very heart of Bob's work
that we wanted to bring forward. So why don't we
listen to at least the first minute of it. Sound
is the movement of air perceived by our ears. An
(02:47):
electric speaker creates sound by vibrating air molecules using a
moving membrane by changing the rate of current flow through
the magnetic field. A speaker membrane can be vibrated at
different frequencies to create any kind of sound. It might
seem like a lot of science on terminology to take in,
(03:09):
but we're going to walk you through how synthesizers work.
Probably the best place to start, because with the history
of how synthesizers came into being, the mog machine here
has made a startling contribution to the new bach rage.
It can do anything but stand up and take a bow.
It can produce almost any kind of variation on pure sound,
(03:31):
including some sounds that have never been heard before on
this Earth at least, and these sounds can then be
dubbed onto tape in any combination, from interplanetary noises to
a bach fugue. Synthesis technology first appeared in post World
War two North America. By the late nineteen forties, engineers
(03:52):
were starting to play around with manipulating electrical currents and
the sounds they make. In Canadian engineer he Like developed
the sack But, a sort of early rudimentary synthesizer, and
in n a team at R. C. A. Laps created
(04:13):
the Mark to synthesizer, a massive unit that was essentially
glued to a laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. But the
invention of synthesizers as we know them today is almost
entirely credited to one man, Bob Moog. I asked Michelle
to tell us about Bob and how we ended up
(04:33):
creating one of the world's most popular instruments. My dad
was an only child of George and Shirley Moak. My grandpa, George,
was an electrical engineer for conn Edison. He was also
an amateur woodworker. And you'll understand why I'm telling you
that in a minute. They lived in Flushing, Queens, New York,
and my grandfather had a very well outfitted basement workshop.
(04:59):
And MI grandfather was kind of quiet and more reserved
and introverted. And I would say that my father was
also more quiet and introverted, and highly intelligent and interested
in science from a very early age, in all kinds
of science. At the age of ten years old, he
wrote a letter to his aunt and his grandmother proclaiming
(05:22):
his hobbies and in his hobbies included chemistry, electro chemistry, biology, physics.
He was obviously very influenced by his father. At the
same time, at the age of six years old, he
began taking piano lessons. My grandmother had a great desire
for him to be a concert pianist, and so she
(05:45):
made sure that he practiced every day. As a matter
of fact, he used to tell us stories that she
would wrap him on the knuckles with a wooden spoon
when he messed up, so there was no messing up.
And I think he did enjoy playing the piano, but
not necessarily under those circumstances. He did become quite profession
at it and went on to study at the Manhattan
(06:06):
School the Music and he was offered to pursue a
professional accompanist track which he declined pretty early. At ten
years old, he started making small electronic hobbyist projects with
his father. I think part of it was they would
both escape down into the basement just to get a break,
as introverts like to do. That is where my father's
(06:28):
work in electronics started, and they would make three note organs,
and my dad actually made Geiger counters. Eventually, by the
time he was around fourteen fifteen, he found an article
in I think it was called Radio News about how
to build your own thereman, and that is when he
fell in love with the thereman, which is an early
(06:50):
electronic musical device that was invented by the Russian physicist
Leon Thereman. If you've never heard or seen a theremin,
they're incredibly unique instruments. There perhaps the only instrument you
play without touching them. Instead, you move your hands around
an antenna and the proximity and movement of the hand
generates an eerie sound from the theramin. Here's a demonstration
(07:13):
from Leon Thereman himself. And my dad really was captivated
(07:38):
by not only this kind of magical interface where you
produce sound with an instrument that you don't touch, but
he was captivated by the elegance and simplicity of Leon
Thereman's circuitry design. And at that time, theremans were no
longer in production, so he worked at prof in his
(08:00):
own design. This is when he was about fifteen. By
the time he was nineteen, he was proficient enough that
he wrote an article for radio and television news called
the Theremin, and it was an instructional on how to
build your own theremin. But what happened is that people
had a hard time finding the parts. They were somewhat esoteric.
(08:22):
These were at that time vacuum tube based Theremans with
big copper coils that were, you know, maybe even a
foot tall and required hundred and seventy five rounds of copper.
I can remember my father telling me that's one of
the things he excelled at, that he would wind the
copper coils, he would design the circuitry. Grandpa helped him
(08:44):
some with that. Grandpa built the wooden cabinets for his Theoremans,
and they both did some of the kind of silk
screening that went on the front interface. But what happened
with the article is that people didn't find that they
excelled at winding copper coils like Bob did or finding
the parts, and so they wrote him and said, where
(09:06):
can I get a full built Thereman? And so my
father started our a Moke co with my grandfather's support,
to not only self thereman parts, but also fully built thereman's.
That was the beginning. Bob's Thereman business was booming. He
was selling his own models left and right, and this
(09:26):
success is what laid the conceptual groundwork and provided the
financial means for his work to come. In synthesis. What
happened is he was at a music educator's conference in
New York rapping his theoreman's and a young professor from
Hostra University approached him and said, listen, I have one
(09:49):
of your melodia theramans. I use it in my ear
training classes, and I'm an experimental jazz composer as well
as being a professor of music, and there are all
these sounds that I've to make in my experimental jazz
compositions that I just can't make with splicing tape, which
is the technology that was available then. This gentleman's name
was Herb Deutsch, and he said to my dad, do
(10:11):
you think you could help me build something that would
make these sounds that I'm envisioning for my compositions. And
so that began a year long conversation that ended in
the summer of nineteen sixty four when Herb, with a
two d dollar grant from host University, spent three weeks
during that summer working with my dad on creating the
(10:34):
first prototype of the more synthesizer. And essentially it was
this collaboration where Herb would say, listen, as a musician,
this is what I need, and my dad would build
it and then her would test him say I need
more of this or less of this. Okay, well well
now we have this, say the oscillator tone generating source
than what, Well then I need to sculpture somehow. So
(10:56):
they worked together over three weeks, and then they eventually
brought in other people over the summer, and my dad
lectured on this voltage controlled synthesis that he had developed
in October of nine four the Audio Engineering Society. So
this big board here is where the sound is made.
(11:16):
Appropriately enough, we call the analog board. A lot of
parts on you. Each section of this board here corresponds
to one section of the of the front panel. These
are cold connectors here bringing the electrical signals that tell
the analog circuitry what pitch to go at, when to
start a note and when to stop it and so on.
(11:37):
And he started selling his modules at that convention, and
that is when he was offered a booth that someone
else had vacated. He didn't even plan on exhibiting there.
So he was there with like a bridge table with
some kind of bohemian table cloth of my mom's and
a few little modules. I mean, this has just started.
(11:57):
And he started getting orders. He got an order her
from our one Nikolai Wendy Carlos and by hitting a
note on the keyboard. Now I'm connected up, so I'll
hear that one sound. It's very low sound, it's very bright.
If I manually turn this knob, you listen to the
sound get considerably duller gets very dull down here. Prior
(12:22):
to Bob Moog, there had been some work in synthesis already.
We mentioned a few examples at the beginning, like the
r C A Mark two. There were people working in
synthesis prior to that. Harold Boda was one of those people,
(12:43):
and also Vladim r Usachski, who was working at the
Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Studio. They had the r C
A Mark synthesizer. The r C A synthesizer was this huge,
room sized synthesizer that function by punch tape, so it
(13:03):
was very very different, and it was really run by academics.
But Bob was a musician, so he wanted to create
something not to be studied in a lab, but to
be used for the purposes of musical expression. What Bob
Mug did is he took the synthesis that had already
begun to be developed and created a system that was
(13:28):
accessible to musicians. At the very beginning, that was accessible to,
you know, maybe some more experimental musicians originally, but eventually
a few people, a few very talented people who were
able to understand modular synthesis decided to wrap those instruments.
(13:49):
I'm thinking right now, Paul Beaver and Bernie Cross on
the West coast. M Yeah. What they did is they
tried to sell Moog synthesizers in Los Angeles and they
(14:12):
had a really hard time. The modulars were big, heavy,
hard to transport, very expensive. They cost as much as
a small house at that time, and they were having
a hard time getting people to embrace them. They talked
to someone at their record label. They actually had a
record kind of that was a demonstration of the Mog
(14:34):
synthesizer on non such records, and they talked to Jack Holsman,
who was the CEO, and said, you know, we're having
a hard time getting people to understand these instruments. What
do you think we should do? He said, why don't
bring them to the Honorary Pop Festival, which happened in
the summer of n And they did that at and
(15:00):
what they didn't expect is that they were absolutely mobbed
with people. They had a tent with a mug modular
in it, and they were mobbed with people to the
extent that they had to have security assist them in
creating a line. But what came out of that is
the Monkeys, the Doors, Simon and Garf Uncle and the
(15:36):
Birds all subsequently bought mog synthesizers. The Doors were the
first to use it. Later and by the time nine
rolled around, the Beatles were using it. It should go
(16:04):
without mentioning that in there Wendy Carlos came out with
the groundbreaking record Switched sham Bab, which didn't just use
it as these cool sounds in the background, but it
used it exclusively. It was an entire album of Bach
(16:28):
music translated with the mog synthesizer, which is incredibly hard
to do. Wendy told me that it would take her
twenty minutes to do nine notes because she was constantly
having to patch and repatch. And then Keith Emerson of
Emerson Like and Palmer actually then of the Nice Heard
switched sham Bach and then he got a huge modular system.
(17:01):
So it was really these very ambitious musicians, all in
their own ways, who helped bring the more synthesizer to
the four of the public consciousness, and it was the
earliest use of synthesis in that way. Now, Don bouk
Law also developed a synthesizer at about the same time
(17:23):
that Bob did, but his approach was very different. They
were not quite as accessible to most musicians, so they
were a little bit more what you might call experimental,
so not as well known the most synthesizers. They were
the tool of popular musicians, and that is why they
came into the popular consciousness earlier and in a much
(17:47):
stronger way than any other synthesizer at that time. As
mog synthesizers picked up in popularity, you heard them everywhere,
(18:07):
and so the sound of the mog became a distinct
cultural statement that an older sister that was a big
Beatles and a Monkey's fan. So those were two of
the first pop groups that actually used the synthesizer and
a recording. And I remember hearing that. I must have been,
you know, eight or nine years old or whatever, and going,
you know, well, what's that sound? You know, that's that's interesting.
(18:30):
There's something about that that really kind of pulls you in,
you know, if you resonate with that sort of thing.
My name is August Whorlie. I'm an electrical engineer and
a musician and the former More Music technician, both up
in Muffalo, New York, the Old Factory and down here
in Asheville the Newer Factor. I work for Bob and
(18:53):
developing the Mini More Voyagers synthesizer. I asked August where
his story with synthesizers began it and his answer surprised me.
I started working on my own equipment as a bassist,
you know, amplifiers and designing speaker cabinets, and just started
tinkering around. He's taking a part of my parents stereo systems,
(19:13):
and I decided to buy a moke Torus bass pedal synthesizer,
and so that was my first synthesizer and reading up
on it and exploring all the sounds it's It was
a really good, rudimentary, primary sort of synthesizer because it
didn't have all the bells and whistles. It was pretty
much straight ahead, you know, didn't have all the modulation
or noise or any of those other things. It was
(19:34):
reutilitarian and it was just a lot of fun to
work with that technology as well as being a bass player.
People marvel at Getty Lee or whatever because all the
(19:54):
stuff he had. I never ever heard of Getty Lee
when I was doing all that. You know, as August
got more interested, he started thinking about synth technology as
a future career path, and one day that opportunity fell
into his lap. I was getting close to graduating. I
(20:19):
really had no idea what I wanted to do. I
think it was about two weeks before I graduated when
my lab partner sat down before class and said, hey,
I've got a friend of mine I worked at more Music,
and he said that they're hiring. I'm gonna go down
there and put in a job application. You want to
go And it was like, well, let me think about that. Yes.
And the interesting thing was that I always like to
(20:41):
tell people that my first job was working on the
space shuttle. At the time, More Music had a subcontract
with Fisher Price Toy manufacturing Company to do a little
space shuttle, the Alpha Pro, the Alfa Rican sled Here,
the electronic sound system Blast, all communications on redd Alert,
(21:03):
astroplots here on here, life support cable for space walking
on docking now for the Crucist No No, the Electronic
Alpha Probe by Fisher Price. They needed testers audio testers
for the little circuit boards that went into their Space shuttle.
(21:26):
I listened to this little Space Shuttle board make, you know,
sample and hold noises and take off noises and all
that kind of stuff for I think about two weeks.
It was a second shift job. But August wanted to
do more. He wanted to build his own synthesizers, so
he found a clever way to do that. I built
am source from rejected parts from the assembly line. You're
(21:50):
gonna throw that digital board out, may I haven't. So
I just started taking parts home and building the unit up.
And I still haven't. And that was just the big
inning of a long and storied career in audio engineering.
I figured August would be the perfect person to help
us understand how synthesizers actually worked. Probably the first place
(22:13):
to start with thinking about how a synthesizer works is
the concept of a an input in an output where
there's a beginning of middle and an end to the
signal path until it comes out the other end, which
can then be amplified and heard. So the first place
to start was the concept of voltage control, where you
have a control voltage which doesn't really make a sound
(22:35):
in and of itself, but it tells things like oscillators
and filters and envelope generators what to do. So an
oscillator is a periodic waveform generator. By inputting a control
voltage into it of a certain level, you can control
the frequency of it. You can control the pitch. So
(22:56):
that lends itself to being able to be connected to
something that has a discrete incremental array, like a keyboard,
so that when you move left to right, the voltage
goes up, and therefore the pitch will follow that control voltage,
And so the keyboard is a good starting point for that.
But you don't have to use a keyboard to control
(23:18):
the pitch of the oscillator. You can use anything that
creates a voltage. Crawford, the guys used to have suit
jackets that had conductive lapels, or when you touch the
lapel of their jacket, you could generate a control voltage
and put it into you know, the synthesizer, So you
(23:40):
use your clothing as a control voltage source. The more
oscillators you add, the more textures you can add to
the sound. And different waveforms that you can create in
order to thicken the sound and give the oscillator a
different texture. That's how you can emulate some of the
real instruments, such as you know saxophone, which is a
soft wave. O bos are a triangle wave, so you
(24:13):
can emulate real instruments or just completely derive a texture
out of your imagination by what you have. One of
the most popular features of a synthesizer is the sequencer.
A sequencer basically is just what it says. You're able
to put an array of elements in a row in
(24:36):
order to create melodies or austinato patterns that is a
pattern and repeats. And I remember there was always this
debate about having sequencers there at all, because it's now
you're turning it over to robots. But it's like anything
else with music, depends on how your approaches. Let's demonstrate.
(24:57):
While I was touring the Maxim and playing around with
a synthesize, I got to try out a few sequencers.
Listen for all the different patterns they can create. SEP
(25:31):
SEP sep SEP sequencers are just one of the many
(25:56):
innovations Bob mog developed specifically for musicians. As Michelle Moke
said earlier, Bob was devoted to serving musicians. August agrees
with that entirely. From the mid sixties to the pretty
much so. When the minimal came along, sequencers were big,
expensive and complicated, and we're only available to the very
(26:18):
wealthy or to large universities or organizations recording studios, that
sort of thing. And then by the time the seventies
came along, there was a certain credibility associated with the synthesizer,
and it looked like people were actually using these creatively.
Mogul is exceptional and that we did listen to the
musicians what the musicians were looking for, always informed the design,
(26:42):
you know, just trying again make these more available for
common musicians in order to give them the tools. With
the success of the first move, the Moke modular business
was good throughout the mid sixties, but by around nine
nine it became obvious that people needed something that was
(27:02):
more affordable, that was more portable. Here's Michelle Moog again.
At the same time, Arimko was having a hard time
supporting itself because there was a huge cell of modulars,
but then it kind of peaked and declined and the
company was in financial trouble. So while my dad was
actually out looking for someone to invest in his company
(27:24):
to help it survive, a couple of his engineers started
coming up with the idea of building something that was
much smaller, that was very basic. So they came up
with what would become the prototypes for the Minimog. In
an analog synthesizer like this, we start out with an oscillator.
Oscillator produces a steady pitch sound, and then this synthesizer
(27:48):
we can control the oscillator sound from either the keyboard,
from a pitch wheel, or automatically through modulation real Roo Roue.
The mini Mog would essentially be a smaller, more condensed
version of the Mog modular. It could almost fit in
your lap, and it had only a fraction of the features,
(28:11):
but it was more accessible. Bob initially did not like
the idea of taking these glorious modulars that had over
two hundred and fifty thousand different sounds and minimizing it
down to something, you know, much much less than that,
but his engineers realized that if the company were to survive,
they had to make something smaller. The result was the
(28:32):
Mini Mooge, which later became the best selling analog synthesizer
of all time. Twelve thou two hundred and sixty nine
units were produced between nineteen seventy and two, and that
basically set a course for MOG synthesizers after that to
be accessible. There was a variety of things that happened
(28:54):
to MOG synthesizers after that. They became smaller and smaller,
some of them with less capability but still very robust sound.
Just trying to address different needs in the marketplace, they
started incorporating things like small ribbon controllers so that there
was different ways to access to sound. After that, the
(29:16):
memory Mouge made use of stored presets, which some of
the instruments did not have before that time, and eventually
some of the instruments became MITI capable, and that's about
when that part of mode music ended. The mid eighties
is when everything changed for synthesis with the invention of MIDI,
(29:38):
that is, musical instrument digital interface analog. Since such as
MOG became old news. Digital keyboards like the Yamaha d
X seven became the music industry standard, much to the
dismay of engineers like August. It's funny. Everybody at MOG
just really hated the sound. Who are so used to
(29:58):
the analog sound and those textures in that warmth at
hearing these digital keyboards. Really, these things that these guys
are kicking our ass in the marketplace because we think
they sound horrible. I'm sure you know the sound stuff
like aha or alphaville. You heard the same four or
(30:28):
five sounds on the radio all the time. You know,
as soon as the latest hit top forty song came
on and the guy takes a keyboard solo, they go, oh, yeah,
that's preset number twenty three on the d X seven
because everybody's using that one. You know, problem with those
keyboards was that they were very difficult to program. You know.
(30:51):
That was another thing that we just couldn't get our
heads around. It's like, okay, so you've got this sound
on your memory mug or whatever, and if you want
to change it, all you have to do is grab
a knob, you know, and there it is with these things.
You know, you had to go into sub menues after
sub menu after sub menu in order to change a
parameter and then enter it and then hopefully it's what
(31:12):
you're after because it was such opinion, he is to
go back and change it. Some people made entire careers
out of programming d X seven sounds. August says, that's
soon enough, digital synthesis expanded to the point where it
dominated the music recording industry. Synthesizers were always at that
(31:33):
time were usually found in the context of a traditional band.
So the synthesizer was added into the guitar based and
drums and vocals and all that other kind of stuff.
It was like that little chair in the top of
the cake, and then more and more started to overtake
the other aspects of the musical composition. So then before
(31:53):
you knew what you had synthesizers that were the drums,
synthesizers that were the base, and synthesizers that were emulating
the guitar, using synthesizers in the vocal parts like the
vote quarter. So you know, this idea of a purely
electronic sonic source or modification technology was of the production
(32:15):
from beginning to end. The microphone is probably about the
only thing that wasn't an actual digital component of the
single chain. So why was MOGS so committed to analog
versus digital? We didn't realize that at the time, but
as I look back on and now, I think the
thing that we were so used to hearing, which is
why analog keyboards came back, was that there's a warmth.
(32:40):
There's an ephemeral quality to that form of signal generation
that I think people connect with in a very different way.
And I think from the esoteric perspective, I think it's
because we are continuous beings and so we resonate more
strongly with continue its waveforms. Despite whatever your sample rate
(33:03):
is on a digital keyboard, you will always have a
discrete aspect to the way the digital waveform is being
generated because you've basically got a series of ones and
zeros that are being read out of memory to create
a waveform that's always going to be, it's very essence,
a non continual waveform, whereas analog is a continual waveform.
(33:29):
But by the time we adopted the the notion of
doing a digital synthesizer, the company was already in pretty
bad shape. The taste that changed away from analog, and
with that, Moog went out of business. The company officially
declared bankruptcy, but that wasn't the end of music. For
(34:01):
a while, things were tough for Bob Moge Music closed
in the late eighties and he lost the rights to
his name in the Mogan Music trademark. Move Music and
Buffalo went out of business. It started really slowing down,
and I was laid off at the end of nineteen
eighty four, but the kind of picked up a few
service things for them here and there until they've just
(34:24):
completely closed their doors and five. But I was always
involved with all the different people. It's almost like a
family working at that company. So I still maintained connections
with a lot of the people from back in the day.
An acquaintance that I worked with that Mog Music had
contacted me because he had got a call from Keith
Emerson to do some work for I'm just like in
(34:45):
Palmer because they were going back out on tour again
and at that time there was no mo Music and
not a whole lot of people knew about that technology,
and I happened to be one of them, so that's
how I sort of slid into that. So I got
(35:06):
the tour with Emerson, like Palmer, off and on for
about three years. Meanwhile, Bob Mog was determined to get
the rights to his name back in two thousand two.
After a lengthy legal battle, Bob succeeded and he reopened
Mogan Music in Asheville, North Carolina. August Whorley was one
of the first to hear that Bob was back in business.
(35:29):
I saw that Bob Mog was announcing that he was
going to be doing another synthesizer, like one last synthesizer.
He had said that, you know, he realized he was
getting on in years and wanted to take some of
the stuff that was in his head and dump it
into younger heads. And I sort of took notice of that.
Eventually got around it just calling him out of the blue.
(35:49):
I introduced myself as Bob. I We've never met, but
I've worked for everybody you've ever hired back at the
old Mog Music, and I'm three names down from you
in the special thanks liner notes on the list. There
were something so that kind of caught his attention. I
showed him only materials for the work for Keith and
(36:10):
all the rest of that kind of stuff, and he
knew all the guys that are worked with. He said, right, okay,
you're you're in. I like what I see. The next thing,
I know, I'm helping Bob Do, another synthesizer. August worked
closely with Bob to develop the Minimog Voyager, a successful
return to form for the Mog synthesizer. The two thousands
(36:32):
saw a renewed interest in analog synthesizers, and MUG was
once again a thriving and innovative business. Here's Michelle Mug.
The modern day m Music, which is located here in Nashville,
has a long line of incredible synthesizers, starting with the Voyager,
and they are constantly innovating and evolving as well, selling
(36:54):
thousands and tens of thousands of instruments all over the
world every year. August Worley was a huge part of
that success. He says getting to work with Bob Moag
was one of the greatest experiences of his life. I
had a father that I love very much, but Bob
was kind of the father that understood me because we
used to complete each other's sentences, you know, having been
(37:17):
involved in that professional capacity. I think the biggest thing
that Bob did for me is that he made me
be more confident in my ideas, so I wasn't afraid
to present some of these crazy ideas that kind of
popped into my head. You know, I remember having a
conversation once with him, or a sort of outlining, Oh yeah,
(37:39):
and then it worked for this company, and here's what
we did for a radar simulator or a prepress computer system,
or interfacing a deck main frame with an Apple too.
And the thing he said to kind of close out
the conversation was I really envy you your broadness, of
your level of expertise in experience, He said, all I've
(38:02):
ever done his work on synthesizer, and I was kind
of like, okay, well, you know, you've pretty much invented
the bloody industry. I mean, I don't think I have
to really apologize Bob is envious of my experience and professional,
you know, credentials. It's like, okay, whatever. I asked Michelle
(38:26):
mug what it was like growing up with Bob for
a dad. He held his career at arm's length from us,
just because I think he was a little uncomfortable with
his celebrity and his fame, and he really just wanted
a place where he could be Bob or Dad. I
would say, I knew a very kind of surface level.
(38:48):
We all knew that Dad had invented the synthesizer. We
knew that he was famous. We knew that he had
gotten a Grammy. We knew that he knew and loved
a lot of very cool musicians, that he was revere,
heard that he wrote articles in well known magazines. We
had a solid idea of his stature. What we didn't
(39:09):
realize is maybe the impact of his work. The only
access I really ever had to his work in my
early years was when he did have either a basement
workshop in our house or a workshop across the driveway.
I would go at night in my pajamas to give
(39:30):
him a kiss good night, because his routine was he
would stop working around six or seven, we'd have dinner
that my mom always cooked, and then my parents would
take a little nap, and then my dad would go
back out to work until eleven o'clock or midnight. So
by the time it was time for me to go
to bed around eight thirty or whatever it was, depending
on how old I was, I would pad out to
the driveway and I would always kind of stand at
(39:51):
the threshold of the office before opening the door, just
to listen to what my dad was doing. I had
no context for under standing it, but I was interested,
and then I would, you know, go in and just
give him a kiss at night. But it was always
kind of clear when we went in the workshop that
we weren't there for long. You know, he was busy
(40:11):
and he was very serious and very focused, and so
it was just a quick, brief, tender moment and then
I would I would leave. So he never said, hey,
come look at this mini mug, or I've gotten the
mug prototype here, which he did in two I think
he restored the mug prototype for the Henry Ford Museum,
(40:32):
and he never showed it to us. He was so humble.
This humility was kind of legendary, and that extended to
our household. He just didn't make a big deal out
of his own work, to the extent that in his
later years, when he was up for a technical grammy,
my stepmother said to him, you know, Bob, you've got
to tell the kids, and he said, why, what's it matter.
(40:57):
I did have a little bit more awareness as I
got a little older, and then probably the pinnacle of
my understanding prior to my father's illness was when I
was about twenty one, I was a senior in college.
My dad actually invited me to come to a NAM
show with him, which is the first time he had
ever done anything like that. I don't think I had
spent any time alone with my father like that prior
(41:20):
to that. So I went to the NAM show with him,
and it was a very weird experience seeing how revered
he was, to the extent that there was a guy
who dropped to his knees in front of my dad
and just just like, Oh my god, you're Bob Moog,
You're my hero. He went on and on and made
my dad so uncomfortable. Nothing against the guy doing that,
(41:42):
but and I just felt like I was having this
totally surreal, out of body experience because here I am
just walking around with my cool, geeky dad and all
of a sudden, there's all this adulation going on. But
there were some other experiences similar to that that helped
me understand some of the impact he had. But the
real impact came when he got ill. In the late
(42:05):
spring of two thousand five, he discovered that he had
a brain tumor, and unfortunately it was inoperable, and things
rather quickly declined, and at one point on my brother
Matthew set up a page on the Carrying Bridge dot
com for him to be able to journal out how
he was doing, and it was really he didn't but
(42:26):
other people in the family did just to keep people apprised.
And originally it was just meant for forty people, forty
of his friends around the world, but it quickly became
public and in the first seven weeks, sixty thousand people
went on that site. Bob moved passed away on August one,
two thousand five. On the day he died, twenty thousand
(42:49):
people logged onto the site, and over four thousand people
left testimonials on that page speaking to how Bob Loge
had inspired them, how he had changed their life, how
he had transformed their life, how because of Bob mog
they were musicians, How Bob Moge gave them their creative voice,
(43:12):
how Bob Mogan inspired them to be an engineer, and
these testimonials just went on and on and on. At
the time, I owned a small business of my own.
I had two young children, five and ten years old,
and I would um go at night and help take
care of him. And then when I would put my
kids to bed, I would go down and I would
read these testimonials, and I would honestly just cry the
(43:36):
whole time because it was like, for the first time
someone was introducing me to Bob Mug. I did not
know Bob Mogan until I was thirty seven and he died.
And it was those people through Caring Bridge that not
only you know, knocked down the kind of walls that
my father put up around his Bob Mog persona to
kind of protect the family from that celebrity, but enlightened
(43:58):
the rest of my family to this incredible depth and
breadth that the impact he made had on people all
over the world. We had people from sixty seven different
countries leave testimonials. Michelle says, those testimonials or what inspired
her to create the Bob Mog Foundation in two thousand six.
(44:21):
When you have an inspirational force like that, something that
you can use to change the world in a positive way,
that it not only deserves to be carried forward, but
it really demands to be carried forward because you don't
get opportunities like that very often. So it was the
family who said, you know, we really, we really need
(44:43):
to do something important here, and that's when the foundation
was created. The official mission is to inspire people through
the intersection of science, music, innovation and technology, which is
essentially a mirror reflection of Bob MoG's legacy itself through
our three projects. We have three different projects. Dr Bob
(45:04):
sold School, which is our hallmark educational project that teaches
little kids about the science of sound through music and technology.
We have the Bob Mog Foundation Archives, which is a
vast collection of over ten thousand pieces of archival material
that we protect, preserve, and share with other museums and researchers.
And then we have the Mogsium in downtown Nashville, North
(45:25):
Carolina that carries that mission forward to inspire both children
and adults through all these interactive exhibits that bring Bob
Mug's legacy alive, not just his life story and his
work story, but the science that really drove his work,
to science and engineering that he was so passionate about.
(45:47):
One has to wonder what might Bob Mog have done
in today's world with today's technology. Well, Michelle has some
insight into that. At the end of his life, he
really was more focused not on synthesis itself, but on
how we were accessing synthesizer interfaces. He told one of
(46:07):
his engineers at move Music that the keyboard wasn't antiquated interface,
and that we needed to move on. He told him
that when he was moving his office, he was already
walking with a cane because his left side had become
somewhat debilitated because of his brain, and he knew he
wasn't going back, and those were his parting words to
that engineer. And my dad had been working on multi
(46:31):
touch sensitive interfaces for decades at that point, and he
had been developing a multi touch sensitive keyboard with an
avant guarde opera composer named John Eaton. That kind of
(46:54):
work was actually ahead of its time, and what he
was aiming for is ubiquitous now. The roly controllers, the
Hawk and Continuum. The Hawk and Continuum as a newer
instrument made of foam. It's not unlike a keyboard, but
you hold it more like a guitar. You can manipulate
the sounds based on the speed with which you move
(47:16):
your fingers, the amount of pressure you apply, and all
sorts of other new parameters, all of that touch sensitivity,
(47:38):
pressure sensitivity, velocity sensitivity. He was working on all of
that starting in He actually told my stepmother that the
multi touch sensitive keyboard he felt was his most important
contribution to the world of music. He felt like the
world of synthesis had kind of gone far enough, but
there wasn't enough human nurance in that world. That's what
(48:00):
he was really interested in near the end of his life. Now,
I played the Hackam continuum. That is a really interesting technology.
The first time I ever checked it out, that foam
keyboard idea and being able to interface with the sound
in a tactile way led me to believe that it
was going to be a winner, because there is always
(48:22):
going to be that barrier between the musician and the
musical instrument. The more steamless that is, the more useful
and expressive it is. Because at the end of the day,
you know, these are all supposed to be a means
of expression for the musician, and so being able to
interact with the sound that you're creating is is imperative.
(48:45):
And even Bob recognized that aspect of the synthesizers, which
is why you always wanted to incorporate some would into
the instrument. And we as humans feel connection to that.
I think it's because it used to be alive. So
being able to connect with that at some level, I
think is what makes a musical instrument much more expressive.
(49:06):
But I kind of think that the actual synthesizer is
sort of reached full maturity. I mean, the actual sound source.
You can keep any more stuff onto it. But I
think any future progress is probably going to be made
in the domain of how we control and express what
that sound is. Even still, August says we should continue
(49:29):
to explore the world of analog synthesis. There's still plenty
of sounds to be discovered. I like to tell the
story that some of the best sounds I ever got
out of a memory mode was back at the factory
on my test bench just before they died. I mean,
you know, you'd start playing this thing and it's like, oh,
you know, this thing's got a problem. It starts getting
(49:49):
all kind of crunchy, and like, Trevor, you gotta hear
this sound, man, This thing sounds like it's just about
the like the bed part of my French And you know,
he put the headphones on and go, wow, that is amazing.
If only we can make it do that all the time.
You put the headphones on and play like a couple
of chords, and then it just stops. I was like, oh, correct, now,
(50:10):
I gotta find out what's wrong with it. But in
that thirty five seconds, man, it was like audio bliss.
This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Trevor
Young and produced with Max and Alex Williams. August Borley
(50:31):
is a former engineer for mog Music, and Michelle Mokusa
is the executive director of the Bob Mogue Foundation. Special
thanks to Michelle for the tour of the Mogzium, which
you can visit any time you're in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
Links pictures, sounds, and more on our social media at
Ephemeral Show. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
(50:55):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. The player
Ephemeral is production of I heart three D audio for
full exposure. Listen with that phones. Human beings have been
building musical instruments for tens of thousands of years, chasing
different timbres, textures, and ranges possible in the acoustic world,
(00:32):
and then in the twentieth century a whole new pallide
of sounds emerged. This is a MOG synthesizer. MoG's were
the most popular and innovative synthesizers of the nineteen sixties
and seventies, and they were the first synths to be
widely accessible by musicians across the world. Nowadays, MOG Music
(00:56):
is a very different company, but they still create new
keyboards and sounds. If Emeral producer Trevor Young took a
trip to MOUG headquarters to learn more about these machines
and the history behind their creation. Let's say I'm walking
(01:21):
through the mosium in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm surrounded by keyboards, synthesizers,
and all sorts of other gadgets that I'm not smart
enough to recognize, but they're letting me play on some
of the synthesizers here, and I'm getting a personal tour
from a very special guest. Hi, I'm Michelle moe Kusa.
I'm the executive director of the Bob Mog Foundation and
(01:43):
the Mosium. I'm also Bob MoG's third daughter. We walk
around a corner to find a huge collage taking up
an entire wall all about Mog Synthesizers founder Bob Mog.
What we have here is kind of some arises his legacy, innovation, creativity,
(02:04):
and inspiration. There's a little passage here that says, welcome
to the Mosium, where Bob mogs life, work and legacy
come alive to inspire curiosity and creativity and to give
us insight into one of the electronic music's most important pioneers.
So kind of the crowning the back of the Moxium,
(02:25):
we have an immersive half doome that teaches people how
electricity turns into sound when it's traveling through a circuit board.
So this is essentially the very heart of Bob's work
that we wanted to bring forward. So why don't we
listen to at least the first minute of it. Sound
is the movement of air perceived by our ears. An
(02:47):
electric speaker creates sound by vibrating air molecules using a
moving membrane by changing the rate of current flow through
the magnetic field. A speaker membrane can be vibrated at
different frequencies to create any kind of sound. It might
seem like a lot of science on terminology to take in,
(03:09):
but we're going to walk you through how synthesizers work.
Probably the best place to start, because with the history
of how synthesizers came into being, the mog machine here
has made a startling contribution to the new bach rage.
It can do anything but stand up and take a bow.
It can produce almost any kind of variation on pure sound,
(03:31):
including some sounds that have never been heard before on
this Earth at least, and these sounds can then be
dubbed onto tape in any combination, from interplanetary noises to
a bach fugue. Synthesis technology first appeared in post World
War two North America. By the late nineteen forties, engineers
(03:52):
were starting to play around with manipulating electrical currents and
the sounds they make. In Canadian engineer he Like developed
the sack But, a sort of early rudimentary synthesizer, and
in n a team at R. C. A. Laps created
(04:13):
the Mark to synthesizer, a massive unit that was essentially
glued to a laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. But the
invention of synthesizers as we know them today is almost
entirely credited to one man, Bob Moog. I asked Michelle
to tell us about Bob and how we ended up
(04:33):
creating one of the world's most popular instruments. My dad
was an only child of George and Shirley Moak. My grandpa, George,
was an electrical engineer for conn Edison. He was also
an amateur woodworker. And you'll understand why I'm telling you
that in a minute. They lived in Flushing, Queens, New York,
and my grandfather had a very well outfitted basement workshop.
(04:59):
And MI grandfather was kind of quiet and more reserved
and introverted. And I would say that my father was
also more quiet and introverted, and highly intelligent and interested
in science from a very early age, in all kinds
of science. At the age of ten years old, he
wrote a letter to his aunt and his grandmother proclaiming
(05:22):
his hobbies and in his hobbies included chemistry, electro chemistry, biology, physics.
He was obviously very influenced by his father. At the
same time, at the age of six years old, he
began taking piano lessons. My grandmother had a great desire
for him to be a concert pianist, and so she
(05:45):
made sure that he practiced every day. As a matter
of fact, he used to tell us stories that she
would wrap him on the knuckles with a wooden spoon
when he messed up, so there was no messing up.
And I think he did enjoy playing the piano, but
not necessarily under those circumstances. He did become quite profession
at it and went on to study at the Manhattan
(06:06):
School the Music and he was offered to pursue a
professional accompanist track which he declined pretty early. At ten
years old, he started making small electronic hobbyist projects with
his father. I think part of it was they would
both escape down into the basement just to get a break,
as introverts like to do. That is where my father's
(06:28):
work in electronics started, and they would make three note organs,
and my dad actually made Geiger counters. Eventually, by the
time he was around fourteen fifteen, he found an article
in I think it was called Radio News about how
to build your own thereman, and that is when he
fell in love with the thereman, which is an early
(06:50):
electronic musical device that was invented by the Russian physicist
Leon Thereman. If you've never heard or seen a theremin,
they're incredibly unique instruments. There perhaps the only instrument you
play without touching them. Instead, you move your hands around
an antenna and the proximity and movement of the hand
generates an eerie sound from the theramin. Here's a demonstration
(07:13):
from Leon Thereman himself. And my dad really was captivated
(07:38):
by not only this kind of magical interface where you
produce sound with an instrument that you don't touch, but
he was captivated by the elegance and simplicity of Leon
Thereman's circuitry design. And at that time, theremans were no
longer in production, so he worked at prof in his
(08:00):
own design. This is when he was about fifteen. By
the time he was nineteen, he was proficient enough that
he wrote an article for radio and television news called
the Theremin, and it was an instructional on how to
build your own theremin. But what happened is that people
had a hard time finding the parts. They were somewhat esoteric.
(08:22):
These were at that time vacuum tube based Theremans with
big copper coils that were, you know, maybe even a
foot tall and required hundred and seventy five rounds of copper.
I can remember my father telling me that's one of
the things he excelled at, that he would wind the
copper coils, he would design the circuitry. Grandpa helped him
(08:44):
some with that. Grandpa built the wooden cabinets for his Theoremans,
and they both did some of the kind of silk
screening that went on the front interface. But what happened
with the article is that people didn't find that they
excelled at winding copper coils like Bob did or finding
the parts, and so they wrote him and said, where
(09:06):
can I get a full built Thereman? And so my
father started our a Moke co with my grandfather's support,
to not only self thereman parts, but also fully built thereman's.
That was the beginning. Bob's Thereman business was booming. He
was selling his own models left and right, and this
(09:26):
success is what laid the conceptual groundwork and provided the
financial means for his work to come. In synthesis. What
happened is he was at a music educator's conference in
New York rapping his theoreman's and a young professor from
Hostra University approached him and said, listen, I have one
(09:49):
of your melodia theramans. I use it in my ear
training classes, and I'm an experimental jazz composer as well
as being a professor of music, and there are all
these sounds that I've to make in my experimental jazz
compositions that I just can't make with splicing tape, which
is the technology that was available then. This gentleman's name
was Herb Deutsch, and he said to my dad, do
(10:11):
you think you could help me build something that would
make these sounds that I'm envisioning for my compositions. And
so that began a year long conversation that ended in
the summer of nineteen sixty four when Herb, with a
two d dollar grant from host University, spent three weeks
during that summer working with my dad on creating the
(10:34):
first prototype of the more synthesizer. And essentially it was
this collaboration where Herb would say, listen, as a musician,
this is what I need, and my dad would build
it and then her would test him say I need
more of this or less of this. Okay, well well
now we have this, say the oscillator tone generating source
than what, Well then I need to sculpture somehow. So
(10:56):
they worked together over three weeks, and then they eventually
brought in other people over the summer, and my dad
lectured on this voltage controlled synthesis that he had developed
in October of nine four the Audio Engineering Society. So
this big board here is where the sound is made.
(11:16):
Appropriately enough, we call the analog board. A lot of
parts on you. Each section of this board here corresponds
to one section of the of the front panel. These
are cold connectors here bringing the electrical signals that tell
the analog circuitry what pitch to go at, when to
start a note and when to stop it and so on.
(11:37):
And he started selling his modules at that convention, and
that is when he was offered a booth that someone
else had vacated. He didn't even plan on exhibiting there.
So he was there with like a bridge table with
some kind of bohemian table cloth of my mom's and
a few little modules. I mean, this has just started.
(11:57):
And he started getting orders. He got an order her
from our one Nikolai Wendy Carlos and by hitting a
note on the keyboard. Now I'm connected up, so I'll
hear that one sound. It's very low sound, it's very bright.
If I manually turn this knob, you listen to the
sound get considerably duller gets very dull down here. Prior
(12:22):
to Bob Moog, there had been some work in synthesis already.
We mentioned a few examples at the beginning, like the
r C A Mark two. There were people working in
synthesis prior to that. Harold Boda was one of those people,
(12:43):
and also Vladim r Usachski, who was working at the
Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Studio. They had the r C
A Mark synthesizer. The r C A synthesizer was this huge,
room sized synthesizer that function by punch tape, so it
(13:03):
was very very different, and it was really run by academics.
But Bob was a musician, so he wanted to create
something not to be studied in a lab, but to
be used for the purposes of musical expression. What Bob
Mug did is he took the synthesis that had already
begun to be developed and created a system that was
(13:28):
accessible to musicians. At the very beginning, that was accessible to,
you know, maybe some more experimental musicians originally, but eventually
a few people, a few very talented people who were
able to understand modular synthesis decided to wrap those instruments.
(13:49):
I'm thinking right now, Paul Beaver and Bernie Cross on
the West coast. M Yeah. What they did is they
tried to sell Moog synthesizers in Los Angeles and they
(14:12):
had a really hard time. The modulars were big, heavy,
hard to transport, very expensive. They cost as much as
a small house at that time, and they were having
a hard time getting people to embrace them. They talked
to someone at their record label. They actually had a
record kind of that was a demonstration of the Mog
(14:34):
synthesizer on non such records, and they talked to Jack Holsman,
who was the CEO, and said, you know, we're having
a hard time getting people to understand these instruments. What
do you think we should do? He said, why don't
bring them to the Honorary Pop Festival, which happened in
the summer of n And they did that at and
(15:00):
what they didn't expect is that they were absolutely mobbed
with people. They had a tent with a mug modular
in it, and they were mobbed with people to the
extent that they had to have security assist them in
creating a line. But what came out of that is
the Monkeys, the Doors, Simon and Garf Uncle and the
(15:36):
Birds all subsequently bought mog synthesizers. The Doors were the
first to use it. Later and by the time nine
rolled around, the Beatles were using it. It should go
(16:04):
without mentioning that in there Wendy Carlos came out with
the groundbreaking record Switched sham Bab, which didn't just use
it as these cool sounds in the background, but it
used it exclusively. It was an entire album of Bach
(16:28):
music translated with the mog synthesizer, which is incredibly hard
to do. Wendy told me that it would take her
twenty minutes to do nine notes because she was constantly
having to patch and repatch. And then Keith Emerson of
Emerson Like and Palmer actually then of the Nice Heard
switched sham Bach and then he got a huge modular system.
(17:01):
So it was really these very ambitious musicians, all in
their own ways, who helped bring the more synthesizer to
the four of the public consciousness, and it was the
earliest use of synthesis in that way. Now, Don bouk
Law also developed a synthesizer at about the same time
(17:23):
that Bob did, but his approach was very different. They
were not quite as accessible to most musicians, so they
were a little bit more what you might call experimental,
so not as well known the most synthesizers. They were
the tool of popular musicians, and that is why they
came into the popular consciousness earlier and in a much
(17:47):
stronger way than any other synthesizer at that time. As
mog synthesizers picked up in popularity, you heard them everywhere,
(18:07):
and so the sound of the mog became a distinct
cultural statement that an older sister that was a big
Beatles and a Monkey's fan. So those were two of
the first pop groups that actually used the synthesizer and
a recording. And I remember hearing that. I must have been,
you know, eight or nine years old or whatever, and going,
you know, well, what's that sound? You know, that's that's interesting.
(18:30):
There's something about that that really kind of pulls you in,
you know, if you resonate with that sort of thing.
My name is August Whorlie. I'm an electrical engineer and
a musician and the former More Music technician, both up
in Muffalo, New York, the Old Factory and down here
in Asheville the Newer Factor. I work for Bob and
(18:53):
developing the Mini More Voyagers synthesizer. I asked August where
his story with synthesizers began it and his answer surprised me.
I started working on my own equipment as a bassist,
you know, amplifiers and designing speaker cabinets, and just started
tinkering around. He's taking a part of my parents stereo systems,
(19:13):
and I decided to buy a moke Torus bass pedal synthesizer,
and so that was my first synthesizer and reading up
on it and exploring all the sounds it's It was
a really good, rudimentary, primary sort of synthesizer because it
didn't have all the bells and whistles. It was pretty
much straight ahead, you know, didn't have all the modulation
or noise or any of those other things. It was
(19:34):
reutilitarian and it was just a lot of fun to
work with that technology as well as being a bass player.
People marvel at Getty Lee or whatever because all the
(19:54):
stuff he had. I never ever heard of Getty Lee
when I was doing all that. You know, as August
got more interested, he started thinking about synth technology as
a future career path, and one day that opportunity fell
into his lap. I was getting close to graduating. I
(20:19):
really had no idea what I wanted to do. I
think it was about two weeks before I graduated when
my lab partner sat down before class and said, hey,
I've got a friend of mine I worked at more Music,
and he said that they're hiring. I'm gonna go down
there and put in a job application. You want to
go And it was like, well, let me think about that. Yes.
And the interesting thing was that I always like to
(20:41):
tell people that my first job was working on the
space shuttle. At the time, More Music had a subcontract
with Fisher Price Toy manufacturing Company to do a little
space shuttle, the Alpha Pro, the Alfa Rican sled Here,
the electronic sound system Blast, all communications on redd Alert,
(21:03):
astroplots here on here, life support cable for space walking
on docking now for the Crucist No No, the Electronic
Alpha Probe by Fisher Price. They needed testers audio testers
for the little circuit boards that went into their Space shuttle.
(21:26):
I listened to this little Space Shuttle board make, you know,
sample and hold noises and take off noises and all
that kind of stuff for I think about two weeks.
It was a second shift job. But August wanted to
do more. He wanted to build his own synthesizers, so
he found a clever way to do that. I built
am source from rejected parts from the assembly line. You're
(21:50):
gonna throw that digital board out, may I haven't. So
I just started taking parts home and building the unit up.
And I still haven't. And that was just the big
inning of a long and storied career in audio engineering.
I figured August would be the perfect person to help
us understand how synthesizers actually worked. Probably the first place
(22:13):
to start with thinking about how a synthesizer works is
the concept of a an input in an output where
there's a beginning of middle and an end to the
signal path until it comes out the other end, which
can then be amplified and heard. So the first place
to start was the concept of voltage control, where you
have a control voltage which doesn't really make a sound
(22:35):
in and of itself, but it tells things like oscillators
and filters and envelope generators what to do. So an
oscillator is a periodic waveform generator. By inputting a control
voltage into it of a certain level, you can control
the frequency of it. You can control the pitch. So
(22:56):
that lends itself to being able to be connected to
something that has a discrete incremental array, like a keyboard,
so that when you move left to right, the voltage
goes up, and therefore the pitch will follow that control voltage,
And so the keyboard is a good starting point for that.
But you don't have to use a keyboard to control
(23:18):
the pitch of the oscillator. You can use anything that
creates a voltage. Crawford, the guys used to have suit
jackets that had conductive lapels, or when you touch the
lapel of their jacket, you could generate a control voltage
and put it into you know, the synthesizer, So you
(23:40):
use your clothing as a control voltage source. The more
oscillators you add, the more textures you can add to
the sound. And different waveforms that you can create in
order to thicken the sound and give the oscillator a
different texture. That's how you can emulate some of the
real instruments, such as you know saxophone, which is a
soft wave. O bos are a triangle wave, so you
(24:13):
can emulate real instruments or just completely derive a texture
out of your imagination by what you have. One of
the most popular features of a synthesizer is the sequencer.
A sequencer basically is just what it says. You're able
to put an array of elements in a row in
(24:36):
order to create melodies or austinato patterns that is a
pattern and repeats. And I remember there was always this
debate about having sequencers there at all, because it's now
you're turning it over to robots. But it's like anything
else with music, depends on how your approaches. Let's demonstrate.
(24:57):
While I was touring the Maxim and playing around with
a synthesize, I got to try out a few sequencers.
Listen for all the different patterns they can create. SEP
(25:31):
SEP sep SEP sequencers are just one of the many
(25:56):
innovations Bob mog developed specifically for musicians. As Michelle Moke
said earlier, Bob was devoted to serving musicians. August agrees
with that entirely. From the mid sixties to the pretty
much so. When the minimal came along, sequencers were big,
expensive and complicated, and we're only available to the very
(26:18):
wealthy or to large universities or organizations recording studios, that
sort of thing. And then by the time the seventies
came along, there was a certain credibility associated with the synthesizer,
and it looked like people were actually using these creatively.
Mogul is exceptional and that we did listen to the
musicians what the musicians were looking for, always informed the design,
(26:42):
you know, just trying again make these more available for
common musicians in order to give them the tools. With
the success of the first move, the Moke modular business
was good throughout the mid sixties, but by around nine
nine it became obvious that people needed something that was
(27:02):
more affordable, that was more portable. Here's Michelle Moog again.
At the same time, Arimko was having a hard time
supporting itself because there was a huge cell of modulars,
but then it kind of peaked and declined and the
company was in financial trouble. So while my dad was
actually out looking for someone to invest in his company
(27:24):
to help it survive, a couple of his engineers started
coming up with the idea of building something that was
much smaller, that was very basic. So they came up
with what would become the prototypes for the Minimog. In
an analog synthesizer like this, we start out with an oscillator.
Oscillator produces a steady pitch sound, and then this synthesizer
(27:48):
we can control the oscillator sound from either the keyboard,
from a pitch wheel, or automatically through modulation real Roo Roue.
The mini Mog would essentially be a smaller, more condensed
version of the Mog modular. It could almost fit in
your lap, and it had only a fraction of the features,
(28:11):
but it was more accessible. Bob initially did not like
the idea of taking these glorious modulars that had over
two hundred and fifty thousand different sounds and minimizing it
down to something, you know, much much less than that,
but his engineers realized that if the company were to survive,
they had to make something smaller. The result was the
(28:32):
Mini Mooge, which later became the best selling analog synthesizer
of all time. Twelve thou two hundred and sixty nine
units were produced between nineteen seventy and two, and that
basically set a course for MOG synthesizers after that to
be accessible. There was a variety of things that happened
(28:54):
to MOG synthesizers after that. They became smaller and smaller,
some of them with less capability but still very robust sound.
Just trying to address different needs in the marketplace, they
started incorporating things like small ribbon controllers so that there
was different ways to access to sound. After that, the
(29:16):
memory Mouge made use of stored presets, which some of
the instruments did not have before that time, and eventually
some of the instruments became MITI capable, and that's about
when that part of mode music ended. The mid eighties
is when everything changed for synthesis with the invention of MIDI,
(29:38):
that is, musical instrument digital interface analog. Since such as
MOG became old news. Digital keyboards like the Yamaha d
X seven became the music industry standard, much to the
dismay of engineers like August. It's funny. Everybody at MOG
just really hated the sound. Who are so used to
(29:58):
the analog sound and those textures in that warmth at
hearing these digital keyboards. Really, these things that these guys
are kicking our ass in the marketplace because we think
they sound horrible. I'm sure you know the sound stuff
like aha or alphaville. You heard the same four or
(30:28):
five sounds on the radio all the time. You know,
as soon as the latest hit top forty song came
on and the guy takes a keyboard solo, they go, oh, yeah,
that's preset number twenty three on the d X seven
because everybody's using that one. You know, problem with those
keyboards was that they were very difficult to program. You know.
(30:51):
That was another thing that we just couldn't get our
heads around. It's like, okay, so you've got this sound
on your memory mug or whatever, and if you want
to change it, all you have to do is grab
a knob, you know, and there it is with these things.
You know, you had to go into sub menues after
sub menu after sub menu in order to change a
parameter and then enter it and then hopefully it's what
(31:12):
you're after because it was such opinion, he is to
go back and change it. Some people made entire careers
out of programming d X seven sounds. August says, that's
soon enough, digital synthesis expanded to the point where it
dominated the music recording industry. Synthesizers were always at that
(31:33):
time were usually found in the context of a traditional band.
So the synthesizer was added into the guitar based and
drums and vocals and all that other kind of stuff.
It was like that little chair in the top of
the cake, and then more and more started to overtake
the other aspects of the musical composition. So then before
(31:53):
you knew what you had synthesizers that were the drums,
synthesizers that were the base, and synthesizers that were emulating
the guitar, using synthesizers in the vocal parts like the
vote quarter. So you know, this idea of a purely
electronic sonic source or modification technology was of the production
(32:15):
from beginning to end. The microphone is probably about the
only thing that wasn't an actual digital component of the
single chain. So why was MOGS so committed to analog
versus digital? We didn't realize that at the time, but
as I look back on and now, I think the
thing that we were so used to hearing, which is
why analog keyboards came back, was that there's a warmth.
(32:40):
There's an ephemeral quality to that form of signal generation
that I think people connect with in a very different way.
And I think from the esoteric perspective, I think it's
because we are continuous beings and so we resonate more
strongly with continue its waveforms. Despite whatever your sample rate
(33:03):
is on a digital keyboard, you will always have a
discrete aspect to the way the digital waveform is being
generated because you've basically got a series of ones and
zeros that are being read out of memory to create
a waveform that's always going to be, it's very essence,
a non continual waveform, whereas analog is a continual waveform.
(33:29):
But by the time we adopted the the notion of
doing a digital synthesizer, the company was already in pretty
bad shape. The taste that changed away from analog, and
with that, Moog went out of business. The company officially
declared bankruptcy, but that wasn't the end of music. For
(34:01):
a while, things were tough for Bob Moge Music closed
in the late eighties and he lost the rights to
his name in the Mogan Music trademark. Move Music and
Buffalo went out of business. It started really slowing down,
and I was laid off at the end of nineteen
eighty four, but the kind of picked up a few
service things for them here and there until they've just
(34:24):
completely closed their doors and five. But I was always
involved with all the different people. It's almost like a
family working at that company. So I still maintained connections
with a lot of the people from back in the day.
An acquaintance that I worked with that Mog Music had
contacted me because he had got a call from Keith
Emerson to do some work for I'm just like in
(34:45):
Palmer because they were going back out on tour again
and at that time there was no mo Music and
not a whole lot of people knew about that technology,
and I happened to be one of them, so that's
how I sort of slid into that. So I got
(35:06):
the tour with Emerson, like Palmer, off and on for
about three years. Meanwhile, Bob Mog was determined to get
the rights to his name back in two thousand two.
After a lengthy legal battle, Bob succeeded and he reopened
Mogan Music in Asheville, North Carolina. August Whorley was one
of the first to hear that Bob was back in business.
(35:29):
I saw that Bob Mog was announcing that he was
going to be doing another synthesizer, like one last synthesizer.
He had said that, you know, he realized he was
getting on in years and wanted to take some of
the stuff that was in his head and dump it
into younger heads. And I sort of took notice of that.
Eventually got around it just calling him out of the blue.
(35:49):
I introduced myself as Bob. I We've never met, but
I've worked for everybody you've ever hired back at the
old Mog Music, and I'm three names down from you
in the special thanks liner notes on the list. There
were something so that kind of caught his attention. I
showed him only materials for the work for Keith and
(36:10):
all the rest of that kind of stuff, and he
knew all the guys that are worked with. He said, right, okay,
you're you're in. I like what I see. The next thing,
I know, I'm helping Bob Do, another synthesizer. August worked
closely with Bob to develop the Minimog Voyager, a successful
return to form for the Mog synthesizer. The two thousands
(36:32):
saw a renewed interest in analog synthesizers, and MUG was
once again a thriving and innovative business. Here's Michelle Mug.
The modern day m Music, which is located here in Nashville,
has a long line of incredible synthesizers, starting with the Voyager,
and they are constantly innovating and evolving as well, selling
(36:54):
thousands and tens of thousands of instruments all over the
world every year. August Worley was a huge part of
that success. He says getting to work with Bob Moag
was one of the greatest experiences of his life. I
had a father that I love very much, but Bob
was kind of the father that understood me because we
used to complete each other's sentences, you know, having been
(37:17):
involved in that professional capacity. I think the biggest thing
that Bob did for me is that he made me
be more confident in my ideas, so I wasn't afraid
to present some of these crazy ideas that kind of
popped into my head. You know, I remember having a
conversation once with him, or a sort of outlining, Oh yeah,
(37:39):
and then it worked for this company, and here's what
we did for a radar simulator or a prepress computer system,
or interfacing a deck main frame with an Apple too.
And the thing he said to kind of close out
the conversation was I really envy you your broadness, of
your level of expertise in experience, He said, all I've
(38:02):
ever done his work on synthesizer, and I was kind
of like, okay, well, you know, you've pretty much invented
the bloody industry. I mean, I don't think I have
to really apologize Bob is envious of my experience and professional,
you know, credentials. It's like, okay, whatever. I asked Michelle
(38:26):
mug what it was like growing up with Bob for
a dad. He held his career at arm's length from us,
just because I think he was a little uncomfortable with
his celebrity and his fame, and he really just wanted
a place where he could be Bob or Dad. I
would say, I knew a very kind of surface level.
(38:48):
We all knew that Dad had invented the synthesizer. We
knew that he was famous. We knew that he had
gotten a Grammy. We knew that he knew and loved
a lot of very cool musicians, that he was revere,
heard that he wrote articles in well known magazines. We
had a solid idea of his stature. What we didn't
(39:09):
realize is maybe the impact of his work. The only
access I really ever had to his work in my
early years was when he did have either a basement
workshop in our house or a workshop across the driveway.
I would go at night in my pajamas to give
(39:30):
him a kiss good night, because his routine was he
would stop working around six or seven, we'd have dinner
that my mom always cooked, and then my parents would
take a little nap, and then my dad would go
back out to work until eleven o'clock or midnight. So
by the time it was time for me to go
to bed around eight thirty or whatever it was, depending
on how old I was, I would pad out to
the driveway and I would always kind of stand at
(39:51):
the threshold of the office before opening the door, just
to listen to what my dad was doing. I had
no context for under standing it, but I was interested,
and then I would, you know, go in and just
give him a kiss at night. But it was always
kind of clear when we went in the workshop that
we weren't there for long. You know, he was busy
(40:11):
and he was very serious and very focused, and so
it was just a quick, brief, tender moment and then
I would I would leave. So he never said, hey,
come look at this mini mug, or I've gotten the
mug prototype here, which he did in two I think
he restored the mug prototype for the Henry Ford Museum,
(40:32):
and he never showed it to us. He was so humble.
This humility was kind of legendary, and that extended to
our household. He just didn't make a big deal out
of his own work, to the extent that in his
later years, when he was up for a technical grammy,
my stepmother said to him, you know, Bob, you've got
to tell the kids, and he said, why, what's it matter.
(40:57):
I did have a little bit more awareness as I
got a little older, and then probably the pinnacle of
my understanding prior to my father's illness was when I
was about twenty one, I was a senior in college.
My dad actually invited me to come to a NAM
show with him, which is the first time he had
ever done anything like that. I don't think I had
spent any time alone with my father like that prior
(41:20):
to that. So I went to the NAM show with him,
and it was a very weird experience seeing how revered
he was, to the extent that there was a guy
who dropped to his knees in front of my dad
and just just like, Oh my god, you're Bob Moog,
You're my hero. He went on and on and made
my dad so uncomfortable. Nothing against the guy doing that,
(41:42):
but and I just felt like I was having this
totally surreal, out of body experience because here I am
just walking around with my cool, geeky dad and all
of a sudden, there's all this adulation going on. But
there were some other experiences similar to that that helped
me understand some of the impact he had. But the
real impact came when he got ill. In the late
(42:05):
spring of two thousand five, he discovered that he had
a brain tumor, and unfortunately it was inoperable, and things
rather quickly declined, and at one point on my brother
Matthew set up a page on the Carrying Bridge dot
com for him to be able to journal out how
he was doing, and it was really he didn't but
(42:26):
other people in the family did just to keep people apprised.
And originally it was just meant for forty people, forty
of his friends around the world, but it quickly became
public and in the first seven weeks, sixty thousand people
went on that site. Bob moved passed away on August one,
two thousand five. On the day he died, twenty thousand
(42:49):
people logged onto the site, and over four thousand people
left testimonials on that page speaking to how Bob Loge
had inspired them, how he had changed their life, how
he had transformed their life, how because of Bob mog
they were musicians, How Bob Moge gave them their creative voice,
(43:12):
how Bob Mogan inspired them to be an engineer, and
these testimonials just went on and on and on. At
the time, I owned a small business of my own.
I had two young children, five and ten years old,
and I would um go at night and help take
care of him. And then when I would put my
kids to bed, I would go down and I would
read these testimonials, and I would honestly just cry the
(43:36):
whole time because it was like, for the first time
someone was introducing me to Bob Mug. I did not
know Bob Mogan until I was thirty seven and he died.
And it was those people through Caring Bridge that not
only you know, knocked down the kind of walls that
my father put up around his Bob Mog persona to
kind of protect the family from that celebrity, but enlightened
(43:58):
the rest of my family to this incredible depth and
breadth that the impact he made had on people all
over the world. We had people from sixty seven different
countries leave testimonials. Michelle says, those testimonials or what inspired
her to create the Bob Mog Foundation in two thousand six.
(44:21):
When you have an inspirational force like that, something that
you can use to change the world in a positive way,
that it not only deserves to be carried forward, but
it really demands to be carried forward because you don't
get opportunities like that very often. So it was the
family who said, you know, we really, we really need
(44:43):
to do something important here, and that's when the foundation
was created. The official mission is to inspire people through
the intersection of science, music, innovation and technology, which is
essentially a mirror reflection of Bob MoG's legacy itself through
our three projects. We have three different projects. Dr Bob
(45:04):
sold School, which is our hallmark educational project that teaches
little kids about the science of sound through music and technology.
We have the Bob Mog Foundation Archives, which is a
vast collection of over ten thousand pieces of archival material
that we protect, preserve, and share with other museums and researchers.
And then we have the Mogsium in downtown Nashville, North
(45:25):
Carolina that carries that mission forward to inspire both children
and adults through all these interactive exhibits that bring Bob
Mug's legacy alive, not just his life story and his
work story, but the science that really drove his work,
to science and engineering that he was so passionate about.
(45:47):
One has to wonder what might Bob Mog have done
in today's world with today's technology. Well, Michelle has some
insight into that. At the end of his life, he
really was more focused not on synthesis itself, but on
how we were accessing synthesizer interfaces. He told one of
(46:07):
his engineers at move Music that the keyboard wasn't antiquated interface,
and that we needed to move on. He told him
that when he was moving his office, he was already
walking with a cane because his left side had become
somewhat debilitated because of his brain, and he knew he
wasn't going back, and those were his parting words to
that engineer. And my dad had been working on multi
(46:31):
touch sensitive interfaces for decades at that point, and he
had been developing a multi touch sensitive keyboard with an
avant guarde opera composer named John Eaton. That kind of
(46:54):
work was actually ahead of its time, and what he
was aiming for is ubiquitous now. The roly controllers, the
Hawk and Continuum. The Hawk and Continuum as a newer
instrument made of foam. It's not unlike a keyboard, but
you hold it more like a guitar. You can manipulate
the sounds based on the speed with which you move
(47:16):
your fingers, the amount of pressure you apply, and all
sorts of other new parameters, all of that touch sensitivity,
(47:38):
pressure sensitivity, velocity sensitivity. He was working on all of
that starting in He actually told my stepmother that the
multi touch sensitive keyboard he felt was his most important
contribution to the world of music. He felt like the
world of synthesis had kind of gone far enough, but
there wasn't enough human nurance in that world. That's what
(48:00):
he was really interested in near the end of his life. Now,
I played the Hackam continuum. That is a really interesting technology.
The first time I ever checked it out, that foam
keyboard idea and being able to interface with the sound
in a tactile way led me to believe that it
was going to be a winner, because there is always
(48:22):
going to be that barrier between the musician and the
musical instrument. The more steamless that is, the more useful
and expressive it is. Because at the end of the day,
you know, these are all supposed to be a means
of expression for the musician, and so being able to
interact with the sound that you're creating is is imperative.
(48:45):
And even Bob recognized that aspect of the synthesizers, which
is why you always wanted to incorporate some would into
the instrument. And we as humans feel connection to that.
I think it's because it used to be alive. So
being able to connect with that at some level, I
think is what makes a musical instrument much more expressive.
(49:06):
But I kind of think that the actual synthesizer is
sort of reached full maturity. I mean, the actual sound source.
You can keep any more stuff onto it. But I
think any future progress is probably going to be made
in the domain of how we control and express what
that sound is. Even still, August says we should continue
(49:29):
to explore the world of analog synthesis. There's still plenty
of sounds to be discovered. I like to tell the
story that some of the best sounds I ever got
out of a memory mode was back at the factory
on my test bench just before they died. I mean,
you know, you'd start playing this thing and it's like, oh,
you know, this thing's got a problem. It starts getting
(49:49):
all kind of crunchy, and like, Trevor, you gotta hear
this sound, man, This thing sounds like it's just about
the like the bed part of my French And you know,
he put the headphones on and go, wow, that is amazing.
If only we can make it do that all the time.
You put the headphones on and play like a couple
of chords, and then it just stops. I was like, oh, correct, now,
(50:10):
I gotta find out what's wrong with it. But in
that thirty five seconds, man, it was like audio bliss.
This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Trevor
Young and produced with Max and Alex Williams. August Borley
(50:31):
is a former engineer for mog Music, and Michelle Mokusa
is the executive director of the Bob Mogue Foundation. Special
thanks to Michelle for the tour of the Mogzium, which
you can visit any time you're in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
Links pictures, sounds, and more on our social media at
Ephemeral Show. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
(50:55):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. The player
Ephemeral News
Host
Alex Williams
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