Robert Moog and the sound of tomorrow

In October 1964, Bob Moog unveiled the first modular voltage-controlled synthesiser, an instrument that forever changed the course of modern music. Here's a look through the BBC archives at the Moog's impact on everything from The Beatles to pioneering electronic classics, via Bach.

Looking like a cross between a telephone exchange and the controls of a spaceship, the Moog synthesiser was a system of exotic sounding modules such as voltage-controlled oscillators, amplifiers, filters, envelope generators, noise generators, ring modulators and mixers. All these could be put in various combinations to produce otherworldly sounds.

Robert Arthur Moog was a fledgling engineer making a living selling Theremins with his father when he met with composer Herb Deutsch at the New York State Music Conference in 1963.

The pair hit it off and began discussing the idea of creating an instrument that could synthesise electronically generated tones.

In a 2019 feature in Yes & No magazine, Deutsch recalled: "The idea of combining both technology and thought and ideas into one world was the whole design of the original Moog."

Moog later said of the encounter with Deutsch: “By the end of that session and the one that followed, together we had come up with the basics of a modular analog synthesiser.”

Shortly after meeting with Deutsch, Moog would come into with another future collaborator at a convention for Columbia University's Audio Engineering Society.

Wendy Carlos was wowed by the prototype synthesiser brought along by Moog and instantly understood the musical potential of the new technology.

Carlos later recounted: “It was a perfect fit. He was a creative engineer who spoke music, I was a musician who spoke science. It felt like a meeting of simpatico minds.”

A couple of years later, after ordering her own customised version of the Moog Synthesiser, Carlos released her own innovative album which showcased some of the sonic possibilities of the the new equipment.

Switched On Bach re-interpreted works originally composed by Johann Sebastian Bach using the Moog modular system.

In 1970, she appeared on the BBC Two programme Music Now to demonstrate how she made it. “You have to build every sound," she said.

Carlos demonstrated the sound design process on the Moog years before digital software synths came equipped with banks of pre-set sounds available at the tap of a button.

This took raw sound waves created by oscillators such as sine, sawtooth, triangular, square and noise, fed them through the various modules on the synth and in the process, sculpted them into something much more musical.

The Switched On Bach album topped the Billboard Classical Album chart for three years and would sell over one million copies.

Carlos would also win three Grammy awards and the Moog sound was now mainstream - recognisable to millions, even if they didn't know what a synth was.

Shortly before the release of Switched On Bach, the first Moog production models were released, and artists as diverse as The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel and even the Monkees began featuring it on their records.

In 1969, Mike Vickers, formerly of Manfred Mann, appeared on Tomorrow’s World to demonstrate the new instrument that he had played on the latest Beatles album.

Vickers demonstrated the versatility of the instrument by playing an arrangement of the English folk song Greensleeves followed by The Beatles' Norwegian Wood.

Tomorrow's World presenter Derek Cooper proclaimed: "The days of the one-man band are back again."

As Vickers continued to patch cables make adjustments to the synth, Cooper contended that "You don't have to be an electronics expert to play the Moog".

However, he then mentioned that the musicians' score played on the Moog looks more like an "electrician's wiring diagram".

In a 2020 interview on Reverb, external, Vickers recalled the experience of appearing on the programme with little fondness.

He said “To be honest with you, it was very boring to me how they wanted to do it."

"I was still full of Switched On Bach, but today the idea of using a brand-new instrument to do old music, like Greensleeves — well, it seems silly to me now.

"I could have done something spacey and noisy, which was much more what I was interested in.”

A few days prior to the broadcast, The Beatles had released Abbey Road, an album where Vickers had actually used his Moog expertise to help them get the sounds they wanted to add to four songs.

He charged them £30 a day for this work.

During the 1970s the sounds generated by Moog synthesisers would become a staple of rock, jazz, disco, pop and electronic music itself.

They could also be heard on the television via science-fiction series such as Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People or at the cinema, providing the sonic backdrop to dystopian movies such as A Clockwork Orange, The Andromeda Strain and Logan's Run.

After the success of the his first instruments, Robert Moog kept inventing and refining his original concept.

In 1970, his fledgling company, Moog Music, released the Minimoog.

Designed as a portable version of the modular Moog synthesiser, it was the first synthesiser sold in retail stores. Years later, Robert Moog himself demonstrated the instrument on Micro Live.

Crucially, the Minimoog was also much more affordable than its pricey predecessor.

All of a sudden, a whole new generation of young musicians emerged with a do-it-yourself ethos and ditched their guitars for oscillators to create a new kind of synth pop soundtrack.

No longer solely the domain of academics, inventors and engineers, experimenting with synthesisers was now something accessible to anyone with an interest in music and a propensity for moving faders, twiddling knobs and pushing buttons.

By now the Moog sound and the brand itself was an established part of pop culture, often associated with exciting, innovative music such as Donna Summer's I Feel Love, produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, or Blue Monday by New Order.

As well as inspiring generations of musicians, there has been a long-standing debate over the pronunciation of the now famous name. In Hans Fjellestad's 2004 documentary 'Moog', Robert Moog himself settled the debate by saying that he and his wife preferred the sound that rhymes with "vogue".

Moog continued inventing and working in music until his death in 2005. He received numerous accolades for his contributions, including The Polar Music Prize in 2001 – described in Sweden as The Nobel Prize of music. He also was awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2002.

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