Celebrity death that bummed you out the most...

[Elspode]

For most of you, the passing about which I am going to write probably wouldn't be a blip on your sociological radar. For me, it is a passing of tremendous enormity...the loss of a visionary giant whose very name is synonomous with innovation and creativity; a man who almost single-handedly changed the musical world with his creations.

Today, Dr. Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog Synthesizer, died of a malignant and aggressive brain tumor at his home in North Carolina. Bob Moog was 71 years old. In those 71 years, Bob was an inventor, a self-made, humane, universally loved and admired engineer and scientist whose youthful fascination with electronics led him first to building theremins and selling them to help pay his way through school. Today, those early Moog theremins bring almost unimaginable prices as collector's items, examples of both ingenuity and vision, a vestige of simpler technological days when erstwhile youths could still cobble together something in their basements and amaze the hell out of their friends and neighbors.

While Moog afficionados have long known of Bob's fascination with the theremin and those who play them, the world at large usually thinks of the Moog Synthesizer when they think of Bob at all. So revolutionary was this device, that the name Moog has become almost generic for synthesizers, much like Kleenex is for tissues. While Bob did not invent the synthesizer, he did something much more meaningful and important - he made these devices practical for use by musicians. Before Bob's advent, synthesizers were enormous devices (the earliest true example, the RCA synthesizer, literally took up two large rooms due to the fact that integrated circuits had not yet become commonly used when it was built).

Bob engineered synthesizers into boxes that were at least marginally portable at first. At the very least, they were suitable for installation into recording studios and universities. Synthesizers are, in their most basic form, devices that produce and manipulate the various parts of a musical event such as note generation, breaking the event down into its component parts. For each portion of that event, a different part of the synthesizer generates or controls an aspect of each part of the sound - an oscillator creates the pure tone, a waveform generator gives the wave a distinctive shape, imparting color and harmonic content, an envelope generator controls the rise, decay, sustain and fall of the sound, a filter strains out the more desireable harmonics or imparts resonance...and so on and so on. Bob Moog took this rather simple yet complex set of parameters and unified them into hardware modules capable of producing the necessary part of the equation, and which could then be assembled (patched) in the manner necessary to produce a simulation of an instrument...or some sound that no one had ever even imagined.

The impact on music was immediate and profound. Once the creative minds of the music world got their hands on these devices, nothing was ever the same. While truly avant garde types had played with various forms of electronic music for over sixty years, no one had ever had so much raw sonic power at their fingertips before the Moog Synthesizer, and it began to show up in popular music almost immediately. Synthesizers didn't really come into their own, though, until an album entitled "Switched on Bach" was released. In one fell swoop Walter (now Wendy) Carlos turned the classical and popular music world on its collective ear, thanks to a large, custom specified Moog modular synthesizer rig.

Wendy Carlos has remained friends with Bob for nearly forty years, as have others with whom Bob worked over his stellar career. Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, Dick Hyman...the list goes on and on. These people were not just customers of Bob Moog, not just admirers, not just adopters of his technology. They were truly his friends and confidantes, part of the extended Bob Moog family of musicians and technicians, music lovers and gear heads. Of all the things I have ever read about Bob Moog, he has never been characterized as anything except kind, loving, gentle, friendly, sincere, devoted, dedicated. Truly, he was a man for whom superlatives fail.

Bob Moog always said that he was not a musician, he was an engineer. But he was an engineer who observed what musicians wanted and needed, and then strove to give it to them, because in the end, what he created wasn't about IC's and knobs and voltage control. What he created was a new way for musicians to bring into being sounds which existed only in their heads, and give those audio visions to the world.

As I mention from time to time, I am utterly consumed by synthesizers. I have owned several over the years, including a couple of Bob's most successful and well-known units, the MiniMoog, still the most coveted portable synthesizer in the world today, and regularly selling for more at 30 years of age or older than they did when they were new. The passing of Bob Moog is, for me, the passing of an era, a turning of a page in history. He is the father of a major portion of the soundtrack in my mind, and I will always, always remember him fondly for that.

To expand upon one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons - "Welcome to Heaven...here's your harp."

"Welcome to Hell...here's your accordion."

"Welcome to the Universe, Bob. Here's your Moog."

(Picture below - Dr. Robert Moog with a Mini Moog Model D)