Synths - ARP vs Moog

[klothos]

I dont deny Moogs can be 'fat' sounding but Patrizio Fariselli of Area played Arp, and his sound isnt particularly thin:

^ Thats decent -- but it still doesnt have that Moog "phatness", which isnt necessarily a bad thing if the player isnt looking for that..My implication is that they are "thin" to Moogs in comparison.....sure, a good synthesist can find "fatness" on anything but, on a Moog, it was already there by design -- its just part of its makeup. Even its thin "whistle" and "flute" sounds had some authority to them..... but I still want to reiterate what I said in my first response: ALL had their uses. Arps, Elkas, and the like were better for pads....or the fact that any musician or producer may want to choose a less-beefy sound to suit the production needs of any given song (such as illustrated in your video)

[trurl]

Yep, even little thin guys like the Pro-Soloist and the MiniKorg have thier charm and sound nice in the right situations, just like sometimes youwant the sound of an oboe and not a screeching electric guitar... Tony Banks made that kind of approach his "thing".

[BobM]

I had a mini Korg for many years. Great for a live setting - you could get new sounds pretty fast. But the ultimate flexibility wasn't there. I'm pretty sure early Cars used them for their lead lines.

[Rarebird]

I used a Roland model 101 single oscilator synthesizer, when I was young and played with a schoolmate, who played a harmonium, which he used to create a churchorgan imitation. I needed a sound that cut through and it worked. The only problem was the amplifier (a small portable record-player.) Perhaps not fat, but efficient. Using a pulse, probably modulated with a LFO and mixing in the VCO sync output.

[trurl]

I had a mini Korg for many years. Great for a live setting - you could get new sounds pretty fast. But the ultimate flexibility wasn't there. I'm pretty sure early Cars used them for their lead lines.

I had one too- still do, though right now it's dead! Yep, Greg Hawkes used one. It had that really sweet thing it could do with the bender that would auto-bend into notes. Give it a chorus and delay and it was a groovy little beast. But yeah, very limited, by design.

[GuitarGeek]

One of the things that ARP had going for them was their oscillators did stay in tune. The famously detuning Moog oscillators can be heard to good effect on side one of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra, where Chris Franke had to keep retuning the oscillators in his big Moog (which he was literally using for the very first time during the session, and apparently didn't know that you're supposed to let it warm up for about a half hour before you start using it).

As far Dr. Perlman hating rock music, he may have hated the music, but the company certainly used rock musicians in their advertising. Off the top of my head, they had several ads with Pete Townshend in them, and I remember seeing at least one brochure that had Jon Lord pictured in it. So ARP himself certainly wasn't adverse to using the fame of said musicians to promote his instruments.

As for EMS, my impression of the VCS-3 and the Synthi A these days is they were nearly useless for playing tuned melodies, unless you used only one oscillator. Apparently, the patch matrix had no buffering circuitry, so when you tried to feed a keyboard or sequencer voltage to both of the audio oscillators, they didn't always see the same voltage and therefore didn't always stay in tune with each other. I have the impression that the vast majority of instances where you hear EMS synths on rock records, they're mostly being used for abstract soundscape type stuff, like the way Hawkwind, Gong, Tangerine Dream, or Klaus Schulze used them. I know Tim Blake occasionally used a sequencer on his EMS, and of course, On The Run from Dark Side Of The Moon is a sequencer thing done on the Synthi AKS, so tuned notes were possible, but most of the time, it seems when actual keyboard playing was needed in those bands, the musicians used more conventionally designed gear (for instance, Tim Blake I believe used a Minimoog for his melodic synth work in Gong, and I believe I've read that great synth solo on Hawkwind's Reefer Madness was also done on a Minimoog).

I think if Moog was more popular than other brands, it was probably because of name association. Switched-On Bach was a very big record (at least at one time it wasn't the biggest selling album of Bach's music), and I think that a lot of people (at least people who had the money, anyway) to get Moog gear. I think Emerson has said he bought the original Moog modular that he used on the first ELP album (which was actually a lot smaller than the instrument you see in a lot of the pictures and video footage from 73-ish onwards) because someone had played Switched-On Bach for him. And I imagine a lot of people got Moog synths because Emerson, Wakeman, etc were using them. In other words, it's kinda like how everyone was suddenly playing Stratocasters after it was realized that's what Jimi was playing.

Another thing is, if you walked into a music store and said "I'm interested in buying a synthesizer", and the only instrument they have is a Minimoog, or the only one within your budget, that's what you went for. If the store you walked into was a Moog dealer, or an ARP dealer or whatever, that may also influence what you'd get.

And one other thought: I've never used an actual ARP 2600, but I did putz around with a couple VST versions a couple years ago. I actually had to read the owners manual to figure out how to make anything work, because it didn't seem to be set up in what I'd consider an intuitive fashion, in terms of how normalized patching worked. By contrast, when I got my Mini-moog (which I've owned for nearly 30 years now), I had no trouble getting it to work predictably and I could easily figure out what each knob or switch did in influencing the way the instrument work. So maybe some people walked into a music store, there's a 2600 and Minimoog sitting side by side, musician tries them both, decides the 2600 was too much of a pain in the ass, and so opts fort he Minimoog.

As for ARP "using Moog components", what happened was there was a stretch where they using filters that were copied off the Moog 4 pole transistor ladder filter. When Moog found out, they basically sent a cease and desist order. ARP had to pay a royalty for all 2600's and Odysseys that were sold with the Moog style filter and they were forced to switch to a new filter design. On the new Korg Odyssey reissue, there's a switch that selects each of the three filters that were used of the course of the instrument's evolution during the 70's (the second one being the Moog style).

[GuitarGeek]

I had a mini Korg for many years. Great for a live setting - you could get new sounds pretty fast. But the ultimate flexibility wasn't there. I'm pretty sure early Cars used them for their lead lines.

If I'm not mistaken, all the synth lines on the first album was done on a MiniKorg. But when the Prophet-5 came out, Greg Hawkes switched to that. Let's Go is the Prophet-5. Then later still, he switched over to the Jupiter-8, and also used a Fairlight heavily on Heartbreak City (though when they went on tour, he used a Synclavier).