Synth history usually reaches us as objects. The Minimoog, the theremins, the wall of patch cables behind somebody famous in 1971. Finished instruments photograph well, which is most of why we remember them, and they skip the part where the thing did not work yet.
inMusic Brands has donated 4,489 items to the Bob Moog Foundation Archives: Bob Moog's personal office effects plus material from the final years of his tenure at Moog Music. Well over 500 schematics. 700 letters. Prototype models, vintage synthesizers, original writings, artwork, hundreds of back issues of industry magazines, rare product catalogs, and handwritten engineering notes across schematic notebooks. The Foundation spent almost two years evaluating and documenting the collection before saying a word about it publicly.
The bench models are the interesting part
A few of the instruments will get photographed immediately, and one or two have earned it: a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype, Moogerfooger prototypes, a Multiple Resonant Filter test fixture, a Moog Phone Controller model PC-30.
Read that list slowly. A bench model and a test fixture are not products, and they were never meant to leave the building. They are what you assemble to find out whether an idea survives contact with a soldering iron, and they normally get stripped for parts the moment the answer arrives. Somebody decided not to strip these.
Two of the machines in the donation are not Moog designs at all: a Fairlight CMI and a Synton System 3000 modular. Australian sampler, Dutch modular, sitting in the same accession as the Moogerfooger prototypes.
Letters have dates on them
The correspondence is the part with the longest tail. The Foundation names Wendy Carlos, Herb Deutsch, Felix Visser and Lydia Kavina among what it calls "dozens of industry luminaries" whose letters were "all waiting to be rediscovered."
A finished synth tells you what somebody concluded. A letter tells you what they were still arguing about, and it comes stamped with the month they were arguing about it. Same for a first draft of a technical article, or a note pencilled into the margin of a schematic notebook.
Michelle Moog-Koussa, the Foundation's Executive Director, framed the donation as one that "helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history."
What a producer takes from a filing cabinet
The lesson has nothing to do with owning vintage gear. The people who built these instruments kept their own rough drafts, and the drafts turned out to be worth almost two years of somebody's careful attention.
Most of us work the opposite way. You bounce the final, you delete the twenty versions that got you there, and six months later you cannot reconstruct why the filter moved where it moved. Moog's bench had the failed revision still sitting on it. That habit is free, and it is the only part of this collection you can copy tonight.
We have been to Asheville for adjacent reasons before: 24 April 2014, Art Department playing Moogfest on a No.19 Social Experiment bill, which we covered at the time. The Moogseum sits in the same city, run by the Foundation as a nonprofit separate from the instrument company.
As for seeing any of this yourself, hold the expectation. Joe Richardson, President of Moog Music and Executive Vice President of inMusic, says the intent is for the materials to be "preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans." No exhibition date, no digitisation programme, and no public catalogue has been announced.
