Word: moog
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Switched-on Bach, the burbling and tootling re-creations of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and other works on the Moog synthesizer, has become the best-selling "classical" record of all time (3 million copies sold worldwide to date). None of the subsequent sons of SOB (The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Moog Strikes Back) has ever managed to overtake the original, but the newest and most interesting challenger is Tokyo's Isao Tomita, 43. After a slow start last year, his RCA album Snowflakes are Dancing (electronic versions of Debussy piano pieces) has passed the 200,000 mark. Three months...
...invention of the Hammond organ in 1935, hardly an instrument exists that has not been electrified. Piano, flute, violin, trumpet, drums -each has its own plugged-in cousin. Most conspicuous is pop-rock's king of instruments, the electric guitar. Ten years ago, from Engineering Physicist Robert Moog, came the Moog synthesizer, which first produced music through electricity alone. A nuclear-age superorgan, it looks like the offspring of a piano and a telephone switchboard...
Then along came the guitar synthesizer. "This guitar does not play a high E, it plays a high anything," claims its Inventor, Walter Sear, a Manhattan tuba manufacturer who worked with Moog for 18 years on the original synthesizer. His instrument looks like a guitar. It plays like one too. There ends the resemblance. Mating a solid-body Plexiglas Armstrong guitar with a Moog by means of an electric umbilical cord, Sear has created an instrument of virtually incalculable sound potential...
...guitar, notes can bend, slide and wave. Sounds can glide through all the frequencies between two fixed pitches-just as the human voice does-enabling Sear's musical clone to produce any sound imaginable. Moreover, the guitar can now match a keyboard Moog's titanic output decibel for decibel. In live performance, the complex studio wall synthesizer with its winking lights and patchcord jungle can be replaced by a portable console...
...spares precious few of his brothers and sisters. (He even offers a veiled suggestion that Angela Davis is the modern equivalent of the stern black mama figure trying to shape up her offspring in the absence of a father.) A minister named the Rev. Rookie is replaced by a Moog synthesizer; Maxwell Kasa-vubu, a button-down black literary critic, hallucinates that he is Richard Wright's illiterate murderer Bigger Thomas. Reed even brings back those veteran moochers from Amos 'n' Andy, the Kingfish and Andrew H. Brown, now trying to cash in on the street-corner...