June 13, 1980 Gusto feature story: The Moog synthesizer marches on

Another look at a locally-made innovation that changed the world of music.

June 13, 1980

Moog

The musical synthesizer is less than 20 years old, but already it's being acclaimed as one of the nation's great inventions. The recognition has come from none other than the U.S. Small Business Administration, which has chosen the Moog Synthesizer for its traveling exhibition, "Eureka! A Celebration of American Business Innovations," along with such marvels as the telephone, the bifocal, the zipper, the ice cream cone and the Xerox copier.

Inventor Bob Moog has been making his synthesizers in an unassuming warehouse-like building in suburban Cheektowaga since the mid '70s, when he merged his pioneering company with MuSonics, a local synthesizer manufacturer. Moog's mainstay is the Minimoog, a three-oscillator unit which sells at about $2,000. (About $8,000 in 2025 dollars.) In the 10 years it's been available, Moog has sold 13,000 Minimoogs and, in the process, has changed the shape of popular music.

The synthesizer made the keyboardist king in the '70s. Here was a device which could reproduce any sound from violins to drumbeats, simply by shaping an electronic signal. Its most common application was an otherworldly swoosh, though "Switched On Bach" was one of the early demonstrations of the synthesizer's potential.

Many major performers leaped at the chance to explore its possibilities. Classical pianist Leo Smit used a Polymoog on Aaron Copland's works. Oscar Peterson applied it to jazz. The list of jazz and rock artists goes on forever – Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Jan Hammer, Chick Corea, Larry Fast, Tony Banks of Genesis, Jimmy Destry of Blondie. As they worked more with their synthesizers, they'd come to Cheektowaga to visit Bob Moog and his factory and talk about customized modifications.

"One day," artist relations director Rob Konikoff says, "we had both Oscar Peterson and Devo in here. Peterson, by the way, has one of the most modified Minimoogs in existence."

Manufacturing a synthesizer is an assembly-line process that's heavy on small details. Most of it consists of piecing together circuit boards, which are soldered either by machine or by hand and then tested over and over again. There are tests for heat resistance, for operating stamina. The shock-proofing test is run on a machine which shimmies like a paint mixer. Frequency response is sampled in a soundproof shed at the end of the production line. Along with synthesizers, Moog also makes 11 models of Lab brand musical amplifiers.

Moog's bid for the mass synthesizer market comes in the form of a compact, two-oscillator model called the Prodigy, which sells for a couple hundred dollars less than competing models. Within two years, Konikoff says, Moog expects to have made more Prodigies than its 10-year total of Minimoogs.

Now that synthesizers have become reliable, easy to operate, widely accepted and low-priced, the next 10 years will see them become more sophisticated and adaptable. No one has yet perfected a synthesizer which could be operated via a guitar fretboard – the sticking point being there's too much variation in magnetic signals – but they're working on it.

In the meantime, Moog and other manufacturers have come up with a way to make the synthesizer as portable as a guitar. Scheduled for introduction this summer is Moog's Liberation, a keyboard synthesizer which can be strapped on and carried all over the stage. That's exactly what Spyro Gyra's Tom Schuman was doing with his prototype test model on the group's just-completed American tour.

"You should see him with it," Konikoff says. "He runs out into the audience with it and he plays it like Hendrix played guitar, you know, up behind his neck. It's great. It gets the people very excited."

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IN THE PHOTO: Tom Schuman in the iconic 1980 advertisement for the Moog Liberation.

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FOOTNOTE: The Liberation was the first "keytar" to arrive on the scene and is generally associated with Devo, although Wikipedia says they only used it in promotional images, not in concert. It was manufactured for only two years. As for Moog itself, it succumbed to the digital revolution and the arrival of the MIDI interface system. The company declared bankruptcy in 1987.

Robert Moog got the name back in 2002 after a legal battle and merged his follow-up company, Big Briar, into a new Moog Music, now headquartered and manufacturing in Asheville, N.C. It has prospered, thanks to a revival of interest in the analog synthesizers. Moog himself died in 2005.

Still among us is Robbie Konikoff, who went on to manage Audio Magic recording studio on Military Road. It's now The Cave, a concert venue run by the Sportsmen's Tavern. I had many happy days with Robbie there in the early 1990s when Ani DiFranco was recording her first albums.

P.S.: I wrote about Moog and MuSonics in the early 1970s. The easiest way to look up those articles is to search my Blogspot site.