Don Buchla - The Electronics Genius

Don Buchla is widely regarded as one of the major pioneers in electronic musical instruments; He constructed the first voltage-controlled synthesizer in 1963. Since then, he has produced a variety of conceptually and technically advanced instruments, many of which are in use in university and private studios around the world. He has consulted for several instrument manufacturers, including CBS, Kimball Piano, Zeta Music, Yamaha International, Gibson Guitars, and E-Mu Systems. Don Buchla has served as technical director of California Institute of the Arts, technical director of the Electric Symphony, co-director of the Artists' Research Collective. Don has received grants from the Veterans' Administration (guidance devices for the blind), the Guggenheim Foundation (music languages), and the National Endowment for the Arts (composition). He recently received the prestigious 2002 SEAMUSLifetime Achievement Award "in recognition of his pioneering achievements and lifetime contribution to the art and craft of electro-acoustic music". Hundreds of his unique instruments continue to be in use and vintage Buchla synthesizers continue to be in strong demand. Don received a degree from UC Berkeley in Physics in 1960, and holds several patents in the fields of optics and musical instruments.

He developed one of the first synthesizer systems on America’s west coast, just as Robert Moog was developing his own, soon to be more famous system on the east coast. Don Buchla’s own creations were used by pioneering composers Morton Subotnik (on Silver Apples of the Moon), Ramon Sender and others. Buchla’s Box, as it was known, became a part of Ken Kesey’s ‘Acid Test’ setup, squawking and skronking away as test subjects lost their minds and found them again, and he has a cameo in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Meanwhile, to earn a living, he worked on a number of projects for NASA , developing life support systems for rabbits in space, amongst other things.

Don grew up with a passion for music and a passion for engineering. When he combined the two loves, he created electronic musical instruments the world had never dreamed of before. His early synthesizer pre-dates the work Robert Moog was doing on the East Coast while Don was working in Berkeley, California. Composer Morton Subotnick commissioned Don to build an electronic musical instrument for live performances and recording. Don Buchla was definitely part of the avant-garde. He has been called a mad scientist, a genius, an innovator, a recluse, an iconoclast, and has gathered a horde of fiercely loyal admirers by following his own visionary path, and dancing to his own muse.

The System 100 Series (1963) – Buchla 101

Buchla was born in 1937 in South Gate, California, and studied physics, physiology and music. He formed his electronic music equipment company, Buchla and Associates in 1962 in Berkley. Buchla was commissioned by avant-garde music composers Morton Subotnik and Ramon Seder, both of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, to create an electronic instrument for live performance. Under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Buchla completed his first modular synthesizer 1963. The result was the Buchla Series 100, which he began selling in 1966. Buchla's synthesizers experimented in control interfaces, such as touch-sensitive plates. In 1969 the Series 100 was sold to CBS, who soon after dropped the line, not seeing the synthesizer market as a profitable area.

In 1970 the Buchla 200 Series Electric Music Box was released and was manufactured until 1985. Buchla created the Buchla Series 500, the first digitally controlled analog synthesizer, in 1971. Shortly after, the Buchla Series 300 was released, which combined the Series 200 with microprocessors. The Music Easel, a small, portable, all-in-one synthesizer was released in 1972. The Buchla 400, with a video display, was released in 1982. In 1987, Buchla released the fully MIDI enabled Buchla 700.

Beginning in the 1990s, Buchla began designing alternative MIDI controllers, such as the Thunder, Lighning and Marimba Lumina. With the recent resurgence of interest in analog synthesizers Buchla has released a revamped 200 series called the 200e.

NIME-05, the 5th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, held in Vancouver, Canada in 2005, featured a keynote lecture by Don Buchla as well as a sizable exhibition of many of the instruments he and his team have created over the years.

Historical Overview

1963

Don Buchla created the 100 Series Modular Electronic Music System

1970

The 200 Series Electric Music Box

1971

Minicomputers became affordable, and Don built the first hybrid (digitally controlled analog synthesizer) - the 500 Series and along came microcomputers and the Series 300 (using series 200 analog modules combined with 300 series digital modules)

1972

A hot little analog performance instrument, the Music Easel was introduced

1978

Four hybrid (digital/analog) instruments. Don conjured up the Touché

1982

The Buchla 400, featuring an outrageous video display

1983

The Buchla 406

1987

Introducing of the Buchla 700, now enabled with MIDI up the Wahzoo

1990

Don shifted his attention to controllers and designed the Thunder

1991

The Lighning

1995

For Oberheim (then a Gibson subsidiary), he designed the OB-Mx

1996

The Lightning II

1999

Don built the gold edition of the Marimba Lumina

2000

He added the silver Marimba Lumina 3.5

2001

The smaller Marimba Lumina 2.5 is born

2002

Introducing the Piano Bar, now manufactured and distributed by Moog Music Inc.

Photo: Richard Ecclestone

2004

Several new modules, calling the 200e Series

2008

Introducing the Lightning III

2013

The new Buchla Music Easel, Buchla 272e Polyphonic Tuner

Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments is the new incarnation of Buchla & Associates

Conrad Schnitzler

Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1937, Conrad Schnitzler is an essential name in the history of electronic music music during the 60′s and 70′s.

Having been pupil of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and being inspired by the likes of Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage, Schnitzler was co-founder of the Zodiak Club in Berlin in 1968, where the pioneering psychedelic band Agitation Free used to play. Conrad Schnitzler became a member of Tangerine Dream in 1969 recording their first and legendary album “Electronic Meditation”.
Conrad Schnitzler left the band in 1970 to form the project that would became a master key of the krautrock and experimental vanguard in Germany: the band Kluster, which was formed along with the early electronica masters Hans-Jaochim Roedelius Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Schnitzler left the band after a couple of albums to develop a solo career oriented to the electronic and analogue synthesis experimentation.
In 1971, Schnitzler started a trilogy of albums (“Schwartz”, “Blau”, and “Rot”) in an almost extreme attitude of melodic, tonal, rhythmic, and structural minimalismism, setting the foundations of modern electronic minimalism music.

During the first half of the 70′s, Schnitzler produced numerous experiments, but this hardly saw the light until 1978 when Peter Baumann from Tangerine Dream instigated the release of his works.
By the early 80′s, Conrad Schnitzler started series of numerous releases, most of them synth pop oriented, and he finally moved back to his most experimental side in the 90′s with a series of releases in the Plate Lunch label.




Electrocon (1980/CD2006) Recorded at Paragon Studio, Berlin in 1980-81. Digital remastered at Peace Music, Tokyo, Japan 2006.

Laurie Spiegel plays 1977 Bell Labs Hal Alles Synth

Concerto for Self-Accompanying Digital Synthesizer. The instrument is possibly the first realtime digital synthesizer, built at Bell Telephone Labs, NJ by Hal Alles and team, with C language software written by Laurie Spiegel that processes the player's live input into an ongoing accompaniment that will continue to be played live against.

Léon Theremin - Good Vibrations for Comrade general secretary Lenin

Léon Theremin (born Lev Sergeyevich Termen) in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire in 1896 († 3 November 1993, Moscow) was a russian inventor and most famous for his invention "The Theremin", one of the very first electronic musical instruments.

He is also the inventor of "Interlace", a technique of improving the picture quality of a video signal, widely used in video and television technology. His invention of "The Thing", an espionage tool, is considered a predecessor of RFID (Radio-frequency identification) technology.

Theremin was legendary by invented the electronic musical instrument that bears his name, and his story is as strange as the music the thing produces. After experimenting with radio vacuum tubes, Theremin developed a machine (1917-20) whose pitch and volume could be controlled by the movements of the performer's hands -- without touching the instrument. The instrument was demonstrated for Lenin, who was so impressed he ordered their mass production and asked Theremin to give him lessons.

In 1927 Theremin emigrated to the United States, where he patented the "Thereminvox" (1928) and contracted with RCA to market and distribute them. During the '20s and '30s Theremin worked in New York and associated with high society, and his instrument gained fame thanks in part to the classical performances of the great thereminist Clara Rockmore.

In 1938 Theremin mysteriously disappeared from his New York apartment, reportedly spirited away by a group of Russian men.

Beginning in the 1940s the Theremin was used for movie soundtracks, and these days is most commonly associated with 1950s science fiction films (and with the 1960s pop song by The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"). The instrument enjoyed fame in the US and the UK, but the whereabouts of its inventor remained a mystery. As it turns out, he had been kidnapped by the Soviet secret police, imprisoned for seven years and then put to work for Soviet intelligence.

(to be continued)

Edgar Froese - Sobornost (1981)

Solo TV performance by Tangerine Dream's Edgar Froese playing the Oberheim Four Voice Polyphonic Synth

Johann Timman - Trip Into The Body (1981)

Here is a true classic. The Dutchman Johan Timman was equipped by Moog in 1981 to implement his music. Then he issued "Trip Into The Body" in 1981.
Each piece describes a different part of the body and is characterized by its lively style of play, the melodies and the unique atmosphere created and already a classic. A great trip into the body.

On “The Brain”, the annoyance of synth cymbals is easily forgotten by the heavy orchestration. Timman, filling the entire spectrum of sound, not just here, but on the whole album.
“The Heart”, opens with a steady, pounding, rather-human-like (for electronic-percussion) beat. Steadily riding the fine line between campy and classic, the melody is solid, but the tone, perhaps merely a victim of time, runs the verge of being cheesy.
The next two tracks are eerily similar in sound and structure. They both exude a haunting feel, even when things, musically, go major. “The Windpipe” is hinted at several times in the second half of “The Blood Cells And The Antibodies”.
“The Hemoglobin” serves as an effective, yet forgettable track for travelling from “The Lungs” to “Inside The Tympanic Cavity”, where things are simple, yet spooky. Droning synth’s throughout underlie a methodic, question and answer lead line.

The last track, “Hearing (Ocean of Sound)” reminds on Kraftwerk’s "Computerwelt" immediately, but is less edgy, less constrained, but harkens to earlier Kraftwerk efforts for its anthemic personality.

Pierre Schaeffer - Father of Musique concrète

Born in Nancy, France, 1910, Pierre Schaeffer († 1995) is told to be the Father of musique concrète and one of the pioneers in the use of electronic technologies.
Being a technician who had studies at the Polytechnic School in Paris, he was not originally a musician and he used to work as an engineer and broadcaster at the Radiodiffusion Television Francaises (RTF). In 1942, Pierre Schaeffer started a studio for the science of musical acoustics at the RTF, experimenting with phonograph turntables and a large library of sound effect records. During his experiments with turntables, Schaeffer discovered a technique to create loops, making the needle go back to the same position. At the same time, he started working with the isolation of naturally produced sounds, which was the beginning of musique concrete which was working with natural sounds recorded and played back in a musical context.
In 1948, Pierre Schaeffer started a series of experiments on the timbre, attack and decay of percussive instruments by recording bell tones and using a volume control between the mike and cutter to eliminate the attack. Interested in the creation of banks of pre-recorded sounds that could be manipulated from an instrument, he created the Phonogene, a keyboard that could transpose a loop in 12 distinct steps , which was an predecesor of Mellotron. Schaeffer used this device in his composition “Concert for Locomotives”, playing samples of trains. Later he began to play records at different speeds, affecting the amplitude envelopes of the sounds.
In 1949, Schaeffer worked on the “Symphonie pour un Homme Seul” in which all of the sounds were created by the human body, along with the composer Pierre Henry, who was asigned by the RTF to help in Schaeffer’s investigations. This was one of the most important works in early musique concrète, which was performed in 1950 in Paris using a PA system, several turntables, and mixers.

In 1951, RTF provided Pierre Schaeffer with a new studio and he began his first experiments in spacial sound, using several speakers and also co- founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete where other composers where involved such as Pierre Henry, Olivier Messiaen and his pupils Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and George Barraque.
Pierre Schaeffer’s legacy to the music was also his study of classification and definition of the musical syntax, classifying aspects of the sound and creating definitions like length, complexity, extracts, manipulation, transmission, modulation, etc. These characteristics were published in his book “The Search for a Concrete Music” in 1952.
Pierre Schaeffer died in 1995 at the age of 85. His work has been highly influencial in some of the most brilliant composers from the 20th Century. He has also influenced several generations of electronic musicians, including Kraftwerk, Jean Michel Jarre or Steve Reich.

The Magic of Theremin

The master shows how to play.

Laurie Spiegel

Laurie Spiegel was born in Chicago (September 20, 1945) where in her teens she played guitar, banjo & mandolin, and through them cultivated a devout philosophy of amateur music making. After receiving a degree in the social sciences, she returned to music. Having taught herself notation, she studied classic guitar and composition privately in London, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman and Vincent Persichetti.

Having worked with analog synthesizers since 1969, she sought out the greater compositional control which digital computers could provide and wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973 trough 1979. She later founded New York University's Computer Music Studio, and became famous in rock music circles for her music software for personal computers.

The EMS Story

The Electronic Music Studios (London) Ltd. was formed in 1969 by Dr. Peter Zinovieff to market innovative ideas arising from his private studio and interest in musical applications of computers. Over the next ten years many seminal products were released and many talented designers worked for the company. EMS had its own peculiar brand of British eccentricity which could be both endearing and annoying, but should be viewed in the context of true pioneering. The EMS influence was significant and can be traced into many contemporary products.


It may be difficult for a generation brought up with 32-bit computers and digital signal processors as consumer items to appreciate just how revolutionary Peter Zinovieff's projects were. In the 1960s to have access to a 12-bit computer with 1K of memory outside the academic or military establishment, let alone have two personal ones and then use them for music, was completely unheard of. To have a video screen as well when most people programmed with punched cards was beyond belief. Today there is a huge worldwide market for electronic music equipment, but there is little that was not envisioned by the EMS team before 1970 ten to twenty years ahead of their time.
The demise of EMS has many parallels with that of ARP. Both companies succumbed to the lure of the guitar market, ARP with the Avatar and EMS with the Hi-Fli. Both put a large amount of R&D effort into ambitious projects that were never completed. Had they both stayed within the markets they excelled in history could be quite different. After gearing up to make large quantities of the Hi-Fli, for which there was not actually a corresponding demand, EMS incurred burdening debts. Diversification with the International Voice Movement and falling victims to a financial fraud made the collapse of EMS in 1979 inevitable.






The last version of Zinovieff's Studio in Oxfordshire

Starship Klaus Schulze

Concert in Linz, Austria (1980)
Photo courtesy of KDM Archives

Jean-Jacques Perrey

Jean-Jacques Perrey (born 1929) is a French electronic music producer and is an early pioneer in the genre. He is best known within the sphere of popular music as a member of the influential duo Perrey & Kingsley.

He was studying medicine in Paris when he met George Jenny, inventor of the Ondioline. Quitting medical school, Perrey travelled through Europe demonstrating this keyboard ancestor of the modern synthesizer. At the age of 30, Perrey relocated to New York, sponsored by Caroll Bratman, who built him an experimental laboratory and recording studio. Here he invented "a new process for generating rhythms with sequences and loops", utilising the environmental sounds of "musique concrète." With scissors, splicing tape, and tape recorders, he spent weeks piecing together a uniquely comique take on the future. Befriending Robert Moog, he became one of the first Moog synth musicians, creating "far out electronic entertainment".

In 1965 Perrey met Gershon Kingsley, a former colleague of John Cage. Together, using Ondioline and Perrey's loops, they created two albums for Vanguard Records — The In Sound From Way Out (1966) and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations (1967). Perrey and Kingsley collaborated on sound design for radio and television advertising. Perrey returned to France, composing for television, scoring for ballet and continuing medical research into therapeutic sounds for insomniacs.

Bruno Spoerri - Schweizer Pionier der Elektronischen Musik

Bruno Spoerri (*1935) ist eine der wichtigsten Gestalten im Jazz und in der elektronischen Musik in der Schweiz. Nach Studien in Basel (u.a. bei Karl Barth und Karl Jaspers) und Zürich erwarb er 1958 ein Diplom in Angewandter Psychologie. Er spielte schon als früh als Saxophonist in verschiedenen Jazzgruppen und gehörte von 1957 bis 1975 zum "Metronome Quintett". Nachdem er an den Kölner Kursen für Neue Musik 1965/66 teilgenommen hatte, arbeitete er seit 1967 als Komponist und Tonmeister.

Frühe Experimente mit elektrifiziertem Saxophon, Effektgeräten und seit 1968 mit selbst gebauten Klangwandlern, sowie ab 1970 mit dem EMS VCS-3 Synthesizer, führten ihn immer weiter in die Welt der elektronischen Musik. Spoerri arbeitete u. a. mit Joël Vandroogenbroeck und der Psychedelic Rock-Gruppe "Brainticket" zusammen. Tourneen führten ihn u.a. nach Japan, Indien und Äthiopien. Spoerri war ausserdem musikalischer Leiter des Zürcher Jazz-Festivals zwischen 1971 und 1973, und von 1975 bis 1977, sowie lange Jahre Lehrbeauftragter an der Musikhochschule Zürich für Computermusik. Er schuf zahlreiche Musik zu Werbe- und Spielfilmen.

Sendung Kulturplatz, Schweizer Fernsehen (SFDRS)

Kraftwerk - Autobahn (Animation by Roger Mainwood)

Kraftwerk - Die Roboter on German TV (ZDF/1978)

Wendy Carlos (aka Walter Carlos)

Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos on 14 November 1939, in Pawtuckett, Rhode Island) is one of the first famous performers of electronic music. "Switched-On-Bach", the electronically generated versions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach was contained one of the first albums that made attempt, synthesizers to use as an alternative to an orchestra.

As an assistant to Robert Moog in developing its first commercially available synthesizer, Carlos advance the technology of sound synthesis. Switched-On Bach was the best selling classical album of all time.
In 1972, Carlos underwent after a long preparation for a gender reassignment surgery and changed his name officially. The artist's first recordings were released under the name Walter Carlos. The first release credited to her as "Wendy" was Switched-On Brandenburgs (1979). Carlos's first public appearance after her gender transition was in an interview in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine, a decision she regrets because of the unwelcome publicity it brought to her personal life, where her surgery was described in anatomical detail.

Carlos began musical education at age six with piano lessons. Following undergraduate studies of music and physics at Brown University accompanied by early explorations of electronic music, Carlos earned a master's degree in composition at Colunbia University, studying there with Vladimir Usschevsky, a pioneer in electronic music (other teachers included Otto Luening and Jack Beeson). Remaining in New York after graduation, Carlos met Rober Moog and was one of his earliest customers, providing feedback for his further development of the Moog synthesizer. Carlos convinced Moog to add touch-sensitivity to the synthesizer keyboard, to allow a greater level of dynamics and musicality.

Around 1966, Carlos met Rachel Elkind, who produced Switched-On Bach and other early albums. With the proceeds of Switched-On Bach, the two renovated a New York brownstone, which they shared as a home and business premises, installing a studio for live and electronic recording on the bottom floor. Carlos took the unusual step of enclosing the entire studio in a Faraday cage, shielding the equipment from radio and television interference.

Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Several years prior, two Carlos compositions using classical (pre-Moog) electronic techniques had been issued on LP (Variations for Flute and Tape and Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers). Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
Carlos' first release was entitled "Moog 900 Series - Electronic Music Systems" (R. A. Moog Company, Inc., 1967) and it was an introduction to the technical aspects of the machine.
Switched-On-Bach (1968) was an early album demonstrating the use of the synthesizer as a genuine musical instrument. As an early user of Robert Moog's first commercially available synthesizer modules (Moog assembled these as custom installations that differed greatly from user to user), Walter Carlos helped pioneer the technology, which was significantly more difficult to use than it is today. Multitracking recording techniques played a critical role in the time-consuming process of creating this album. Switched-On Bach was the last project in his four-year-long collaboration with Benjamin Folkman and won gold records for both Carlos and Folkman. The album then became one of the first classical LPs to sell 500,000 copies, and (eventually) to go platinum.
Carlos composed and recorded music for "A Clockwork Orange" (1971). She worked with Stanley Kubrick again on "The Shining". In 1982, she scored the film "Tron" for Disney. This score incorporated orchestra, chorus, organ, and both analog and digital synthesizers. Some of her end-title music featuring the Royal Albert Hall Organ was replaced with a song by the Rockgroup Journey, and the music that originally was composed for the lightcycle scene was dropped. Digital Moonscapes (1984) switched to digital synthesizers from the analog synthesizers that were the trademark of her earlier albums. Some of the unused material from the Tron soundtrack was incorporated into it.

Beginning in 1998, all of her catalogue was remastered. In 2005, the two-volume set Rediscovering Lost Scores was released, featuring previously out-of-print material, including the unreleased soundtrack to Woundings, and music composed and recorded for The Shining, Tron and A Clockwork Orange that was not used in the films.

Claudio Gizzi - The man behind "Automat"

The career of Claudio Gizzi (aka Jean Pierre Posit) is recognized for neo-classical compositions used as soundtrack mainly in horror and B movies as well as Andy Warhol's "Flesh for Frankenstein" and "Blood for Dracula". He also composed some incidental music for Roman Polanski's "What?" ("Che?" F/I, 1972).
Back in 1978 he launched a curious and innovative musical project with Romano Musumarra and Mario Maggi called "Automat" and only known for one album. The music is entirely built around the MCS70 synthesizer and progammings, designed and built by Mario Maggi.

Robert "Bob" Moog

Dr. Robert Arthur Moog (pronounced /ˈmoʊɡ/, mohg), commonly called Bob Moog (May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005) was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.

A native of New York City, Robert Moog attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1952. Moog earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Queens College, New York in 1957, another in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University. Moog's awards include honorary doctorates from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (New York City) and Lycoming College (Williamsport, Pennsylvania).

During his lifetime, Bob Moog founded two companies for manufacturing electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000. Moog spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
He received a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement in 1970.

In 2002, Bob Moog was honored with a Grammy Tech Award, and an honorary doctorate degree from Berklee College of Music.
He gave an enthusiastically-received lecture at the 2004 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-04), held in Hamamatsu, Japan's "City of Musical Instruments", in June, 2004. Moog was the inspiration behind the 2004 film Moog. Robert Moog was diagnosed with a brain tumor on April 28, 2005. Nearly four months later, Moog died at the age of 71 in Asheville, North Carolina. The Bob Moog Foundation was created as a memorial, with the aim of continuing his life's work of developing electronic music.

The Moog synthesizer was one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. Early developmental work on the components of the synthesizer occurred at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, now the Computer Music Center. While there, Moog developed the voltage controlled oscillators, ADSR envelope generators, and other synthesizer modules with composer Herbert Deutsch.

Bob Moog created the first voltage-controlled subtractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller and demonstrated it at the AES convention in 1964. In 1966, Moog filed a patent application for his unique low-pass filter U.S. Patent 3,475,623, which issued in October 1969. He held several dozen patents.

Moog employed his theremin company (R. A. Moog Co., which would later become Moog Music) to manufacture and market his synthesizers. Unlike the few other 1960s synthesizer manufacturers, Moog shipped a piano-style keyboard as the standard user interface to his synthesizers. Moog also established standards for analog synthesizer control interfacing, with a logarithmic one volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse triggering signal.

The first Moog instruments were modular synthesizers. In 1971 Moog Music began production of the Minimoog Model D which was among the first widely available, portable and relatively affordable synthesizers.

One of Moog's earliest musical customers was Wendy Carlos whom he credits with providing feedback that was valuable to the further development of Moog synthesizers. Through his involvement in electronic music, Moog developed close professional relationships with various artists. In a 2000 interview, Moog said "I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers. They use my tools."