In the annals of synthesizer innovation, pros and amateur musicians both bow to the Moog. The synthesizer that bears its inventor’s name — Robert Moog — was unleashed on the world in 1964, and opened the door to so many other companies inventing similar keyboards.
Players like Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, and so many others built their leads and compositions around the machine. As Wakeman has mischievously pointed out on many an occasion, the synthesizer gives a keyboardist a way to “cut through” a band’s live sound and be heard just as loudly as the guitarist.
These days you can buy build your own units and add on to them infinitum creating a synth arsenal that will pretty much replicate the sounds of old, and help you to create new ones, too. In finding the right patch and learning all about these fantastic units, author, designer and musician Kim Bjørn has written Patch & Tweak With Moog, with a forward by renowned film score composer and record producer Hans Zimmer.
This hardcover covers pretty much every aspect of owning and creating on a Moog synthesizer. With chapters titled “Play & Sequence,” “Shape & Amplify,” “Space & Time,” to name but a few, the reader is treated to interviews with professional Moog players exploring specific subjects connected to the instrument, espousing their playing ethos, and offering lots of nuts and bolts about coaxing the very best from a synth.
Sure, things get rather technical here; Bjørn presents quite the deep dive across his a near 200 pages. To put it squarely, Patch & Tweak With Moog is a book for Moog players, featuring Moog players, talking about, well…playing their Moogs.
~ Ralph Greco, Jr.
