Minimoog

The Minimoog is a monophonic analog synthesizer, invented by Bill Hemsath and Robert Moog. It was released in 1970 by R.A. Moog Inc. (Moog Music after 1972), and production was stopped in 1981. It was re-designed by Robert Moog in 2002 and released as Minimoog Voyager.

The Minimoog was designed in response to the use of synthesizers in rock and pop music. Large modular synthesizers were expensive, cumbersome, and delicate, and not ideal for live performance; the Minimoog was designed to include the most important parts of a modular synthesizer in a compact package, without the need for patch cords. It later surpassed this original purpose, however, and became a distinctive and popular instrument in its own right. It remains in demand today, over four decades after its introduction, for its intuitive design and powerful bass and lead sounds.

Design

At its most basic, the Minimoog control panel can be broken up into three sections:

Moog

Moog may refer to:

Moog (film)

Moog is a 2004 documentary film by Hans Fjellestad about electronic instrument pioneer Dr. Robert Moog. The film features scenes of Dr. Moog interacting with various musical artists who view Moog as an influential figure in the history of electronic music.

Moog is not a comprehensive history of electronic music nor does it serve as a chronological history of the development of the Moog synthesizer. There is no narration, rather the scenes feature candid conversation and interviews that serve more as a tribute to Moog than a documentary.

The film was shot on location in Hollywood, New York, Tokyo, and Asheville, North Carolina where Moog's company is based. Additional concert performances were filmed in London and San Francisco.

The film's 2004 release was designed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Moog Music, Robert Moog's company that was founded as R.A. Moog Co. in 1954.

Artists who appeared in the film

Moog (code)

MOOG is an astronomical software package. It is an example of Fortran code that performs a variety of spectral line analysis and spectrum synthesis tasks under the assumption of local thermodynamic equilibrium. Moog uses a model photosphere together with a list of atomic or molecular transitions to generate an emergent spectrum by solving the equation of radiative transfer.

The typical use of MOOG is to assist in the determination of the chemical composition of a star, e.g. Sneden (1973). This paper contains also the description of the first version of the code and has been cited about 240 times as of 2008-04-24 by publications in international journals studying the abundances of chemical elements in stars.

The software package has been developed and is maintained by Christopher Sneden, University of Texas at Austin. The current supported version of the code was released in August 2010 and is described in the MOOG User's Guide (see references below). Moog is written in FORTRAN 77.