Further options unavailable to Mini owners included sample+hold and oscillator sync. A closer look, however, revealed that the oscillators offered continuously variable waveform selection, audio-rate modulation for the filter, pitch bend ribbon, and - astonishingly - a pressure-sensitive, 44-note keyboard.Īt a price of £800, it might have been pitched as a cost-conscious alternative to the Minimoog, but as the above modulation possibilities indicate, it offered much that the venerated Minimoog lacked. Let down by the awful aesthetics favoured by Moog at the time, the Multimoog looked like something sold out of the back of a hi-fi shop rather than what it was: a unique and powerful monosynth with the inimitable Moog sound.Īt its core, it was somewhat rudimentary - dual oscillators, 24 dB low-pass filter, and a couple of (very) simple envelope generators. The Minimoog, Polymoog, Memorymoog, and Prodigy come springing to the fore, but few will mention the Multimoog.Īnd that's too bad, because it was a humdinger. Moog MultimoogĪsk any synth aficionado to rattle off the names of classic Moog synths and you'll likely hear a familiar mantra. It had faults, to be sure (primarily a lack of real-time knobs and slow envelopes), but with six VCOs that could be used multitimbrally or piled high in unison mode, it was capable of some massive analogue textures as well as full multi-part arrangements. What might have been seen as a groundbreaking instrument for its combination of 6-part multitimbral operation and built-in sequencer, the Six-Trak was instead denigrated as a poor relation to the Prophet-5, an instrument to which it bore only a passing resemblance. Some of its less expensive instruments were (and are) dismissed, possibly tarnished by the company's eagerness to dabble downmarket or perhaps unfairly compared to Sequential’s high-end products.Ĭase in point: the Six-Trak. Along the way, it produced some landmarks (Prophet-600) and some head scratchers (the Max). However, by that time it was too late to save a company that seemed to struggle to fill the technological gap between its two masterpieces. When the company fizzled out nearly a decade later, it’d just released the Prophet-VS which likewise would come to be seen as a classic. In 1978, Dave Smith’s Sequential Circuits released a bonafide legend in the form of the polyphonic, programmable Prophet-5.
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