by Hannah M.G. Shapero
It is a dangerous thing to allow a college student to remain idle during the summer. Knowing this danger, my father contacted his good friend and tennis partner, Dave Luce, who had moved away from our Boston-area neighborhood to become an engineer at the company that manufactured the famous Moog Synthesizers. So, in the summer of 1973, Dave Luce found me a job at his company, and in early July I returned to the field of electronic music, this time working for what had been the great rival of our Brandeis Buchla synthesizer, the commercial and competitive Moog (the name rhymes with "vogue").
Moog Music, Inc. was located in Williamsville, N.Y, just east of Buffalo, in land that in 1973 was still quite rural. As a New Englander, I had never seen a place like this before: flat open territory with barns and fields. I lived with the Luce family, which included David and his wife Mary Jane, their three children, and a constantly changing roster of relatives and visiting friends. The workplace was set up in an old gelatin factory. Inside the long building were not only the assembly lines but storerooms, laboratories, offices, and a demonstration room to show the product to prospective clients.
I met the cast of colorful characters who were the engineers, designers, mechanics, and managers at the factory, including the inventor Bob Moog himself. He was a lean man with prematurely grey hair, who rode a bicycle to work and wore sandals. These last two details alone were enough to mark him as eccentric in conservative New York State. We all considered him a "mad genius engineer."
There were two main machines made at Moog Music: the popular and easy-to-use "Mini-Moog," which was a small desktop- size synthesizer that amateur musicians or hobbyists could afford, and the larger, custom instrument which the professionals used. My first job at the factory was to learn to work these two machines. Within a couple of weeks, I was in the showroom demonstrating the Moogs to anyone from a fascinated college student and his family to Japanese businessmen. But the "cutting edge" of Moog's technology was the "Poly-Moog," sometimes called the "Polly," which had a new and unprecedented capability: you could play more than one note at a time on it, even chords. This machine was still experimental, but I gave demonstrations on it as well.
At the same time, since I had experience in art and graphic design, the marketing manager put me to work revising and updating the "sound-charts" which instructed Mini-Moog users on just how to set the machine's controls to get various types of sound. I revised them one by one, testing each setting out on a Mini-Moog before I put the design down on paper. The Mini-Moog, often called just the "Minnie," was quite versatile; it could emit anything from imitations of conventional instruments to loud spacey special-effects. I spent weeks painstakingly assembling the sound- charts with an IBM Selectric typewriter, press-on type, spray glue, and slivers of paper cut with scissors and an Exacto knife.
I was not part of the social fabric of the factory. I had never worked in a factory before, and the regular workers considered me an imported fancy college girl (which, of course, I was) who didn't really have to work anywhere. It took me a while to convince the people that I was sincere and that I wanted to be there, but there was always an unbridgeable gap between the Buffalo-area workers and the out-of-town consultant.
Demonstrations and sound-charts were not the only work I did at the Moog factory. During the six weeks I worked there, I was also "quality control." This meant that every day, I would test the new Mini-Moogs which came off the assembly line. This was done by strapping the machine down onto a small platform which vibrated violently when activated. This "shake-table" tested the Mini-Moog's sturdiness; if anything were going to break loose in transit or in normal usage, it would do so here first, so that it could be fixed before the machine went out to the buyer.
While the machine was shaking, I also tested all the sound features. Inevitably, there were some defective machines. I carried these into the workshop and stacked them on shelves, where the engineers looked at the work piling up with bleary expressions. In time they started calling me the "Mini-Killer." But I wasn't trying to destroy the machines - I was just doing my job.
A fascinating number of different components went into the manufacture of the little synthesizers. Many of them had finely done wooden cabinets, so carpentry was part of the manufacture. The plastic keyboards came to the factory by the dozens, shipped from South Carolina in piano boxes which said "Another Piano for a Happy Home." I liked the slogan, so full of optimism about the positive power of music, so I asked for that section of the box with the slogan, as a souvenir. I still have my piano box sign as a treasured memento in my library.
Another job I had, when the shaking and the soundcharts were not going on, was testing transistors. The transistors came into the factory from Japan, packed by the thousands in big boxes. The open boxes of colorful tiny parts looked like huge containers of candy. But every one of these thousands of pieces was slightly different, and they all had to be tested before they went into the electronics. I shared in this tedious task, noting the voltmeter and the oscilloscope readings for each one, and then sorting them into usable, questionable, and no good. The task was made more difficult by the fact that the factory had no air-conditioning, and these transistors were highly sensitive to heat. Buffalo can get hot in the summer, and to cool the factory down, the maintenance people had to pour water on the roof of the building from hoses.
The highlights of my tour of duty at Moog were when musicians visited the factory. Billy Cobham, a well-known jazz drummer, visited Moog to test out the first versions of a drum pad device connected to the synthesizer; nowadays these drum pads are standard equipment. But the most famous player to visit, when I was there, was Keith Emerson, from the synth-rock band "Emerson, Lake, and Palmer." He was a short, thin Englishman, a classically trained pianist who had found success mixing electronic music with hard rock. He was bringing in his big Moog Synthesizer for repairs after sixty concerts, including a Caribbean beach concert where the machine had gotten showered with sand. I managed to have a couple of conversations with him; while I was not much of a rock fan, I did like his music, especially the electronic special effects. I tried to imitate some of his synthesizer sounds on the Mini-Moog, and after checking them with him for at least a reasonable facsimile, I got him to autograph the sound- charts for these settings.
Towards the end of my stay, new people came into the factory and set up shop. These were not musicians or electronics assemblers, but accountants. They were preparing the papers for the sale of Moog Music to Chicago Musical Instruments, Inc.. This would mark the end of Moog as an independent synthesizer maker, and things would be somewhat different afterwards. My work-time with Moog came to an end in mid-August, and, though Moog Music, Inc. continued on for a few years, I heard little from them.
Twenty-four years later, in 1997, I revisited the Luce family in their suburban Buffalo home. Their children are all grown and on their own, and many of the open fields I marveled at in 1973 are now covered with housing developments. My patron Dave Luce no longer works in the music business, though he was able to bring back many memories of Moog for me. Bob Moog himself now lives in North Carolina, and is still working with electronic music. But what is most fascinating is that just recently the old Mini-Moog has gone back into production as a collector's item, produced by a new company from the old specifications. Synthesizer players and electronic music aficionados are returning to the old "analog" synthesizers, after twenty years of computer- generated and programmed sounds.
I have even heard from my father, who is now retired from Brandeis, that the Buchla synthesizer which I played during my teen years twenty-nine years ago is still in use among new generations of Brandeis students. Here we are in the computer age, dependent on machines that didn't even exist in 1973. Yet somehow, the old analog machines, the lutes and harpsichords of the electronic music world, are still attracting creative people. The futuristic vision and invention of Don Buchla, Paul Ketoff, Bob Moog and the other electronic music pioneers, and the work of all the musicians they helped, lives on into the new world of cybersound and global cultural fusion.
Hannah M.G.Shapero
10/20/97