Moog Minimoog Model D | First pass experimental ambient sound design

video upload by MIDERA

"I've wanted a Minimoog for some time, but it was 'always out of my price range' (and it still is - 0% financing for the win?). When the new version was released at $5000, I laughed and said, well, that's not going to happen. After the mass layoffs at Moog - I guess I was somewhat compelled to get one. I'm sure this is, by itself, a fairly irrational reason to get it. At the time, I didn't know (or maybe it's still not 100% certain) whether Moog would make more Minimoogs in the US. Originally the thought/fear was that everything would be produced elsewhere. So yes, that played probably an unhealthy role in my decision making process. I've heard the Mini would still be made in the US. I guess I'm not entirely proud to say that maybe by buying it under InMusic, I wasn't doing Moog any favors. I honestly don't know.

If you remember when I got my Sequential Prophet 10, I remember being let down. I wasn't sure it was as good as I thought it should be for the price. While I have come around, it was a major fear I had after buying the Minimoog. I'm quite happy to report that these misgivings were not in my head at all when I first turned on the Mini. Of course, there are some things that confused me. First, I didn't hear any sounds and that made me nervous (turns out my mixer wasn't on). It does take a little reading in the manual to know what switches and knobs are doing exactly what. It's less immediate than one would think on first glance.

It's hard to know what to say. I don't really want to fetishize the instrument - but I think that it's a bit impossible. It's a cool synth. It's one of the most iconic synths - so in that aspect, I will fail this immediately. But it does LOOK and FEEL very impressive... and elegant. In a way that the Matriarch doesn't. The keybeds seem the same though. Getting to the sound - it's got such a rich sound. I would love to A/B it with my Matriarch (which has other benefits such as paraphonic mode, arp/seq, patching), but I think the pure tone from the Minimoog is better (again, I want to test this).

So what I did here was send the output to the Strymon Volante and then added Eventide Blackhole VST. I didn't prepare anything except the original sound. Honestly, I didn't even know what I was going to play throughout. This is just me fiddling around after playing it for 5 minutes to get my bearings straight.

Before I forget. The first sound you hear is actually just the filter with some noise modulation on it. I later add oscillators.

I hope you enjoy."