The MOOG Story: Part One

it will publish. It will publish in January. And Joe, you and I are kind of like right in the crunch for people who do podcasts and videos as holidays loom up. So I say that to alert our listeners that we might get a little loopy. And that's only kind of a pun because we're talking about mog synthesizers and sometimes musicians these loops. So yeah, we're gonna talk about mog synthesizers. And when I brought this up, I gave Joe a list of potential topics. These were all

ones that were suggested by by listeners. So thank you guys for sending in your suggestions. That's awesome. I really appreciate it. And Mog synthesizers are kind of amazingly cool, Jonathan. They are not cool, they are cool. Okay, that's fair. Yeah. For the longest time I thought it was Moog. I thought it was Moog too. And when I told my wife Rachel that I was going to be recording an episode with you on on mog, she was like, what's that?

And she was like, is it not Moog? And I was like, yeah, I used to think the same thing. But apparently we're just all super ignorant because MOG is not an acronym for something. Doesn't stand for massive open online gorillas or mogic modular organic oh led garage. I don't know. No, it doesn't stand for anything. It's it's a person's last name rights the last name of old Bob Moog who not Moog Bob move. It's a hard

habit to break, dude. No. I remember I did a podcast with Chris Palette years and years and years ago, and I think I said Moog synthesizer and that, and I was get some angry, angry letters. I was. I was thrashed about the neck and wrists with a with a ruler, which Chris kept on him. Chris, Yeah, I mean, well, he's a percussionist for one, and you know he's been in bands. You know, he opened for he opened for

for Indigo Girls. I mean he's like, we're talking serious musician here, um, And I'm only slightly ripping him because that's all true. But no, he he was very kind actually to point out my my faux paw. Now, yeah, I don't remember many Indigo Girls songs being big on the Moges. No, I was just using that as a way of establishing Chris is uh musical chops in the sense that he was an established musician, not so much to specifically put him in a mog camp. I would

like to attend Mogue camp. I bet it would be fun, But we wanted to start off before we get into the nitty gritty of Mogue. We wanted to talk a little bit about electronic music because part of the story is how electronic music wasn't always an acceptable musical format to the general public, but of course now it's it's an incredibly huge, uh genre of music. Well, despite being really popular among some people. I mean, there are lots of people who love electronic music and that's their favorite

genre of music. There is still sometimes you'll see a kind of I don't know what you call it, a kind of acoustic elitism snobbery that isn't so much at electronic music itself, though you do encounter that a little bit, like like explicitly electronic music, But a lot of times I see it at music that is that uses electronically generated tones in conjunction with traditional arrangements and instruments, So like pop songs that have synthesizers in them, there are

like snobby, elitist opinions against that, and I wonder why that is. I mean, I know there is there's sort of a general idea that electronically generated tones are fake, which is, you know, they're like it's almost like they're not real sound. Yeah, when you get down to it, when you really peel away all the layers of this onion, you realize how ludicrous an argument that is. Because a

musical instrument is a construct we used to generate sound. It. It doesn't necessarily have any electronic components to it, but it's still a tool that we're used to create these musical notes. Like there's nothing natural. You don't go to the violin tree and pluck a violin off the violin jury, right, I mean, these are all tools and well, it's sure, but my wardrobe broke down like three years ago, so I'm not going to go to the old school violin

maker who makes fake violin. Yeah, exactly, Like you should be arguing like, well, you're not singing, so you're just doing You're just faking it, like unless you're using the human voice and tapping upon your own barrel chest for percussion, you, sir, are not a musician. Well, this is a concept we're gonna have to revisit throughout the episode today because I think it is a central theme of the career of Robert mog But I thought it would be good to start just by asking you what is some of your

favorite electronic music. You don't have to be moge centric here, because that might be kind of limiting if if I just say, played on a mogue with electronically generated tones, what do you like? Okay, So I'm just gonna run through these pretty quickly, because I mean, obviously we could we could have an entire podcast dedicated to music. Effect we used to have a music oriented podcast from How Stuff Works. Haven't done it in ages? It was stuff from the B sides. I would love to see that

come back sometime. But here's some First of all, have to mention daft punk, uh obviously, like that's like the kind of clear front runner of electronic music as far as mainstream awareness is concerned, outside of just the electronica fans, who are of course their knowledge runs far more deep than mine. Um. I could also just lump in pretty much any band that was part of the new wave movement, because new wave was very electronic heavy and in certain

parts of that uh, that movement. Yes, the the the post punk new wave movement. I love that that genre of music as well. Um, the soundtrack to the original Tron movie, I love it. I also like Tron Legacy, which again goes back to daft punk. But I love the soundtrack to the original Tron movie. You know, we

both fight for the users. Yes, and that was scored by Wendy Carlos, and Wendy Carlos is very important in the history of MOG because Wendy Carlos also did an album called Switched on Bach, which was an early album that really uh pushed MOG into the limelight. Like it it was a very popular album. It hit top twenty charts and I own this on vinyl. It is at my house right now. I have a vinyl copy of Switched on Bach. Now did that album actually make an

appearance in the movie A Clockwork Orange? Or was that that was Wendy Carlos scoring? When Carlos scored music and that oh wait, that was Beethoven, wasn't it Beethoven was the piece? That was the music that was That's right, the lindvig Van. But Wendy Carlos scored Clockwork Orange. She also scored the Shining Um and then also, I like the soundtrack to Lady Hawk. I don't know what that is. You don't know Lady Hawk is. Lady Hawk is a fantasy film from the mid eighties and it starred Matthew

Broderick as a thief. No no, he was a thief named mouse. Rutger Howard played a no. Rugger Howard was a a like canthrope who was in love with a a young lady played by um By Lady Hawk. Well, she was the Lady Hawk, but the name suddenly escapes me and that's terrible, but anyway, and it will kill me. People right in and tell me who was Michelle Pfiffer, Michelle Phifer, she was Lady Hawk. Uh. So, the story goes that he turns into uh, a wolf at night,

she turns into Rugger Howard. She turns into a bird in the daytime. They are in love with one another, but they can never be together because as one is transforming into human, the other one's transforming into animal. And it's this kind of story of tragedy as they as Rugger Howard's character is looking to enact revenge upon the the person who has cursed them to this existence. Marger Howard has so many time related struggles. He wants more life.

He needs to be a day wolf. Yep. So the The soundtrack is a mixture of orchestral uh and pop scynth rock and uh. Some people absolutely detest it. I love it. I love it because it is very much a thing of its time. It would not fit in any other time period. Like if this movie remain in the nineties and it had that soundtrack, you would be

scratching your head wondering why. But in the eighties it was right there at the forefront of this pop scynth score movement that some people hate but I love also. I mean I mentioned switched on Bach. Have you ever heard of the Disney's Main Street Electrical Parade. I know, I don't know what you're talking about. So it's a parade that was very popular at Disney World in Disneyland. Don't know if they still do it. Parade and actual parade. Yeah, you would go oh and and find a spot on

Main Street and wait and the floats. It was at night, and the floats were all lit up with various led lights. I think that are originally like incandescent lights when it was first going, because that's how old the parade, sure, and uh, the the but the music was all electronic music and very peppy, and it included motifs from various Disney films like Mary Poppins and Pete's Dragon and that kind of stuff. And um and I had that on vinyl. It's a little uh uh, a little uh tiny um,

which is great. There was an album called The mog Cookbook. Did you ever hear this? So? I didn't hear this came out in the mid nineties. The Moge Cookbook is a cover album. Uh the cover the songs are all like from the mid nineties, but covered with bogus. So you've got like, wait, is it not the Moke Coke Boke. No, it's not the Mog Coke Boke. It's the mog Cookbook. I looked it up. Uh yeah, it included a black Hole Sun, Buddy Holly, basket Case, free Fallen smells like

teen Spirit, and several other songs. Wait, it included the artist Buddy Holly or the song Buddy the song Buddy Hollybyewheeler, because they were all from that that general era. And I also have an un ironic love for the music of sticks, in which keyboard solos often play a pivotal role. Well, it can't fault you there some of my own favorite electronic music, like you. A lot of the electronic music

that came to mind was from soundtracks. Of course. I think of the Doctor Who theme, which is a wonderful early electronic masterpiece. It was composed in the BBC Audio workshops by somebody named Delia derby Shire, or actually I think it was composed originally by somebody else as a piece of written music, but realized electronically in a fascinating

and wonderful way by by Derbyshire. At the BBC then so much so that the original composer actually said, at this point this music is not really my own anymore. It's it's Derby Shire's. And not that that. It wasn't wasn't distancing from the music. It wasn't saying like this is a bad thing, but this is a remarkable thing. Yeah. And also I would have to mention the electronic compositions

of one John Carpenter. For example, I cannot get enough of the soundtrack of Halloween three Season of the Witch, a movie with much better music than it deserves. Now did they use the same motif as the Michael Myers motif and Halloween's one and two? It's been a lontesis. It's different, it's got it's got some of some kind of similar themes weaving in and out, but but it's its own thing. You should dun dunt dun dundu dun mean that shows up a little, But you should just

listen to the Halloween three soundtrack. It's great electronic music. I'll have to take a listen. Yeah, I love the John Carpenter stuff like I love his stuff from Big Trumble, Little China, and and uh, you know, like even some of the things that are are He's playing songs that are more guitar driven, but you can tell the instead of guitar, they're using a synthesizer, which is kind of cool. That's a kind of different thing once you start talking

about digitally edited together music. But also, earlier today, because I knew we were going to do this, I asked my co host, one of my co hosts from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb, about his favorite old school SyncE stuff and he recommended a guy named Mort Garson, who had never heard of before, but who performs under the He did perform under one name, Lucifer was the performer artist's name, and there was an album unreleased him to the artist name Lucifer. That's just great. I listened

to it earlier today and I loved it. It's very moogie. I don't know if it was actually done on a Moog, but it it sounds like it's got that old school synthesizers. Sounds analog um. But but we should get to the origin of the Moog story. Moog the Mogue. We should get to the origin of the Moge story. So who was Bob Mog? Yeah, and and keep in mind like when we talk about the Moge story and we're talking

about the birth of the analog synthesizer. There were other groups also working on synthesizers at the same time as Moge, but Mogue's name has sort of become iconic in this idea of the analog physical circuitry synthesizer for multiple reasons. So who was he, Well, he's he was born in Queens, New York on May and as a kid he became really interested in electronics, just thought it was a fascinating thing,

and so he really kind of dove into it. And he also was really interested in the idea of using electronics to make music. I think it's called mosic maybe, uh he He however, was not um a musician himself or mosician if you prefer. He was not a musician himself, but he liked the thought of creating the instruments that would be you know, would allow someone else to make music. And one of the first things he really became interested in was the thereman, which we have covered on tech

stuff before. The thereman had been invented back in the twenties, so he was that had already been around for quite some time before Mogue was even born, but Mog got interested in it. And in case you don't remember what a thereman is, just imagine a box that has a

pair of antenna. Typically you have one vertical antenna and one horizontal antenna poking out of this box, and the antenna rely on radio waves around them, and as you move your hands closer to in a way from you start to interfere with the waves that are around this antenna. You never make contact, or you don't you're not supposed to make contact with the antenna. You don't have to. It's just by bringing your hands closer and moving them further apart, you can change a tone that is generated

by this device. Now sound like Just imagine in your head all of the goofy bad horror and sci fi movies you saw in the nineteen fifties, especially sci fi yeah that was big, like yeah and uh and typically like not. Typically, the way it would work is that one of the antenna would would change the pitch as you moved your hand closer and further away, and the

other one controlled the volume. So as you're one is one is how high the flying saucer is often and the other one is how close it's coming towards you, yeah, or whether it's moving towards you or away from you. All right, so I like, oh, it's getting closer because Doppler effect, right, Uh so yeah, it's It was a really interesting and odd musical device, and mog was really interested in them. He built his first one when he was either fourteen or fifteen. I've seen reports that site

one age or the other. But right in that friend that a year I saw. I think it was nineteen fifty four that he's well, no way, I think that's when he said he sold his first one, right, So he started building them when he was still a teenager. By the age of nineteen, that's when he started a business them. Yeah, he actually and he didn't just sell theremans. He did do that, but he also sold kits and partially constructed ones. So in other words, he was helping

other d I Y enthusiasts. I assume that if you wanted a completed kit, then that would obviously be more expensive than just buying the parts from him and then the instructions and putting them together yourself. Um, And he and his father kind of created a business together and it was the r A Mo company. Uh. He then would go on to attend college and go on to graduate school at Cornell and while he was there he was studying physical engineering and in nineteen sixty three he

met a guy named Walter Sear who was a tuba manufacturer. Manufacturer. No, how many times are we going to do this? You're not the one who gets the email Joe manacturer? Yes, how many will have that job? At least one a right, at least one manfacturers operate in the world at the same time. You do wonder what the you know, how tuba's have to last a long time? Right, there's gotta be a major resella expired. I gotta check it out.

Hading to go buy a new tuba? Uh so yeah, he he met Walter Seer and Seer thought that Mog was an interesting guy and said that Mog should uh go to the New York State School Music Association gathering. And while he was there, he met another guy named Herb Deutsch, and Deutsch was part of the experimental music movement that was starting to really kind of play with the idea of what is music and what what can

be music and what can music do? Like really pushing the boundary going beyond just the simple construction of a song and and getting really weird stuff. And Mog talks about how it was his meeting with deut that sort of really got him interested in electronic music and wanting to build equipment that would help us create new kinds

of sounds. Yeah, the two of them kind of agreed that this would be a really interesting prospect, the idea of building a device specifically to create new sounds for music. And so, with Deutsche's urging, that's what most out to do, and he created a shop near Ithaca, New York, UH and began to experiment using silicon transistors as the basic components. Transistors were kind of a game changer at the time, right, absolutely, Yeah,

totally changing what you could do with electronic equipment. Well, it certainly changed, yes, And the main reason is because they took up less space and generated less heat than the alternatives, right, because it would be vacuum too, exactly. So there were certainly electronics before transistors, but they were larger and they generated way more heat. And so if you wanted to have and electronic device that was a musical instrument. For the invention of the transistor you're looking

at some pretty unwieldy equipment. It's gonna be bigger and hotter than what you would find later on once you switched over to transistors. So he began to look at transistors to be the basis of the circuitry he would use to create a Mogue musical instrument, and uh, he found that he could alter the pitch, like as long as he created frequencies that were within the range of human hearing. He could alter the pitch by changing the voltage in various circuits before sending that signal out to

to allowed speaker. So as long as you keep the frequency between say, twenty hurts and twenty thousand hurts, that's the range of human hearing, then you can do that. If you go beyond that, obviously, then you most people are unable to perceive it. And obviously not everyone has exactly that range, right. Some people start, especially as you get older, you start to lose they to perceive at the higher end, which is why I no longer hear children.

Oh yeah, I remember those stories about the cell phone tones that only kids could hear because they're too high pitch for adults to hear. Was that true or was that that, I hope, I don't know. I heard a similar story about how how like um gas stations were employing loudspeaker systems that would play that pitch at a high volume because adults couldn't hear it and it discouraged kids from loitering. Man, that's that's that's that's another story

I heard, But I don't know if that's true. If you wanted to be a really cool uh synthesizer musician, you could create a musical instrument that only plays in the frequency range that adults can't hear, and so you couldn't have a stodgy adults coming into your concert and just well I guess you could have them just they're pretending or they would or they just say like I don't understand the music these days, uh, or yeah, yeah I hear it. Man, you go a step further and

you just make music for dogs. You know you could do that? So? Uh So Moe created a circuit. One of the one of the music stores I go to here in town called its Decatur c D. If you go in there, there's an album they sell they've always got in stock that I think is called music for Dogs. There might be called like music, dogs love. I've never listened to it. Yeah, yeah, just be a bunch of cats melling. I don't know what it is, maybe maybe

a doorbell. Occasionally. Have to ask about it next time. Well, Moe created a circuit that produced a pitch and then with an increase of one vault, that pitch would go up one octave. That's convenient, right, and then the pitch would change back and forth using different types of wave forms, which I will cover later on in this episode. So I'll explain all about the different wave forms because that's an important part of what makes a mogue sound the

way it does, and other analog synthesizers as well. Um, and it would create the sort of weird vibratos sound. And he gave the instrument his own last name, possibly following the lead of Theriman. Therreman was named after the guy who invented it. You know that it's not a word that was made up for the device. It's actually named after the inventor. It sounds like a made up word, it does. But it was somebody named like like Jeff Thereman. Yeah,

it was exactly that. It was Jeff Thereman. It was not, but at any rate. No, it's he decided to name it after himself. You know, there are tapes of Mog giving early demonstrations of of his synthesizer equipment when he when he was very first developing it. And in one of those tapes that I heard by listening to the documentary Mogue, which which is a documentary that that I watched online about Robert Mog. Yeah, and it's available on YouTube, so you can actually watch the whole thing, right, it

might be a bootleg. I don't know. Well, well, it definitely is there. If you want to unethically watch the whole thing, it's on there. But yeah, so there there was a nineteen sixty four demonstration where Mog is talking about a prototype modular synthesizer and he calls it the Abominatron and I love that. So he obviously has a sense of humor about it. But it does kind of get to a problem that Mog started noticing when he was first making his his synthesizers public. He says that

people reacted to it by saying it wasn't natural. He says that, you know, the first response was that it was just not right, something about using this electronic means of creating musical pitch was not the way things should be in music. And he even tells a story where there's an interviewer who was, you know, interviewing him about his new technology, and he leans into him and the interviewer says, tell me, Mr Mog, don't you feel guilty

about what you've done? Sick burn? And so MoG's interpretation of that is that the the reporter's point of view was that by creating the means to generate tones without traditional instruments made of wood or brass or plucking strings or something like that, he was somehow perverting and destroying music, doing something offensive to an ancient tradition from human culture, which again to me, is ludicrous on the very face of it, because the history of music is one of innovation,

where people have created instruments that are more capable than their predecessors. Right, the piano forte is a lot different than the ancestors to the piano. Well, yeah, and I hate to break it to these people, but the piano has not existed for ten thousand years. The piano is only a few hundred years old, right, And before that they were, you know, you had the harpsichord, where you had the plucking of metal tabs as opposed to the

percussion of strings. And if you look at the history of music again, it is all about innovation, and so I think it was just that it sounded so different from the stuff that came before it that people's initial reaction was one of confusion, and maybe they were a little unsettled that this thing that did not have any moving parts to it, unlike something like, you know, a stringed instrument where you can actually see the action that is creating the sound that you hear, or a wind

instrument where you can see that the musician is breathing life into this object and you're getting music out of it. This is a monstrosity of a machine of wires and transistors that you know when you press a button a sound comes out of it. And I think it must have just felt like it was too far removed for some people to be comfortable with it. Well, one possibility that comes up this is also from MoG's comments in

that documentary, and I think this is really interesting. I've always thought of the idea of a synthesizer as Okay, it has that name because it creates something synthetic like there are natural sounds, and then there are synthetic sounds, as in fake sounds created by this fake sound making machine, the synthesizer. The idea, the idea being that this this device can synthesize the sound of other quote unquote real musical instruments. But that's not at all the sense in

which the name was originally intended. It Originally, Mog says, the term synthesizer came from the other main meaning of synthesis, like the combination of elements to create a whole. Like when you, you you know, you take a bunch of research sources and synthesize them into a single coherent vision of something, right, like a like a dissertation of some sort. Yeah, that would be synthesis. Uh, and so in that applies to his technology because originally what Mog was creating was individual

modules for modulating sounds. So you'd make a module that generates a square way, or a module that does this, or module that does that. And if you combine all these modules together into a single huge instrument that you can manipulate in lots of different ways, you're essentially creating

an electronic music modulation synthesis. It's a synthesizer. It's it's it's a hole that's greater than the sum of its parts in many ways, because these modules are arranged in such a way so that you can connect them in in different ways dynamically, like you can change the connections, so it's not like you can plug one into another or you can buy Now you've made a new type of machine. And that's that's the I mean, that's the whole basis of modular electronics and modular inventions. It's this

idea that by making these combinations you can innovate. We've seen that in technology and other areas to the idea, like the modular phone where you put a phone together

with just the elements that you want. And there are a couple of different companies that are trying this approach out and it you know, we'll have to wait and see if that actually becomes successful, but it's a really interesting idea where the consumer determines what his or her phone has just based on the modules you want to include,

and you leave out anything you're not interested in. Well, that's sort of the same idea behind the synthesizer, except of course, the goal was what are the different ways we can manipulate electronic frequencies to create different types of sound. Yeah, And so eventually Mog did bring a model to market. Yeah. He He actually made quite a few different models. One of them, one of the ones that was in development for a very long time was the Mini Moog. I

think that was a popular one. Yeah. So the Mogs are um like, if you're thinking of just a keyboard, your way off mog is buying a Mogue is like buying a boat. Yeah. I mean they talked about it in in some detail in this documentary where Mog talks about how when they sold these things originally it was kind of a tricky business because it wasn't like, you know, they're generating Fender stratocasters and things sell a hundred thousand

of them a month or something like that. I don't know how many stratocasters, but it wasn't a mass market item. They were making them one at a time and selling them one at a time, and they were very bulky and very expensive, and so most of their customers were people who had a lot of money and expected to get a lot of use out of the machine. So, for example, like a music house studio that recorded commercial

jingles or something like soundtracks to nineteen fifties science fiction films. So, uh, the way I tend to describe these early synthesizers, these analog synthesizers, is that imagine that you've got a keyboard and it's attached to a what looks like a old fashioned telephone switchboard, the kind where you would plug cables and to make the connections like, uh, you know, I'll ring her for you, and you plug the cable in and then you make the actual physical connection between two

lines similar to that, except of course, instead of connecting two lines, you are connecting modules together to manipulate an electronic signal in some way. When I used to see mog synthesizer boards with all of the cables hanging out of them, what I honestly thought was that this was just people. It was like intentional obscurity. I thought it was people just trying to look cool or be funny

by having all these cables hanging out. No, that's how you make the sound of your instrument is by plugging like fifty different cables into different places. Right, And it all depends on how many modules you have as part of your synthesize, Right, that's if you have one of the big ones, yeah, because because I mean if you have just a few modules, then one your synthesizer is

going to be more limited. You won't be able to do as many variations on that electronic signal as you could with one that has a lot more modules, but it also be maller like. That was the idea that Mini Moge, right, was the idea that let's try and get something that is of a manageable size because these

are big instruments. Um. So, one of the other models that became famous with the Moge name, and somewhat controversially is the Sonic six, which began its life as a different device that was made by someone who had originally worked for Mogue left the company ended up joining another company. That company ended up buying Mogue because, as you were pointing out the business model Mogue was following, it's pretty limited. It was it was hard to make a profit, it

was hard to stay afloat. And so I believe that that Moge was sold for something like a quarter of a million dollars, which was the amount of debt it had accrued. And but they decided to keep the Mogue name because it had real brand recognition among musicians, and they actually did take this pre existing Prototoel Hype that was originally not a Mogue device, changed it around a little bit by adding in some components that were found

in Mogue devices and put that the market. So it's the Sonic six is very different from the other Mogue instruments of that time. But um and it's one of those that that still like like aficionados still really love that particular instrument. Uh. Mog himself passed away in two thousand five, but the Moge brand name still exists. You can still buy products from Mog. It's not it's kind of it's not not as bad as Atari, but it

is kind of different from the original Moge company. But but it has a stronger claim to that name than say anything that you call Atari these days. That name is is long since severed all connection to its origins. Well, then what is it you really think of as being the essence of the legacy of Moga. I don't know to what extent this is true about the products they create to a but historically I think of Mog as being a company associated with analog electronic music, as opposed

to digitally digitally created electronic tones. Yeah, and and the difference there is important. Although you could argue that our our ability to get ever more refined digital music has largely erased the gap between the two, there still is

a fundamental difference in the technology. And UH the best way of of explaining this is to imagine that the sound you get with analog UH instrumentation and analog recording is a continuous wave of sound, right like, just as I am creating sound right now to you, Joe, maybe not to the listeners because they're listening to a digital file, but to you, Joe, I'm creating sound is a continuous a wave every time I'm generating that sound, right, But

you you listeners at home, or it unfortunately just a sampling's voice, because that's the digital conversion. So if you were to look at analog music in a in a form where you're you know, you're trying to visualize it, we always use the wave form, right, That's that's how we we visually depict a a sound file or a sound or rather a sound wave in an analog format. UM. And this is because it's continuous. There's no point where in one moment it ends in the next moment it begins.

For for a single sound, it's it's continuous until the sound is done. Um. This is different from digital. Digital is discreete digital. You have numbers that represent a single slice of time at which point there is a sound, and the number of slices of time you have within say a second, tells you the sample rate that you have for your digital sound file. The sample rate is how many times you sample that sound within a second

h to represent it in a digital format. The more times you do it, the closer it's going to sound to the original analog source. But also the more information you are including in your sound file. Your file gets bigger and bigger as your sample rate goes up. Right, But if your sample rate is really low, then it's almost like you are only able to listen to a fraction of a second of each moment that you're listening to music. It will be a very different experience than

if it's a continuous experience. You know, a continuous uh performance and all that that all applies to playback and stuffy like recording a piece of music and then playing it back. You could have an analog playback format like a vinyl record or digital playback format like an MP

three or f C thing. Uh. But but here we're we're talking about the generation of sounds inside the machine, and that happens differently in digital versus analog ways to So in the digital version, and the way MOG would explain it is, you know, you've got a sound saved in memory that's represented digitally a set of values. You call that up, you send it to the speakers, and the speakers play it, so they create the vibrations there.

With an analog generated tone, what's coming out of the speakers is generated by the natural vibrations of the electronic components in the machine, right. And by by vibrations, we're talking about the frequency of the the electronic signal, So it's the circuitry that's making the sound as opposed to just replicating something with one's zeros. It is a bit

of a fine distinction. There's also there's also another concept called sample precision, which tells you how big a gradation you have when you're doing a step from one sampled moment of a of a piece to the next, um Like, are you able to get that so precise that it feels like a continuous piece of music. Because one of the things about a analog wave is that you have an infinite number of values within any analog wave, right, because you could just keep getting more and more fine tuned.

So uh like, if you're looking at a sixty hurts uh frequency sound wave where it's going from positive sixty to negative sixty hurts any point in there, you could say, like, all right, well, here's twenty hurts right here, this is the part of a period of a wave where it's a twenty hurts. But then you could zoom in and say, okay, well here's twenty point five hurts. You can zoom in more, is it? Here's twenty point five five hurts, and you

could keep on doing that. With digital you can't. You have a specific value for a specific moment of time, and then you have a specific value for the next moment of time. But there's nothing in between. You can't you can't zoom in any further. You are as far in as you can go. So they are discreet. There is a finite amount of representation in a digital file. There's infinite and analog. Jonathan, are you trying to get

me to have thoughts about my mortality? You know? I got some stuff to sell you after the end of this podcast, but I'll save it for when we're off the air. So one thing I thought would be really cool, obviously, is to talk about these modules, the circuitry that are that's in a Mogue synthesizer, and actually explain what the heck these things do, because if you know, we're talking about generalities and and the principles behind it, but how

does it actually work? Right? Well, we we mentioned before that the the this idea of a synthesizer is made out of modules, and that's modules in the sense of something being modular right there. There are pieces that you can insert and exchange, and the basic ideas that each module does something pacific and relatively simple. You get even more simple when you look at the components within those modules. They are they are like the embodiment of that idea.

Each circuitry component does a very specific thing and that's all it does. And that simplicity is what allows you to pair these with other elements to create more complexity. So when you break it down to its individual parts, it's simple. When you put them all collectively together, that's where it gets complex and you start to think you've got to have a degree in physics to play this instrument,

and uh, it's really cool. Well, we know that there are going to be a lot of different ways of manipulating the sound electronically, but I'm interested in where the sound actually comes from. What like, So a sound is a vibration in the air, but it's got to originate with something oscillating inside the equipment. Where does that come from? That comes from? An oscillator actually is uh, which I originally thought was a breed of like kind of a

cat part of the feline family. Where oscillators that's apparently awesome lots you know they're called oscillators, right, So oscillators are that's what provides the the the oscillation the frequency here of an electric electronic signal. So oscillators don't have to be electronic, right, Oscillators can be a pendulum? Is an oscillator? Is it? Is? It? Pretty much that if anything goes back and forth, it's an oscillator pretty much. Yeah.

It's something that it has a a wave and it has each you know, it has this periodic behavior to it that repeats until some other force causes it to stop. In the case of a pendulum friction will eventually cause the pendulum to stop swinging. So when Moe slaps Larry and curly back and forth rapidly between their two faces, his hand isillator. Yeah, it's oscillating and uh yeah. So an oscillator swings back and forth a certain number of times in a certain number within a certain time period.

Usually we talked about a second being the time period, and the number would be at least in sound. We talked about it. It hurts by the length of time that a waves period passes through a certain stationary point. So a period on a wave, you pick a stationary point on a wave. Let's the easiest is either the peak or the trough, like the lowest point or the highest point on a wave, and you go to the

next peak or trough, whichever one you picked. So peak to peak from mountain to valley, but mountain of mountain, and that distance from that same point on those on those two sections, that's the period of the wave, and the number of times that passes. Uh, that happens within a second, that's the frequency. And if it happens twenty times in a second, that's twenty hurts. Hurts. As the unit we give for frequency, and twenty hurts is again at that low level of perception for humans, like, that's

that's about low as you can go after that. When you go lower than twenty hurts, you get into sounds that you cannot hear, but you can feel, like if you've ever felt the force of something but you're not actually hearing anything. That's probably below twenty hurts. Uh. And then of course if you get up to twenty thousand hurts, that means that the waves are repeating twenty times a second.

That's set the upper end of human hearing. And also the frequency relates to the pitch, right, the lower the frequency of the lower the pitch, the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch, more vibrations per second, the higher its sound exactly. So Uh. The oscillator is the heart of the synthesizer. The oscillator is what allows this frequency to happen and then be sent to the other modules to have it altered in some way. So you could

just use an oscillator. In fact, you could just use an oscillator connected to speakers, but you would just constantly be generating noise because there'll be no governing element there to stop it from making noise. As long as that course it had a signal coming into it, you obviously have to feed it with electricity. So a very simple

oscillator would be pairing a capacitor with an inductor. These are two very basic electronic components, and a capacitor is essentially a pair of plates and you build up the charge on one plate until there's enough charge for it to jump across the gap. So capacitors are kind of

like batteries. They store energy, but they release all their energy in a single got batteries, Yeah, So like the flash on an old camera, flash that works by capacitor because you wanted to release the energy all at once. If it were a battery, the light would take too long to light up and go down, and it would you would never get a good photograph. So they're different from batteries and that they release all that energy at

one time. The inductor is essentially a coil of wire and when it encounters electrical charge, it creates a magnetic field. So if you pair a capacitor with an inductor, what happens is electricity goes from the capacitor discharges into the inductor, which creates a magnetic field. That magnetic field begins to build up a charge on the capacitor's other plate, so you're getting the polar opposite charge. So talk about voltages,

Actually you get the polar opposite voltage. So you put in sixty volts on one side, it's the minus sixty volts coming back the other way. Uh. It's the way we describe the movement of electricity here. And then it discharges again, but now it's the opposite polarity, and then it doesn't again. So that's why when you look at the the wave depiction of uh sound, you have those peaks and those valleys. It's the going from the positive end to the negative end of whatever that sound actually

is um and it's pretty neat stuff. That's a very but that's a very basic oscillator. That's and also it would just like a pendulum would eventually stop because of friction, electron of oscillators would eventually stop if you don't feed more energy into them. They'd eventually stop because of resistance. You know, you have resistance with electric wires. That means you lose some energy to heat and eventually you would lose enough where if you didn't pour more energy into it.

It would just stop. You wouldn't have enough energy to discharge the capacitor in the first place. So um a lot of reasons why. It's similar to a physical oscillator. So that's your very basic component that is important. But like I said, if you don't have anything else, like if you had a keyboard connected to an oscillator that was connected to a speaker, like an amplifier and a speaker,

then it would always be making noise. You could change the pitch by pressing keys on the keyboard, but it would never stop like it would you would just be like, unplug this thing. It's a monstrosity. So it sounds like some kind of gate a gatekeeper for voltage, and that would be the voltage controlled amplifier or v c A, which can raise or lower the volume of a synthesizer. And so it affects the amplitude of a wave. The amplitude is how high and low those peaks and troughs

are right. So the frequency is the number within a certain given amount of time. The amplitude is the height the volume essentially of this and so with a v c A you can lower that volume to nothing and you can create a gate where the is a very simple logic gate, which essentially says, if there's a signal coming in, then allow it to go to the speaker.

So you would connect that so that when you press a key, that's essentially a signal saying I would like you to make sound now, and when you stop pressing the key its I would like you to stop making that horrible noise. And the v C A is what allows that to happen. So that's another very basic component. Um. They are so abusive to your electronics. Look there there for me, all right, I'm not there for them. You've got to understand whose boss, otherwise electronics will rule your life. Okay, guys,

this is Jonathan. You've been listening to me and Joe talk for a while. This show ended up being way longer than what we anticipated. So in the interest of preserving sanity and Noel's UH preservation as well, we're gonna divide this up into two episodes. So this is the conclusion of part one. We will return with part two to continue our discussion about electronics and moge synthesizers and analog synthesizers and all that goodness UH. In next week's episode.

So I just want to remind you guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of Text Stuff, you can always let me know. The email address you can use is text Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler with the handle text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again about more mog really soon. For more on this thousands of other topics, is a housetop works dot com MHM