About my MOOG Modular 2C

[mosc]

From time to time it comes up that people ask me about my MOOG Modular synthesizer. So, I thought I'd answer a few general questions so as not to have to repeat myself.

I am the original owner. I bought this 2C modular direct from Moog in 1972. It has the second generation oscillators, the 921Bs (6 of them) and the 921 (1 of those). There are 2 921A oscillator controllers. It has 3 four channel mixers, 2 VCAs and 2 envelope generators. It has a voltage controlled hi-pass and a low-pass filter, with a filter coupler. There is a white/pink noise source and a 14 band fixed filter bank. It has the original keyboard and ribbon controller, but I don't use them as they were not very good even when I got the unit new. I use a Roland MPU-101 MIDI/CV converter.

I have modified the envelope generators to have significantly longer decay times. These were simple mods of just increasing resistors.

I built my own sequencer a couple of years after I got my Moog. Since I worked for Don Buchla, I wanted a more powerful sequencer than Moog offered at the time. I think I built a great one. I've yet to see one as good even after all these years. I owe a lot to George Gibson, who at the time was an engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. He was interested in synthesizer circuits and worked with me. He taught me a great deal about circuit design. The sequencer doesn't work at this writing.

At this time the synth still works pretty darn well. I'm astonished at how stable it is, and at how well the oscillators still track. There is quite a bit of noise, but that's the way these units were from the day they were shipped.

Here's an old photo of my studio where you can see the Moog.