Something in the way he Moogs

The father of the Moog synthesizer has sined his last wave. Robert Moog, who invented the first musical synthesizers in the 1960s, passed away earlier this week at the age of 71, and the music world should now strike a collective rumbling E-note on their analog low-pass filters.

Where would the rock world be without the Moog? Well, we might have gotten by without 30-minute versions of The Nutrocker Suite by Keith Emerson. Brian Eno might have had to take up the guitar instead of keyboards. And Donna Summer’s I Feel Love just wouldn’t sound the same without that pulsating Moog line coursing through it in the early days of disco. But the ‘70s just wouldn’t have been the ‘70s without the Moog.

Okay, so those born in later decades might think they’re safe from the Moog’s influence. Wrong! Ever since lo-fi alternative music emerged, new bands have been chucking out their preset synths and reaching for the warm, analog ambience of the Moog (and the Arp, to a lesser extent). Bands like Fatboy Slim, Stereolab, Elastica, Flaming Lips, Wilco, Blur, Underworld, the Chemical Brothers and the Beastie Boys brought the Moog back into fashion.

The guy behind the Moog (which rhymes with "vogue") was a native of North Carolina, strangely enough. Somehow, it’s easier to imagine a wiggy-haired European developing the keyboard tool that would become a fixture of Progressive Rock in the early 1970s. Thanks to Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter Carlos, before the sex change), who used its weird, oscillating tones on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange and the album "Switched-On Bach," thousands of conservatory-trained dorks were inspired to tickle the plastic keys of the first Moog devices to come out of Asheville, North Carolina. Even the Beatles got hold of one for "Abbey Road," their swan song that featured Beatle Paul Moog-ing out on Here Comes the Sun, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and Because, among others.

After that, Moogs were everywhere, for a while. Moog mania reached a peak with bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Lucky Man) and Yes (Roundabout). Early Moogs were big as airplane hangars; Mr. Moog quickly fixed that by making a portable polyphonic keyboard, with each pitch assigned to a different key. The nice thing about the Moog synthesizer was that it was flexible: a musician could actually build sounds from the ground up. Starting with simple repeating wave patterns (with names like "Sawtooth" and "Sine"), they could hone the parameters of each sound; with a few twists of the VCO (voltage-controlled oscillator, for adjusting pitch and quality of sound) and the VCF (voltage-controlled filter, for adjusting tone), they could approximate string instruments, horns, warm washes of sound, or eerie pitch-bending lines.

Unfortunately, all this grand experimentation began to date almost as quickly as it came out on vinyl. Sure, Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been able to travel to "The Dark Side of the Moon" without their Moogs and Arps. And Moogs provided the ultra-funky bass lines to Stevie Wonder classics like "Innervisions" and "Songs in the Key of Life." But I defy anyone to tell me they actually enjoy listening to ELP’s "Tarkus" or even "Brain Salad Surgery" at this late date. Along with the leap in sound possibilities came a huge expansion of Ego and Pretentiousness, the twin vices of most ‘70s progressive rock musicians.

Fortunately, Moog had other tricks up his sleeve. He began building Theremins (responsible for those weird "whoo-whoo" sounds heard on the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations) and other, more stage-sturdy synths — like the Minomoog and the Micromoog — and started a company called Big Briar that was a pioneer in electronic instruments. His legacy is varied. The subject of a 2004 documentary (called, naturally enough, Moog), his contribution to music could easily be consigned — with some sniggering — to the category of "bizarre instruments" which might also include the Kazoo, the Mellotron (a forerunner of today’s samplers) and the above-mentioned Theremin.

But this would be doing a great disservice to the enduring power of the Moog sound. Sure, the world has not been made a better place by novelty songs like Popcorn (cut entirely with synthesizers in 1974), and we will never, ever forgive Paul McCartney for Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

But the return of the warm, analog brilliance of the Moog in the ’90s seemed to bring a cleansing effect to the music world. The previous decade had seen too many New Wave bands reaching for synthesizers like crack whores to the pipe, and this led to mass-produced synths from companies like Yamaha and Kurzweil. The ’80s, among other things, was surely the Decade of Presets. The big companies put out a variety of patches that are still frozen somewhere in that instant in time — ghastly, horrid sounds. Much as movies like Boogie Nights showed how the switch from porn-on-film in the ‘70s to porn-on-video in the ‘80s was aesthetically a bad thing, the switch from analog to digital synthesizer sounds was a landmark in bad taste.

But when ‘90s lo-fi bands like Stereolab began using the Moog to approximate ’60s "bachelor pad music," they did so with affection, not tongue in cheek. Artists like Beck and groups like Underworld saw the Moog sound as a valid musical strand in their evolving vision. And surely the seeds of most electronic dance music would not have been planted if a bunch of Germans calling themselves Kraftwerk hadn’t spun some Moog lines around a bunch of tapes of car sounds they’d recorded while driving around Europe in 1974. The resulting album, Autobahn, was a huge influence on electronica and even hip-hop.

So is this ode to the Moog just retro nostalgia? Another chance to embrace the past with tongue in cheek? No way, pedro. The nice thing about the Moog’s comeback is that countless alternative bands now see Mr. Moog’s invention not merely as a gimmick, not just a quirky sound effect, but as an expressive instrument that can be used to add texture to a variety of musical landscapes. The man himself was humble about his role in all this: "I’m an engineer," Moog said in 2000. "I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers. They use my tools."

But if either Britney Spears or Eminem decide to jump on the bandwagon, I’m outta here.

TOP 5 MOOG MOMENTS

The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun

Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Lucky Man

Pink Floyd, Any Colour You Like

Kraftwerk, Autobahn

Donna Summer, I Feel Love