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JUNE 22, 1975
Meet Bob Moog

Rare are the opportunities to get an insight into the mind of a true musical pioneer. Bob Moog, developer of the system of synthesizers that have changed the course of contemporary musical history, is one of those pioneers.
Moog is 40 years old, musically trained at the Manhattan School of Music from the age of 14. As Moog said, leading off the conversation, "They went all the way from giving piano lessons to four-year- olds to granting college degrees, and they still do. I was in their pre-college division; I never studied music at the college level." Moog trained as an engineer at Columbia University (B.S. in electrical engineering) and Cornell University (Ph. D. in engineering ,physics). He's been in the professional ranks since the age of 18.
Moog put his wife and himself through school by making theremins, and that's where this conversation picks up:
db: How did you learn to make theremins?
Moog: I taught myself, pretty much. I made them for a hobby as a kid; I began when I was 14, and I got pretty good by the time I was 19.
db: Is the theremin a complicated instrument:
Moog: No, it's actually very simple. It's hard to play, but easy to make. I've been interested in electronic music instruments ever since I could hold a soldering iron.
db: What do you feel are your unique achievements in the field?
Moog: I don't know, there's no one single achievement. It's been a whole series of achievements that I've strung together that has resulted in a successful enterprise here. One of my gifts with electronics is my ability to design good circuits; another is a fairly sensitive ear to know when things sound good-and when they don't sound good to know what to do about them. The third thing is my ability to converse with musicians, to understand what their needs are, and to appreciate what innovative musicians are trying to do. Finally, there's the ability to work with the media, to promote new ideas.
db: Are there technical limitations on Moog instruments that have yet to be overcome?
Moog: The technical limitations are being overcome faster than the musi-cians are learning to do with what we already have. I think that as new technologies evolve and become cheap enough to evolve into consumer goods, that they'll be used more generally in musical instruments. The next big technological breakthrough will be the use of digital computer circuitry in inexpensive musical instruments. They're already being used now in electronic organs.
db: Are you doing any work along those lines yourself?
Moog: Sure am.
db: Do you have any products you might want to discuss that might result from this research?
Moog: Well, every one of the products that we've designed for the last year or two has used digital circuitry. With each succeeding product, we use more and more of it. Now the polyphonic synthesizer, the Polymoog, that we're introducing at the show, uses a great deal of digital switching and control circuitry.
db: What will this mean to the musician who plays it?
Moog: It'll mean an extremely large variety of readily accessible sounds.
db: How about the future of acoustic instruments as opposed to electric?
Moog: I have never thought that electronic music instruments would affect the sale or use of acoustic instruments. When you look at it over the long historical perspective, you see that every different technology that's developed results in a different class of musical instruments. So first you have leather, used in drums. Then you have wood-the stringed instruments; then metal-the brass instruments and the woodwinds. Now we have electronics. I don't see that any of these new technologies has ever replaced the older ones. They simply added to the whole body of musical instruments, and made music a more important and more versatile force in our life. We still have as many acoustic instruments being played as ever now, even though the instruments have been around for 200-300 years. The acoustic guitar, for instance is real a completely different instrument than the electric guitar. I just can't see how the development of electronic instruments, even new electric guitars, are going to affect the sale of acoustic guitars.
db: You don't feel any competition?
Moog: No. You know, the musical instruments sales per person are going up, and I don't see that that's happening at the expense of established lines of products. In fact, I had a look at a Norlin annual report just a while ago and they broke down the sales in the last five years, in terms of existing instruments and new instruments that were developed more recently. Existing instruments have held steady, while the new instruments have increased dramatically over the last five years. I'd expect these trends to continue for the next 5 years.
db: What markets are best for Moog products?
Moog: The very first people who buy our instruments are the studio musicians - the people who make radio-TV commercials, they make pop records, they also do experimental, avant-garde music. It's a very small market, and it's not the sort of market a typical retailer would serve.
The second level is the pros who have an ear for new sounds, who like to extend their axes over and above what they can get with traditional stuff. These pros are jazz and rock musicians and so on, they become highly visible and successful, and what they do with these instruments that they've bought then develops market for the serious amateur musicians - you know, the high school kids and the young working musicians for whom music is a very serious endeavor, but not necessarily a livelihood.
So, when we introduce a new product, like the Polymoog, we think of getting the serious pro interested first, and working with him, making sure he knows what the instrument can do, and how to go about doing it.
See, in the case of the Polymoog, a market already exists. So many thousands of people have played monophonic synthesizers that a certain percentage
already know that they have to have a polyphonic synthesizer, and so this is a market that is already pre-generated. By what we've already done, we're going to sell to many people right away, and sure they get the most out of their instrument. The first tendency will be for them to sit down and play it as if it were an electric piano. We have to make sure, through our written instruction material, direct contact, and what we tell our retailers, that the buyer knows, or at least has some glimpse, of what the full capability of these instruments are. Then, when their playing is heard over records and radio and television, there will be no problem in developing a following.
db: Can the Polymoog be programmed to play something while the performer is simultaneously playing something else?
Moog: No. The difference between a polyphonic and a monophonic instrument is that in the former, all the keys play- you can play any number of tones at one time. A monophonic instrument is used to play solo lines, and the expressivity of a solo line is a different sort of thing than you get playing a piano or an organ, but it certainly is neither of these. It's a synthesizer, in that you can shape bend many aspects of the tone colors, front panel controls. When you have synthesizer's ability to shape and bend tones, but on top of that you have ability to play any number of tones at any time on a keyboard, and they all have the same tone, you can set it to sound like a super-good piano or a super-good organ or xylophone or God knows what -- a lot of sounds you never ever heard.
db: How best can a Moog retailer sell your products?
Moog: It's not that hard. There are two important things. First, you have to be able to get around on our instruments enough to do a few basic licks on it - be able to demonstrate most of what you can do on it. The typical synthesizer buyer expects a more technical presentation; he expects more information on it than a typical guitar buyer, let's say. A prospective buyer can get turned off very quickly if he asks a simple question that can't be answered.
The successful retailers are the ones who know the products inside and out but really what the manager of the store needs is a synthesizer expert in his employ, to whom all questions can be referred. That's one aspect of it. The other is to have a feeling for what the musical needs of the prospective customer are. There are as many ways of approaching music as there are people; some people want to manipulate sound in a technical way, still others want to imitate their favorite artists, and whatever it takes to do that, that's what they want.
It's important for the retailer to find that out right at the beginning to find out why the customer is there. Is it Keith Emerson he wants to sound like, or Billy Preston? Or does he already play a piano and want to expand on that? Or is it because he's an engineering student and thinks he wants to make music which would increase his understanding of acoustics. Why? The retailer has to find out in each case and be able to steer the kid to the right synthesizer.
There's one guy in Chicago -- Jim Head at Just Music -- who has the most complete synthesizer showroom I've ever seen. He has 'em all, every single one of them, and he also has the ability to match up synthesizers with the needs of the customers standing in front of him. Very few retailers I know of are capable of offering that service.