Robert Moog’s favourite synth records
If you invent a new piece of technology, you can also sometimes be held responsible for everything it’s later used for, for better or worse.
As the man generally credited with introducing the modern, commercial synthesiser to popular music, Robert Moog certainly experienced the full gamut of praise and blame throughout his career. For a while there in the 1980s, a lot of purists were cursing his name, feeling that his obnoxious little keyboards had finally and irreversibly pulled the guts out of rock ‘n’ roll.
By the ‘90s, however, Moog had settled more into the role of revered elder statesman, the sort of Alexander Graham Bell of electronic music in a period when the synthesiser was getting its overdue reassessment. The tones critics had once bemoaned in the sounds of prog-rock, disco, and ‘80s pop were now increasingly recognised as distinctive and dynamic, and every cool art-rock band in the 2000s gladly carried the torch.
As Moog had long explained to his detractors, his intent when developing the first Moog synthesiser in the mid-1960s wasn’t to replace or imitate existing instruments.
“Making unique sounds,” he told Perfect Sound Forever in 1997, “Is close to our original musical intentions. I was never worried that synthesisers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesiser. And second, I never thought that analogue synthesiser sounds would ever be mistaken for traditional musical instrument sounds. To me, the synthesiser was always a source of new sounds that musicians could use to expand the range of possibilities for making music.”
Forward thinking as he was, Moog didn’t fully anticipate the looming prospect of non-human AI making slop synth music for the rest of eternity, but for the most part, his vision was realised, as many of the most respected musicians from both the pop/rock world and the stuffier classical universe began experimenting with Moog synths within a few years of their introduction.
The first Moog-heavy record that really connected with mainstream listeners, according to the originator himself, was Wendy Carlos’s daring electro-classical mash-up Switched-On Bach, which became a surprise, platinum seller in the US. Later, after some fits and starts, progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer made it ‘cool’, at least in some circles, to incorporate the Moog synth into rock ‘n’ roll.
“Every creative musician brings out something different from the synthesiser,” Moog said, but he did admit that some synth artists created music he preferred a bit more than others.
Here’s a look at some specific synth works he selected as favourites when asked by Perfect Sound Forever in 1997, eight years before his death. Most of these include the use of his own Moog synth, save for Clara Rockmore’s Art of the Theremin, which the man produced in 1977 as a favour to one of his own musical heroes.
Robert Moog’s favourite synth records:
- Clara Rockmore – Art of the Theremin (1977)
- Wendy Carlos – Switched-on Bach (1968) and Beauty in the Beast (1986)
- Jan Hammer – The First Seven Days (1977)
- Emerson, Lake and Palmer – Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
- Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention – The Grand Wazoo (1972)
- Rick Wakeman – The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1973)
- Patrick Moraz – The Story of I (1976)
- Gil Trythall – Switched-On Nashville: Country Moog (1972)
(NB not all the records above are available on streaming, so where applicable substitutions have been made in the playlist below)…
