Re: Robert Moog died

Re: Robert Moog died

from: quibbling
67.164.61.245
05-08-23
15:44:49

I don't want to quibble, but there was a couple of things in that article that prompts discussion, at least. For one thing, the Clockwork Orange soundtrack was performed by Walter/Wendy Carlos (except for "Singing in the Rain," "I wanna Marry a Lighthouse Keeper" and the Orchestral version of Beethoven Van's 9th Symphony) all ONE NOTE AT A TIME, boys and girls. Something about progamming Rossini's "William Tell Overture" made Walter wanna cut off his weinie, so watch it, Kurt. You keep fucking around with those Teutonic synth programs and watch what happens. Don't say you weren't warned. For another thing, what was I thinking about? Oh yeah, the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again as well as "Baba O'Reilly" - better known as "Teenage Wasteland") actually used an ANALOG sequencer custom-made by Mr. Oberheim his own bad self. It was basically 16 rows of knobs, each row denoting pitch, tone etc. and it just cycled through them. (You can hear Townsend increase the speed at the end of "Baba".) I had a friend who bought a "Polymoog" from Bob Moog (the first polyphonic synthesizer, it had a failure rate of 400%, which means every single one broke down at least twice) and on one of his many trips to the factory, I met Bob Moog briefly. The Polymoog was a terrific keyboard, when you could get the fucking thing to work. That's the instrument that drove Bob Moog out of business, at the same time ARP became history because of their "Avatar" synth. It wasn't a good time from synth companies. Sequential Circuits, Fairlight, Oberheim, New England Digital and a whole bunch of other people decided to follow Bob's lead and fuck their companies into the ground. Now that's dedication for you. Now that everything's digital and you can glom the Mini-Moog bass sound off a newsgroup, it's kinda sad that people don't realize what we used to go through. We thought push-buttons were so fucking cool because you didn't have to patch cables around to modules to get the sounds. I saw the Tubes in '74, and the synth player (extra points for whoever remembers his name) rode a cherry picker up and down the wall of modules lining a whole side of the stage. He had four keyboards suspended at various points, which he's play as called upon. One note at time. Ooooh. When I saw Yes later that same year, Rick Wakeman did his "Excerpts from 'Six Wives of Henry VIII" and it took the rest of the year to get the pieces of my skull back together. Anyhow, anybody got some early-synth-years nostalgia riffs to share?

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