£599/$599, moogmusic.com
It’s been a troublesome 12 months or so for Moog Music.
June 2023 noticed the corporate acquired by Alesis and Akai Skilled homeowners InMusic, with sources suggesting that almost all of manufacturing can be transferring away from the US. That September, experiences from the manufacturing unit flooring claimed that over half of jobs have been being reduce. “Moog [is] about to alter endlessly,” wrote one former worker. Certainly, the next March noticed Moog vacate its well-known Asheville, NC dwelling on Broadway Road. Extra not too long ago, it was introduced that its bodily Asheville retailer was to shut too.
Moog Music’s official assertion following the 2023 layoffs concluded, “We ask that you simply […] maintain an open thoughts as we put the ending touches on a few of our most revolutionary devices but.” Properly, an open thoughts we will maintain. In addition to — to zoom out for a second — these types of shake-ups are nothing private, and hardly new within the music know-how business (bear in mind when Tom Oberheim lastly bought the rights to his personal title again from Gibson?). What we producers are involved about is the fruit.
Moog’s shift into creating plugins will little question have pissed off many analogue and {hardware} devotees, with the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional-oriented Animoog Galaxy being one such invention that may doubtless have borne the brunt of that. The latest Mariana, however, confirmed actual promise, and there are auspicious rumblings regarding a brand new {hardware} polyphonic powerhouse.
Moog Spectravox
Now comes Spectravox, an addition to what’s arguably the largest success story of Moog’s latest output: its semi-modular line.
Just like the previous Mom-32, DFAM and Subharmonicon, it comes as a Eurorack-friendly unit in its personal elegant, wood-sided case. Like these different devices, it’s a compact, reasonably stunning piece of Moog. Broadly described as an ‘analog spectral processor’, with the addition of a microphone by way of its Program enter it turns into a succesful analogue vocoder. Of all of the ups and downs of the final 14-or-so months, might this be the factor to revive our religion in Moog?
‘How so?’, you ask. The reply to that query lies within the circuit on the core of Spectravox: its filter financial institution. The resonant filter financial institution, hardly ever if ever seen at present in a 3U format, harks again to the earliest Moog designs, leapfrogging the mass of plunderable Moog historical past in between. Truly, the filter financial institution reaches even additional again in time, to 1928 and Homer Dudley’s work on the Voice Working Demonstrator, or ‘Voder’, which preceded the vocoder as a musical instrument with its telecommunications and navy use.
An array of slim band-pass filters that might emulate the traits of actual world sounds — similar to speech — with affordable accuracy and no scarcity of sonic pleasure, the Moog 907 10-band Fastened Filter Financial institution was key to the Moog modulars of yore. In a world nonetheless getting its head across the introduction of synthesisers, its capability to impart quasi-acoustic resonances to sounds not solely helped assimilate digital sounds into acoustical and musical realms, but in addition allowed synthesists to mannequin current devices extra carefully. The Moog 907 most famously discovered favour with Wendy Carlos in her soundtrack for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Moog Spectravox
Spectravox actually is just a little slice of that historical past. Just like the 907 it has 10 bands, and — not that it issues to any however essentially the most ardent purist — these are set in accordance with Dudley’s 1939 Voder specs. Good. Every of those is endowed with its personal band-pass filter, apart from the bottom band, which is a low-pass filter, and the very best band (a high-pass filter).
One main distinction, although, is that Spectravox’s filter financial institution shouldn’t be fastened, however moveable. Variable resonance and frequency positioning are managed by way of a Spectral Shift knob. Spectral Shift makes it potential to comb the whole thing up and down sequentially via the frequency spectrum, creating one thing that’s a cross between comb-filtering, flanging and phasing. In layman’s phrases, let’s simply say it very a lot sounds three-dimensional.
Being a filter financial institution, Spectravox expects a sound supply, or a service, to be fed via it. That is offered on the panel as a single, wholesome Moog-grade oscillator, providing pulse or noticed wave shapes. You possibly can after all bypass this (or ship it elsewhere) and feed Spectravox no matter line-level sound you want by way of the Provider enter, opening up huge processing potentialities for kind of something you possibly can consider.
Flick the change from Filter Financial institution mode to Vocoder mode and issues get much more attention-grabbing. The Program enter is the place the tonal properties of incoming sounds — similar to a voice — are analysed via the filter financial institution after which used to course of the service sign. Historically, this may be the oscillator however with Spectravox it may be something you want.
Moog Spectravox
Even with out both of the above, although, merely turning up the resonance of the filters to ‘ping’ them by themselves creates an extremely resonant, woody-sounding percussion instrument — and that’s earlier than we get to turning any of those bands’ VCAs up or down to emphasize or de-emphasise them, which leads to some unimaginable tonal selection.
If there’s one factor we discover missing within the filter financial institution, it’s the selection to make use of miniature knobs for its VCAs as an alternative of the extra substantial and tactile basic Moog knobs, contemplating how a lot use they get. Sonically, it’s honest to say the resonance of the filter financial institution by no means reaches into notably aggressive territory, á la that of many different Moog synths, which might have given Spectravox vital additional scope. As a substitute, its response is excellently tuned, if just a little tame.
In Vocoder mode, Spectravox’s vary of tonal shaping is immense. Growling snarls, mournful drones, wailing noises — the listing goes on. Don’t anticipate impeccably clear speech, thoughts. That is old-school analogue vocoding, in any case. On account of this, it does require time to seek out the candy spots. For example getting the precise noise-to-carrier combine so as to finest seize the consonants of speech whereas retaining tonal richness, or the right decay time for pure sounding motion.
Moog Spectravox
However that is the secret with old-school synthesis. No presets, no digital tuning, only a set of nicely laid-out controls and a top quality array of sound-generating circuits. The patch bay covers nearly each base (although not filter resonance, apparently) and there are VCA inputs and envelope-following outputs for each filter band.
Spectravox’s panel is relatively sparse subsequent to these of its semi-modular siblings. One inner LFO is offered, normalled to modulate the Spectral Shift, instantly main us to achieve for patch in one other LFO from elsewhere. It’s definitely value noting that Spectravox begs for exterior gear, and so it might show to be a gateway into Eurorack for newcomers to the system.
May Spectravox be the factor to revive our religion in Moog? Fairly presumably. It’s the type of unit whose weighty heritage and basic high quality makes the Animoog appear to be it was designed by an over-enthusiastic intern.
If that is the form of issues to return from Moog, then the longer term is vibrant, even when it does mirror the previous.
Moog Spectravox
Key options
10-band analogue filter financial institution, providing low-pass, band-pass and high-pass filtersAnalogue vocoder to analyse incoming audio and map it throughout the filter bankSaw or pulse wave oscillator with two noise typesSingle LFO, normalled to Spectral ShiftXLR/jack mixture enter
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