Gordon Reid brings us an exclusive insight into the polysynths development Hardware > Synthesizer
The brand new Moog One polyphonic synthesizer.
In September 2014 at the AES Convention in Los Angeles, I had a very pleasant dinner with Trent Thompson, the Product Marketing Manager at Moog Music, after which we retired to a covert location in a nearby hotel to discuss synthesisers past, present, and not yet existing. One of the things that we discussed at length was, at the time, nothing more than a concept - a new analogue polysynth carrying the Moog name. But what should this be? A simple but affordable polysynth? Something more powerful with multiple oscillators per note? Something offering layers? Multi-timbral? How about adding powerful on-board effects? Should it be knobby? Should it concentrate on extensive facilities in deep menus? What should it look like? As you might imagine, I had reasonably strong views about much of this, and I remember suggesting that companies rarely do well when they fly against the market's perception of what they're there for and what they're good at. I also remember suggesting that the Memorymoog has cast a very long shadow and that any new Moog polysynth would have to do more than just nod in its direction. The rest is a bit of a blur. We talked long into the wee small hours and, no doubt, staggered into the Convention the following day a little the worse for wear - or, to be more precise, for lack of sleep due to too many diet colas.
Little did I know that I was one of several people having this conversation with Moog's powers-that-be. The principle of developing the first Moog polysynth in 30 years had been agreed in July 2013, and these conceptualisation meetings (or market research as you and I would call it) took place with key players in the industry and friends of the company over a period of more than two years, during which time a spreadsheet of responses - many of them conflicting - was populated with the huge amount of feedback obtained. Once the information was collated, it was necessary to translate the responses into an instrument concept and, in the autumn of 2015, hardware development - both mechanical and electronic - began.
Since the clamour for a polyphonic Moog had been unrelenting for many years, I asked Amos Gaynes, one of Moog's product design engineers, about the timing of the decision to develop the new synth. He told me, We had considered it when Bob Moog was still alive, but he strongly cautioned against it. Consequently, there was never a plan to develop a polyphonic version of, say, the Voyager. But after the successes of the Minitaur and the Sub Phatty, we had reduced the costs and increased the stability and reliability of our analogue sections to the point where manufacturing a polysynth didn't seem such a daunting proposition. For several years, almost every conversation at every trade show had included the question, when are you going to build a new Memorymoog?' and the pressure just grew and grew. To an extent, this told us that we had to build one.
Once we had collated all the views we had obtained, we started to think seriously about what the instrument could be - not so much what the player sees and hears, but what goes into the engineering underneath. There was a strong feeling that it should have three oscillators per voice rather than two, and that it should be able to do all of the things that a Memorymoog could do. But sticking to the facilities of a Memorymoog was unlikely to be sufficient for someone who wanted to play a modern analogue polysynth today; it would only appeal to people who would buy it for nostalgic reasons. So we started workshopping the idea further, and seriously considering what sort of instrument we could make that satisfied the feedback we had obtained. As we did so, we started to develop the concepts further and, being mindful of Moog's legacy, decided to create the most definitive, awe-inspiring instrument that we could.
The first PCBs were populated in early 2016 and the first prototype was built in mid-2016. Of course, this looked nothing like the synth that you see today. The boards were mounted on lumps of wood and the case was a mock-up, but things were starting to come together. The synth now entered a period of rapid technology validation and refinement and, early in 2017, I was invited to Moogfest to see and play a working prototype.
Such had been the secrecy surrounding the synth that, when I arrived, only a handful of the company's own staff had seen it. This wasn't altogether surprising because, until the second day of the festival, it was little more than the set of prototype circuit boards, still mounted on their various lumps of wood, and they had never been assembled into an integrated whole. So I stood back and watched as the various boards and oLED screens were fitted into a prototype case that had never before hosted any electronics. Over a period of three days or so, the new synth - which looked like nothing so much as a 21st century Memorymoog - was constructed in a super-secret location above an apartment a couple of hundred yards from the Moog Store at the festival and, as it took shape, it became clear that the instrument was going to look resplendent. The design wasn't finalised but, I was told, was pretty close, and certainly close enough to get a feel for what it might eventually become. Mind you, it still wasn't possible to switch the thing on, press a key and have a note come out. The control software still ran on a laptop computer and had to be downloaded on each occasion, and the communication between the computer and the synth's brain was still, umm less than entirely reliable. But the day before the end of the festival everything seemed to be running and I was invited to press a few notes a
