This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.

In the 1960s, Bob Moog and Don Buchla built synthesizers that changed the world. But by the early 80s, they faced a new challenger who threatened to bring it all crumbling down: the digital synthesizer. To defeat this opponent, they’d have to recruit a new ally… and maybe even join forces. Featuring Bob’s daughter Michelle Moog-Koussa, Don’s collaborator Ami Radunskaya, and journalist Ryan Gaston.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Original music by Wesley Slover
Pytarevubu by Sound of Picture
Big Dream by Sound of Picture
A New Girlfriend (Instrumental Version) by Blacktop Banks The Ole Peagravel Pile by Riverside Ramblers
Ghostly by Vowl
Pasikolu by Sound of Picture
Titan by Lupus Nocte
Catch Up by Falcon Dives
Glide by Sound of Picture
Joneve by Sound of Picture
In Time by Kollen
Both of Us (Instrumental) by Vanra

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View Transcript ▶︎

Announcer: Previously on Twenty Thousand Hertz…

[music in]

Andrew: On May 23, 1933, a baby is born in Queens, New York City.

Ryan: Electronic music wasn't nearly as codified as it is today.

Dallas: If Bob Moog was the Thomas Edison of synths.

Andrew: Then Don Buchla was Nikola Tesla.

Dallas: Don Buchla didn’t believe in keyboards.

Ryan: This West Coast approach was more about putting musicians out in the middle of the musical wilderness.

Dallas: The age of synthesized music had arrived.

[music in]

Dallas: As we explored in our last episode, electronic music used to be really hard to make. You either had to use a computer the size of a building. [sfx: computer bleeps] Or you had to cut up magnetic tape [sfx: snip snip] and manipulate it in strange ways. [clip: cymbal stroke]

Dallas: But then, in the mid 1960s, two inventors changed everything. Their names were Bob Moog and Don Buchla. Bob’s synth was simply called the Moog, while Don named his creation the Buchla 100.

Dallas: The interface on Bob Moog's synth was really easy to understand, which made it perfect for pop music. Bands like The Beatles, Yes, and Pink Floyd used a Moog on some of their biggest hits.

[clip: Beatles – Here Comes the Sun]

[clip: Buchla sounds]

Andrew: The Buchla 100 was definitely harder to play, but it could create some really unique sounds.

Dallas: That's Twenty Thousand Hertz producer Andrew Anderson.

Andrew: This synthesizer was interactive in a way that was totally new. It was almost like playing with a live collaborator.

Dallas: But since it was so unpredictable, the Buchla 100 was mostly used by experimental composers, and didn’t show up much in pop music.

[music in]

Andrew: These two approaches came to be known as East Coast and West Coast synthesis.

Dallas: Bob Moog created the East Coast approach, which was familiar and accessible.

Ryan: The East Coast approach really did wind up fitting more into the lineage of the evolution of musical instruments up until that point.

Andrew: That's music journalist and synth historian Ryan Gaston.

Ryan: Whereas the West Coast approach was like trying to throw a wrench into the evolution of musical instruments and do something completely different.

[music out]

Andrew: Before long, fans of the two approaches were arguing about which was best. It was like Windows versus Mac, but for synthesizers.

Dallas: With Bob Moog as Bill Gates.

Ryan: Out of the two of them, Bob Moog was a more straight and button up shirt kind of guy. He was a trained engineer.

Andrew: And Don Buchla as Steve Jobs.

Ryan: Don Buchla did not grow up in that sort of academic environment.

[music in]

Ryan: Buchla was very much involved in the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. And was hanging out with the Grateful Dead and other musicians and groups like this.

Andrew: But while Don was hanging out with rock bands on the West Coast, [music out] Bob was living a quieter life in North Carolina with his family.

Dallas: And his record collection was very different from Don's.

*[sfx: needle drop]

[music in]*

Michelle: He loved bluegrass music.

Andrew: That's Michelle Moog-Koussa, Bob's daughter.

Michelle: He really enjoyed gospel music. I remember he and my mom taking us to African American churches,just so we could listen to gospel music. [sfx: church bell]

Andrew: When he wasn't listening to bluegrass and gospel, Bob was putting in long hours in his workshop.

[sfx: tinkering in workshop sounds]

Michelle: He spent his whole day out there working, and that work day was very long. Plus he always went out and worked for a few hours after dinner.

Andrew: For Bob's kids, his workshop had an almost magnetic pull.

Michelle: It was kind of mysterious because my father rarely talked about his work, and so we didn't have a big understanding of exactly what was happening out there. [sfx: explosion] The only time that I would go out to the shop was to either go and get him and let him know it was dinner time, or to give him a kiss good night. And, although he was always welcoming, it was kind of an understanding that you did not linger.

Michelle: He was extremely detail oriented. You know, he used to say to me all the time, “Michelle, get it right the first time.”

Andrew: As a result, sometimes he worked on projects for decades until they were ready.

Michelle: He considered the multi-touch sensitive keyboard his biggest contribution to the world of music. Starting in 1971, he spent 25 years developing it. It was a keyboard that was touch sensitive in five different ways.

Dallas: A regular piano keyboard is only sensitive in one way. The harder you hit the key, [sfx: keys] the louder the note is.

Andrew: But Bob's keyboard could so much more than that. Depending on how you touched a key, it would play a different sound [clip: three different sounds], add vibrato [sfx: vibrato], or even change the pitch of the note [sfx: note bend].

Andrew: Before long, other companies were making keyboards inspired by Moog's design. Here's a clip of someone playing a Linnstrument, a modern-day multi-touch keyboard.

[clip: Linnstrument clip]

Dallas: All of this is played with just one note on the keyboard. The changes you're hearing are caused by the player applying different pressure and moving their finger to different areas on the same key.

[clip out]

Andrew: Bob's dedication allowed him to make incredible breakthroughs just like this. But it also came at a price.

[music in]

Michelle: When someone is as hyper focused on an intellectual and creative mission as my dad was, money is not the important factor. It's just the facilitator for the work. He basically dumped his life savings into his companies.

Michelle: He wasn't being guided, always, by the bottom line. So his companies did go through a lot of ups and downs. In the early seventies, he actually lost his company. He had to be bought out by a venture capitalist. He had to work for somebody else. He was more and more miserable as that time period went on.

Dallas: Eventually, Bob got so fed up that he left his own company altogether. And he wasn't even allowed to take his name with him.

Michelle: When he left Moog Music in 1977, he was not allowed to use his own name on musical instruments. His life was like a sine wave. [sfx: sine wave] There were constant ups and downs.

Dallas: Don Buchla was a very different person.

Andrew: But he experienced many of the same struggles as Bob.

[music in]

Ami: The first time I met Don, I didn't really know that much about him.

Andrew: That's mathematician and musician Ami Radunskaya. Ami was married to Don during the 80s, and was also one of his long-term collaborators.

Ami: What I was fascinated by was his very organic connection to electricity. [laughs]

Andrew: It seemed like if you could imagine it, Don could make it.

Ami: The best things about working with Don was his creativity and inventiveness. He'd be able to build literally anything you wanted. So if I said, you know, “I would like something that would explode at this certain chord,” he could do that.

Andrew: For a few years, Don and Ami performed together as a duo.

Dallas: Ami played the cello, while Don played one of his synthesizers.

Andrew: They called themselves The Muse and The Fuse.

Ami: [laughs] Yeah, you can guess who was who.

Dallas: At one point, Don had an idea for a duet that was pretty unique.

Ami: He had this idea that there might be a piece where he didn't actually need to be there. It would just be the machine as my partner in this duet.

Andrew: So Don built Ami a custom synthesizer, which he called the Sili Con Cello.

[clip: Duet with Silli-Con-Cello]

Dallas: The amazing thing about this synthesizer is that it interacted with you in real time.

Ami: So I would play something, and then it would respond with similar rhythm, and a similar pitch grouping. But all of this was done with very simple circuitry, like a tiny breadboard, maybe four inches by three inches or something.

Ami: So it was a very primitive, but cool kind of artificially intelligent accompanist, or not even accompanist, but partner.

[music out]

Andrew: This kind of creativity made Don a joy to work with.

Ami: Working together was great because we had such complimentary backgrounds.

Andrew: But it could also be challenging.

[music in]

Ami: The challenges are that he was quite focused. If you wanted to change that focus, it was very difficult. Or if you wanted to do things a little differently, it was tricky to steer the project in a different direction. So it's kind of like doing it his way. And usually doing it his way was fine. And then, at some point, you wanna be in charge (laughs).

Andrew: This my-way-or-the-highway approach was great for inventing new instruments. But it caused him some financial problems. And just like Bob, he also lost the right to use his own name on his instruments.

Ami: He sold his name once to Fender. And then he'd keep trying these mergers and takeovers, but it just wasn't his nature to be able to work that way. You know, he just didn't really want to be taken over by a big company.

Dallas: By the late 70s, both Don and Bob had hit hard times. When they started out, they were the only two people making synthesizers you could actually buy. But now, they had dozens of competitors.

Andrew: What's more, they were not legally allowed to make new synthesizers under their own names.

[music in]

Dallas: And then, something came along that threatened to make their instruments completely obsolete. The digital synthesizer.

Andrew: The first digital synthesizer was released in 1979. And before long, they were everywhere. Because they didn't require a lot of complex parts and wiring, they were much cheaper than either Don or Bob's original analogue instruments. They were also a lot easier to use. Rather than wiring patch cables and fine-tuning a bunch of dials and sliders… [sfx: dial noises]

Dallas: All you had to do was select a preset and start playing. [sfx: preset sounds]

Andrew: It was great news for musicians, who could now afford instruments that previously would have cost a year's salary.

Dallas: It helped inspire whole new genres like synth pop, electronic dance music and rap.

Andrew: But it was bad news for analogue pioneers like Bob and Don. Not only was there more competition, but the competition was a lot cheaper.

Dallas: But just when things looked their darkest, a trend started to emerge that took Bob and Don's work to a whole new generation.

Andrew: That’s coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Dallas: By the 1980s, the analogue instruments created by Don Buchla and Bob Moog were going out of fashion.

Andrew: Digital synthesizers were all the rage.

Dallas: They were cheaper, lighter and easier to use.

Andrew: And because of this, they were all over 80s pop music.

[clip: Madonna - Get Into the Groove]

Andrew: But then something happened that brought Don and Bob's synthesizers back to the top.

[music in]

Ryan: In the 1990s, after synthesizers had been predominantly digital for a number of years, there was a desire for modular synthesizers again. And a man named Dieter Doepfer developed what we now refer to as the Eurorack format.

Dallas: Eurorack was based on the modular format that Bob and Don had come up with in the 60s. But with Eurorack, everything was standardized.

Andrew: All the modules connected together using the same cables.

Dallas: They all used the same electrical current.

Andrew: And they had a standard size, so it was easy to put multiple modules together in one case.

Dallas: You could piece together your own custom synthesizer. And since it was standardized, you could use modules from any company.

Andrew: But Eurorack was about more than just standardized parts. Because these synthesizers actually sounded more authentic, and felt more interactive, than the digital keyboards that dominated in the 80s.

Ryan: Those keyboard synthesizers had certain design decisions baked into them, and couldn't necessarily do everything that you would want a synthesizer to do. Doepfer's Eurorack system made it possible again for people to specify what they wanted their synthesizer to be able to do.

Andrew: Eurorack exploded, with artists like Aphex Twin using one on his track Windowlicker.

[clip: Aphex Twin – Windowlicker]

Andrew: And a modular Eurorack synthesizer was also used by the Chemical Brothers on their song, Hey Boy, Hey Girl.

[clip: Chemical Brothers – Hey Boy, Hey Girl]

Dallas: Eurorack also caused an interesting change in perception. While Bob Moog has always been a household name, Don Buchla was really only known to enthusiasts.

Ryan: Up until then, the only way to get a Buchla-inspired instrument was to just get a Buchla instrument, which were vanishingly rare and valuable.

Andrew: But now, many of Don's boldest (and frankly, weirdest) ideas were being embraced by a new generation.

[music in]

Ryan: A number of manufacturers started making designs that were directly inspired by Buchla instruments, just because those were instruments that they were familiar with and that they were passionate about.

Andrew: Before long, tons of inventors were inspired to create their own Eurorack modules based on Bob and Don's original concepts.

Ryan: In the present day, there are hundreds, if not thousands of manufacturers making devices for this one format. So today when you assemble a modular synthesizer, you don't have to go with all Moog, or all Buchla, or all whoever else. You can kind of mix and match in a pretty unprecedented way.

Andrew: For the first time, Don and Bob's ideas could easily be combined together in one system.

Ryan: Almost every Eurorack modular synthesizer out there contains some mix of ideas from both camps. I think at this point, there's almost equal footing, in terms of inspiration, from both Moog and Buchla's approaches, which I think is pretty exciting.

Dallas: The East Coast versus West Coast rivalry was officially over.

[music in]

Dallas: Thanks in part to Eurorack, both Don and Bob saw their businesses get back on track.

Andrew: First, Don bought back the rights to his own name. Then in the early 2000s, he released new versions of his original 1960s modules.

Dallas: At the same time, Bob was also fighting for the right to use his own name.

Michelle: In 2002, he had to fight a lawsuit to get his name back, and had to mortgage his house to be able to do that. But he did succeed in doing that.

Andrew: Bob also decided to revamp one of his classic products, and in 2002, he released the Moog Voyager. Inspired by his original portable synth, the Minimoog, it was the first synth completely designed by Bob since the 1970s.

Dallas: By this point, Don and Bob had become close.

Ami: Don and Bob Moog were good friends. I never thought there was any kind of divide, at all.

Andrew: Then, at the end of their careers…

Michelle: They actually collaborated on an instrument together, Moog Music's Piano Bar, that Don Buchla originated but, he was not able to finish on his own. So he and my father collaborated, and Moog Music put it out as a product.

Andrew: The Piano Bar is a long rectangular tool that fits exactly over your piano. Basically, it turns your analogue piano into a digital synthesizer. [clip: piano playing, then cross fades into a synth sound as music ends]

Dallas: Although the fact that Don brought this project to Bob was a bit of a surprise.

Michelle: It's ironic too, I think, for Don, that he was doing something that was keyboard based.

Andrew: And that wasn't the only time they collaborated.

Dallas: Because Bob and Don actually got up on stage and played a piece together.

Andrew: Using two instruments built by Don. It’s a piece called, In The Beginning: Etude II, by composer David Rosenboom.

[Don and Bob duet - In The Beginning: Etude II]

[Music in]

Dallas: Through the years, East Coast versus West Coast synthesis has often been portrayed as a rivalry.

Andrew: Some podcasts out there might even call it a war.

Dallas: But in reality, that’s not quite right.

Ryan: I think in the 1960s, Buchla and Moog kind of had their eyes glancing back over their shoulders at one another. But they certainly had respect for what one another were doing.

Andrew: Of course, there were differences. Bob Moog's instruments reached a huge audience, because he wanted them to be accessible.

Michelle: One of the things that made Bob Moog so special is the way he listened. He listened to musicians. I think he was rather fascinated by the ways that a musician would use the tools that he created. He wanted to help expand their sonic universe. And that is exactly what he did.

Andrew: While Don Buchla's instruments redefined what an instrument could actually be.

Ami: Don's instruments are a great way of learning about your creativity, because there are no rules. When you sit down in front of his Source of Uncertainty, [sfx] for example, which has so many possibilities, it's confusing.

Ami: But with that little box, you can do so much, right? But you have to be willing to put the time in to figure it out and get it to do the things you want. I actually love it. I still find it magical when a machine acts like it's alive and thinking.

Ryan: In the end, you can get to very similar sounds on each instrument, they're not that different from one another. But what is much more starkly different about them is the way that you play the instrument.

Ryan: Are you a person who needs to be able to get to a very specific, predictable, repeatable result? Or, are you the kind of person who wants to sit down in front of an instrument and use its unique electronic capabilities in order to do something more than you could do with a piano or an organ or any other instrument?

Dallas: Ultimately, Don and Bob’s legacy goes beyond any one instrument, or even the concept of East versus West Coast synthesis.

Andrew: Because their true gift to the world is the countless musicians they’ve inspired, and the millions of people moved by that music.

Michelle: That's Bob Moog's legacy, that he inspired people all over the world, not only through his instruments, but through the music that was made from his instruments, and that inspiration still ripples out.

CREDITS

[music in]

Dallas: Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound.

Andrew: This episode was written, produced and reported by Andrew Anderson.

Other voices: It was story edited by Casey Emmerling. With help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt, Justin Hollis, and Jai Berger.

Dallas: Thanks to our guests, Ryan Gaston, Michelle Moog, and Ami Radunskaya. You can find Ryan’s deep dives into synthesizer history over at perfect circuit dot com. And if you’re interested in Moog, there’s actually an entire museum called the Moog-seum, in North Carolina. To learn more, just tap the link in the show description.

Dallas: Thanks for listening.