A quick tutorial on the Moog by an expert

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Too much funnnnn!! Thanks Corky

Dave

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Keith was the first to admit he wasn’t particularly technically minded but he had a very solid grasp of programming his modular. I think his system actually had 9 oscillators, right? They were split up into 3 or 4 patches though.

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His techs modified so much, so many times, there is probably only a handful of people who know for sure. Here is what was revealed in Sound on Sound:

" ELP had released Tarkus and Pictures At An Exhibition, so "pushing on” entailed recording Trilogy (1972), and what is perhaps the band’s defining work, Brain Salad Surgery (1973). And, at every stage, the Moog grew to meet the increasing demands of its owner. Indeed, Emerson was not afraid to make it a tier taller just to make it look more commanding. If you now peer into its guts, you can still see that some of the modules are dated 1960‑something, while others are dated 1972 or later. With a bit of detective work, it’s not hard to discover which were added for Trilogy, which were added for Brain Salad Surgery, and even to identify those that were replaced later in the 1970s when something failed. So, what had started as a single cabinet that you could carry under one arm eventually grew into a 400lb behemoth, with dual sequencers, additional oscillators, filters, amplifiers, contour generators and LFOs, and even some dummy panels to fill up the cabinets and make the resulting instrument look as imposing as possible.

By this point, Emerson’s synth was no longer a single synthesizer, because he had patched it so that various modules could be used for specific tasks. This was a necessity; he couldn’t re‑patch it during the show to create new sounds, because his audience expected him to play tracks such as ‘Tarkus’ and ‘Lucky Man’ at some point in the proceedings, and the patches he used for these were both distinctive and complex to create. So, while there were myriad more things he could have done with the existing modules, he had to modify and add to the system when new sounds were needed. For example, switches were added to inject audio and control signals from new modules into the 1CA panel that still provided much of the primary signal path, while a dedicated sequencer, oscillator, filter and various contour generators and VCAs were added to generate the sequence that ends ‘Karn Evil 9’."

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