Moog Guitar

A Moog guitar! I’ve been searching for the perfect guitar synthesizer since I first ran into a Hagstrom Patch 2000 in the late 1970s, so you can probably imagine my sense of anticipation when I first heard rumours of its existence. Although it isn’t actually a guitar synthesizer, as you’ll see during the review, the Moog Guitar is probably more interesting to us guitarists than a mere guitar synth.

The Moog Guitar isn’t Moog’s first venture into using electronics to enhance the sound of a guitar. The short-lived (1977-79) Gibson RD Artist featured Robert Moog-designed active circuitry with a switchable Bright mode, compression and expansion. However, this time round, the inventor behind the technology is Paul Vo, who brought Moog the inspiration and the technology, and who lends his name to this signature edition of the Moog Guitar.

The pedal has a Ground Lift switch to help sort out any ground loops you may find, and there is a side-mounted control knob that sets the overall output level of the guitar, allowing you to roll back the volume if you’re a jazzer after a clean sound or to wind it up if you’re after maximum drive. The pedal also features a Control Voltage (CV) input that accepts the standard 0V-5V range. The XLR cable supplies power to the guitar and carries both the external CV and the internal Control Voltage from the pedal to the guitar. I was somewhat surprised that the pedal casing was plastic rather than metal, and I can only presume that there must be a good reason for this as the Moog Guitar isn’t exactly a budget instrument.

The guitar itself follows the modern super-Strat paradigm in its basic body shape. The body on this review guitar is mahogany capped with a beautiful piece of flamed maple, although quilted maple is optionally available. The headstock is faced in the same flamed maple. If you have a preference, Moog allow you to request either swamp ash or mahogany for the body. Otherwise you get what you’re given, Moog claiming that there is no discernible weight difference whatever the combination. The set neck is maple with an ebony fingerboard and a pretty chunky profile that feels more like an acoustic guitar neck than a state-of-the-art electric. The wood is of superb quality, the build quality is exemplary and everything about the guitar’s construction screams quality.

The guitar’s honey-finished headstock and body feature a styling device that I feel is certain to become its most copied feature — black-painted recessed areas in both the face of the headstock and around the controls. They’re pretty impossible to describe in a meaningful fashion, though you’ll get a better idea of what I’m talking about from the pictures. The headstock recess is particularly effective and gives the maple-faced bit a somewhat Parker-esque outline.

The gold-plated Sperzel locking machineheads have staggered posts to complement the seven-degree headstock angle and the 22 frets are beautifully finished. The tremolo bridge is a Moog-customised Wilkinson fitted with Graph Tech piezo saddles. It’s been a long time since I’ve come across a guitar set up as well as this Paul Vo Collector’s Edition is. The fun that I had actually playing this guitar was due in no small part to the setup, and Moog’s in-house luthier, Doug Wyatt, definitely deserves plaudits for his work.

The Moog Guitar has three sustain and mute modes, all of which are driven by a continuously variable electromagnetic field called ‘Vo Power’ after its inventor and which, for best auditory effect, should always be declaimed in the deep resonant tones of the late Don LaFontaine.

Full Sustain is just that — infinite sustain on any string, any note, at any volume. The speed at which the string begins to sustain depends on the amount of additive Vo Power that you’re using.

Mute does what it implies, the subtractive Vo Power taking kinetic energy out of the strings, which gives you some pretty attractive staccato articulations. Other than the bridge mutes that were a feature of a few 1960s Fender and Gretsch guitars, mechanical muting hasn’t featured much recently, and none of the previous methodologies involved electricity and none of them stopped the string with the Moog’s musicality.

Controlled Sustain mode (which is a kind of misnomer, although I can’t think of a better name) allows you to play sustained single-note lines or polyphonic passages without having to mute unused strings. Basically if you play a note that is above the threshold required to turn on positive Vo Power for that string, the string is sustained, and if the string is sounded below the threshold (by a position shift, for example), the Vo Power goes negative and stops the string. Again, the amount of Vo Power controls the speed of the onset of both sustain and the mute.

Incidentally, Vo Power comes simultaneously from both pickups, and maximum Vo comes when both pickups are delivering equal levels. When you change the power balance between the pickups (we’ll come to the how of that later), you change the way in which the individual strings’ harmonic overtones are excited or killed, thus giving you a whole new palette of subtle (or otherwise) sounds that vary according to mode, string and fret position.

The control area carries two black knobs, three gold-plated knobs, one black switch and two gold switches. Looking at the guitar from the front, the extreme right-hand knob is black and is the Master Volume control. On the extreme left, the black Piezo Blend controls the amount of piezo output being added to the output of the selected pickups. The black, five-position blade Pick-up Selector switch lets you access neck only, neck and bridge in phase, neck and bridge out of phase, bridge only, and piezo only. It’s worth noting that the piezo signal added in via the Piezo Blend knob passes through the Moog Guitar’s filter, but that the output of the piezo-only position does not. While we’re in this area, it should be noted that, without powered peripherals, piezo pickups are the only output source available on the Moog Guitar. This is accessed via an internal, battery-powered preamp feeding a jack socket that sits on the edge of the guitar, next to the XLR output.

The right-hand gold knob controls the amount of Vo Power, giving you totally variable levels ranging from off to full on. The Sustain Mode is controlled by the gold-tipped, three-position Mode Selector, which switches sequentially between Full, Controlled and Mute modes.

The Harmonic Balance knob comes next and works in conjunction with the three-position mini-toggle Filter switch. When that switch is in the Tone Control position, the Harmonic Balance control is disabled and its balance function moves down to the floor pedal.

The final gold-plated knob is the Tone/Filter control, the function of which depends on the setting of the Filter toggle switch. When the switch is in the bottom Tone Control position, the Tone/Filter control is just that, a tone control. In the other positions, the Tone/Filter knob controls the resonance of the Moog Guitar’s two filters.

The final control on (or rather off) the Moog Guitar is the floor expression pedal, which functions differently depending on the setting of the Filter Toggle switch. As we’ve already mentioned, in that switch’s Tone Control position, the floor pedal controls the Vo Power Harmonic Balance. In the switch’s upper Ladder Filter position, the floor pedal controls the cut-off frequency of that filter, and in the middle Articulated Filter position it controls the cut-off frequency at which this filter’s articulation begins. Additionally, the external CV input means that you can also modify the cut-off frequencies using an external LFO or envelope generator.

Having said that, playing with the pedal-mounted output level control let me set up some pretty good darkly-driven sounds on my trusty ’64 Fender Deluxe. The Moog guitar also responds well to being fed into effects pedals. It may be that the essentially dark nature and the relative ‘purity’ of the sound (compared, say, to my hooligan P-90’d Les Paul Junior) gives the pedals a staring point where there aren’t a lot of high harmonics.

Blending in the piezo pickups brings back some of the sparkle that you’re used to hearing from a single-coil, and I found myself keeping a fair amount of piezo in my sound all the time. As an acoustic guitarist, I found the fact that you can’t run the piezos on their own through the on-board filters annoying, and this probably explains the existence of the auxiliary acoustic output.

Vo Power in Sustain modes is fantastic — there is no other way to describe it. It’s like having two E-bows per string that can start infinite sustain virtually instantly and, depending on the way you change the amplitude of the Vo Power and the Harmonic Balance between pickups, that allows you to produce swells and harmonic content changes with a level of subtlety that I haven’t been able to achieve before.

The Mute mode is intriguingly useful. On full power the strings stop like a palm-muted banjo, which is pretty quick. Backing off the power lets you adjust the length of sustain and one of the things that you’ll be able to achieve, using the piezo pickups on their own, is a pretty convincing acoustic guitar sound, feel and response at silly volumes on an electric guitar. Brilliant!

The Moog Guitar’s unique Controlled Sustain mode takes a bit more setting up and getting used to. Because it uses a threshold to determine whether a string is sustained or damped, you have to tailor your playing to the mode. To be fair, I didn’t have any trouble getting used to this, but I felt that I would have liked some way of tweaking the threshold to suit my personal style. Ideally (and I know that this is day-dreaming) I’d have liked to have been able to set separate sustain and mute thresholds for each string. Essentially what this mode gives you is a self-damping guitar, where you’ve got strings sustaining while others are being silenced. With Vo Power set to give you the amount of sustain and damping you need for your playing style, you’ll have sustained lines running against picked patterns in no time.

The Articulated Filter acts as an envelope-following auto-wah, being re-triggered on every note. Again you’ve got resonant and start frequencies under your control so you can dial up just the sound that you want.

To me, the real test of any instrument isn’t how great it sounds, how easy it is to play or how pretty it looks (although all are important in their own ways), it is simply whether or not playing that instrument inspires me to make music that I haven’t made before. The Moog guitar does just that.

Viewed as an electric guitar, it doesn’t quite make it for me. It’ll never be my first-choice electric guitar if only because it requires power before it is of any use to man or beast — unless all you’re looking for is a rather expensive, battery-powered mock-acoustic. However, taking it for what it is, which I believe is a whole new paradigm for the electric guitar, it succeeds massively on a number of levels and offers guitarists an entirely new sonic universe to explore.

However, there are three caveats to bear in mind. Firstly, there is the curious example of the Chapman stick, which is another unique paradigm for the electric guitar. I’ve seen a good few stick players in my time but it always seems to me that (apart from a few honourable exceptions) they tend to gravitate towards playing in a common style. In the case of the Moog Guitar, I think that there’s less of a danger of that happening, but unless players put in the work necessary to fully get to grips with its possibilites, the trap awaits.

The second is the fact that, according to Moog’s publicity, the Moog Guitar needs special Moog strings that are said to have a unique metallurgical make-up especially suited to the demands of the Vo Power technology. Setting aside the obvious low-volume production price hit (one of the major US sites lists a three-pack of Moog strings for $34.99, while three packs of major-brand strings would set you back $15.24), I would have real concerns about Moog Music’s long-term commitment to the manufacture of these special strings. Like every other very expensive, high-end guitar, the Moog is selling into a limited market, and even a value-engineered version isn’t going to do major numbers, simply because it will ultimately only appeal to a restricted range of players. While I know that nickel-wound strings aren’t the most magnetically attractive strings on earth, for the life of me I can’t understand why Moog couldn’t simply have designed the system around stainless steel strings instead of some weird custom concoction, so that we’d be assured of continuing supply from a choice of manufacturers.

The final caveat has to be the price. The Moog Guitar is seriously expensive and that is a fact that we have to live with.

Despite these minor moans, I’m missing it already. The review instrument had to go back far too quickly and I was only just beginning to explore the possibilities that the Moog Guitar offers. For me it opened up whole new avenues of sounds and styles. However I also know that buying a Moog Guitar would only be the first step as there are other products in the Moog catalogue that could open up even more possibilities. All the Moogerfooger stomp boxes and the Moog MP-201 Multi-Pedal (a programmable four-channel CV/MIDI foot-pedal controller) are there as jumping-off points, and I can think of a good few other signal modifiers and controllers out in the wider world that would work very well indeed with the Moog Guitar.

I want one! There is nothing out there that I know of that is capable of doing what the Moog Guitar can do and it is impossible for me to forget the experience of the effects of Vo Power. Somewhere out there is a guitarist who, using the Moog Guitar, will map out a new palette of guitar sounds. Whether this is the start of a new era or just a technologically driven dead-end, only time will tell.  0