A Mini-Documentary on 50 Years of the Moog Modular Synthesizer

Back in the Olden Dayes, synthesizers were the size of refrigerators. The earliest ones filled entire rooms and, in at least one case, a complete railway car. They were hot, noisy, temperamental and devilishly hard to program. And they couldn’t do much.

Then along came Dr. Bob Moog who figured out how to tame electricity with printed circuits and oscillators. His experiments begat the first commercially viable synthesizers. But they came in pieces called modules that had to be roped together with patch cords.

What you see in the picture is a thousand times less powerful than what you can do with an app on your phone. We’ve come a long, long way.

But these modular synths are still beloved by many musicians. Synthtopia points us to this documentary celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Moog Modular.