It was 1982, and Moog did what it had to do to stay in the game: come up with an awe-inspiring polyphonic analog synthesizer that encapsulated the very essence of Moog synthesis, tone and aesthetic.
Moog had pursued the idea of a polyphonic Minimoog for some time, culminating in the flawed but fabulous Polymoog in 1975. As with many contemporary instruments, it used a "divide-down" architecture to reach complete polyphony so that every note could be played. However, the divide-down oscillator manipulation resulted in weak-sounding waveforms, and while it was an extraordinary machine at the time, it was soon surpassed by the sleek form and warm voice card tones of the Sequential Prophet-5, Yamaha CS-80, and Oberheim OB-Xa.
The voice-card approach was like building an entire synthesizer for each voice card, with its own oscillators, filters and VCAs. It was an unwieldy idea until the development of Integrated Circuits—which contained the components needed to make these things manageable. This miniaturisation of discrete circuits was key to developing these new polyphonic synthesizers and eventually forming the basis of the Memorymoog.
The Road to Memorymoog
Moog took their sweet time about it. In the early 1980s, Roland added the Jupiter-8 to the growing list of polyphonic synthesizers, but all attempts to reinvent the Polymoog seemed to fail. It wasn't just the sound comparison; it was in the narrowness of the synthesis. The Polymoog was largely a preset-based instrument, which was great for stage use but less exciting for sound designers and people wanting to explore and experiment with the interplay of synthesizer components. Other Moog instruments suffered from a similarly shallow depth of editing and fiddling. The Opus 3 leaned heavily into the String Machine and Organ concepts, the Liberation was fun for the synth performer with lead guitar-envy but lacked much sound exploration, and the Realistic Concertmate MG-1 along with the Rogue counterpart, were not Moog's finest hour. They needed something a bit special.

[Above: the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5: one of the first widely successful compact analog polyphonic synthesizers.]
The Sequential Circuits Prophet-5—one of the first widely-marketed polyphonic instruments—had a certain amount of elegance in the cleanliness and openness of the interface. We take these things for granted now, but back then, having a single knob to control an aspect of all the voices, all at once, was quite remarkable. Moreover, the Prophet-5 introduced the use of microprocessors for patch storage/management—it was great to be able to instantly store all the settings once you found something that you liked. The patch-saving ability made the Prophet-5 brilliant for both live use and synthesis exploration. And the relatively low voice count—only 5 on the Prophet, and 8 on the Oberheim OB-Xa—turned out not to be as big an issue for musicians as Moog and others might have thought.
Meanwhile, a whole game-changing world of affordable digital synthesis was just around the corner. We'd seen the Fairlight, Synclavier and PPG Wave introduce us to the future, but at this point, it was out of reach for everyone except the fabulously wealthy. However, before Yamaha released the DX7, we were at what could be described as the pinnacle of analog polyphonic synthesis, and Moog knew they had to be at the top. They had to innovate; they had to bring something new and exciting, more than a polyphonic Minimoog, that didn't just mirror what was there but took it further. And so, in 1982, what they described as "The Ultimate Sound of Moog" arrived in the form of the 6-voice Memorymoog synthesizer.
The Moog Memorymoog
The Memorymoog's six voices were derived from six Minimoogs' worth of audio circuitry on individual voice cards. With updated oscillator chips, each voice uniquely had three VCOs, mixed through a classic ladder filter and VCA. All 18 oscillators would auto-tune within a few seconds. Each voice card also housed an LFO, and a pair of envelopes. Oscillator 2 could sync to oscillator 1, and you could adjust the waveforms to find more complex tones. This was well-planned out, accessible synthesis that people could understand and go in deep with. Or, if fiddling was not their thing, it included 100 programs filled with instantly classic sounds.
The sound of the Moog ladder filter played a vital role in the sound of the Memorymoog. The Minimoog has already made it famous, but now you could run six together with keyboard tracking and a full ADSR envelope. If you push the three VCOs fully up you elicit a bit of distortion through the filter, giving it an enviable character that few synths could replicate. Stack those up in unison, and the Memorymoog becomes a monster monosynth.
The envelopes, or "contours" as Moog likes to call them, had some unexpectedly interesting aspects. You had an "Unconditional Contour" mode that runs the whole envelope whether you hold the key or not, sort of like a one-shot. The "Return to Zero" mode cuts off the release when you play a new note, and you can disable release entirely. Then, a "Keyboard follow" mode shortens the envelope the higher you go up the keyboard. They were curious ideas that gave the Memorymoog different and unusual flavors.
Envelopes aside, modulation was quite modest. There was only one LFO per voice, and that could only be routed to pitch, pulse width or the filter cutoff. You do have a choice of waveforms including triangle, sawtooth in both directions, square and Sample & Hold, but you couldn't set different amounts for different destinations. However, the Memorymoog had a modulation super-power. You could use VCO3 as a modulator, at both low frequency and audio rates: allowing you to push it into frequency modulation and those more metallic tones. This did give the Memorymoog a bit more scope for experimental sounds. The filter envelope could control the depth, allowing it to change over time, like a delayed vibrato or stability emerging from wobble.
Moog had gone to town on the digital control system. You had multiple controls over how the voices were used. You could stack all 18 oscillators into one massive unison or control the trigger priority and voice assignment when playing in mono modes. There was a Hold mode for memorising a chord that you could then transpose or use with the arpeggiator. But the real innovation was in the System Controller program display. A keypad and double-digit program number didn't look particularly impressive, but there was an alphanumeric display which showed you what you were turning, which parameter you were messing with and many other functions. It gave readouts from the Zilog Z80-based microprocessor that stored the patches displaying the original value and the new value you'd move it to. This was astonishingly useful, but sadly, that didn't extend to naming presets. You could also lock the keypad with a code to prevent intentional or accidental overwriting of your patches.
[Above: detail of the System Controller section of the Memorymoog.]
Speaking of presets, there were 100 factory sounds that were pre-programmed and ready for instant synth action. Contributions came from such luminaries as Wendy Carlos, Herbert Deutsch and Jan Hammer. While the program names listed in the manual can't necessarily be believed, they do give you an indication of Memorymoog's versatility. There were Wind Chimes and FM patches, Organs and Harpsichords, Clavs and Electric Pianos. There were Flutes, UFOs, Vocal Chorus and Butterfiles in Space. However, the Memorymoog is probably most famous for its pads. There were ten String presets and ten Brass ones which would definitely give you all the warmth, richness and movement that we've come to expect from big polysynths.
And finally, we can talk about its physicality. It was chunky when compared to the Prophet and OB-Xa, but not in an inelegant way. The control panel rises up out of the wooden shell, angling itself towards the user, giving a good level of access to the natural fall of your fingers. The metalwork cemented the idea of modern stability while the wooden finish latched into nostalgic feelings about instruments and Moog's legacy. You can see why, 35 years later, the Moog One followed the exact same aesthetic. It had 61 keys with a novel mechanism that reduced noise and also gave it that now familiar spongy synth-action feel. It had unsprung mod and pitch wheels for very precise control and a solid centre position to return the pitch wheel too. On the back were 15 sockets, giving XLR and unbalanced jack outputs, CV pitch and both S and V-trig gate outputs, footswitch inputs for Contour Release and Hold but also, unusually, program selection. And then there were ports for clock and program saving/loading to and from cassette. I understand it had really good rubber feet and was probably a bit too heavy for one person to carry.
Legacy of the Memorymoog
When it landed, it felt like Moog had nailed it with a seriously beautiful instrument, the fattest sound, a workable control system and comprehensive patch memory. It was lapped up by all the biggest musicians at the time, and can be found all over the records of the mid-1980s. However, the love affair was short-lived, and production ceased in 1986 and Moog went bankrupt not long after. What went wrong?
The 1980s were an exciting but turbulent time for synthesizers and music technology. We had huge innovation and fast technological advancements that came from all sorts of places. While America was refining analog synthesis, Japan had developed completely digital forms of synthesis that could generate more sounds much more cheaply that big old analog polysynths. Fairlight from Australia was revolutionising music production and the way we think about sound to the point where the sound of warm pads and squelchy basslines was no longer what people wanted to hear. The Memorymoog was really too late, and Moog was not able to pivot successfully into the new era of digital sound generation.
However, it wasn't all circumstantial; the Memorymoog has its own problems. It wasn’t as reliable as people hoped. It took several updates to get the auto-tuning to work properly and developed a bit of a reputation for not being roadworthy despite its on-stage credentials and rugged appearance. It had no CV inputs and so couldn't really be sequenced as part of a larger setup, and it arrived a year before MIDI became the standard interface for synthesizer control. Moog soon responded with the Memorymoog+ which had a very basic MIDI implementation and its own simple sequencer, but it still struggled to be all it could have been. It's been said that the Z80 microprocessor was not really up to the task of handling the MIDI data, which caused a bit of lag in the Memorymoog+.
Despite these shortcomings, the Memorymoog has remained iconic in both form and tone. It represents something monumental in the history of synthesizers and that point of tension in the flip from analog to digital that happened in the mid-1980s. It's also interesting to note that in 1992, a German company called Lintronics released an upgrade for the Memorymoog that dramatically improved the reliability, sorted out the MIDI issues, added velocity, installed audio inputs to the filter, removed the uninspiring sequencer and swapped out the CPU and operating system of the Memorymoog+. The "LAMM" upgrade replaced over 1700 parts and took eight weeks to complete. But you ended up with a Memorymoog, which was everything it should have been and was going to continue being awesome into the future.
I think when Moog came back into producing analog synthesizers, one of the things they had to do was exorcise the ghosts of the Memorymoog. The Moog One, released in 2018, did exactly that. It fed into all of the nostalgic feelings around big old polysynths gave us the sort of synthesizer we always dreamed of. It had a similar 3-oscillator design at its core but from there, it expanded in all directions, giving vast areas of tone, a huge modulation engine, and computerised control system that kept everything together. It was what Moog needed to do, but I firmly believe that the extravagance and maybe even arrogance of this sort of synthesizer has passed. Synthesizers are no longer the exclusive playground of rich and famous musicians and producers; they are for musicians and sound designers, fiddlers and hobbyists, and anyone who wants to play. Huge, expensive, premium machines can only go so far. The Moog One has now gone—replaced by the simpler, more affordable, and more accessible Muse—and with Moog under new management, perhaps the focus and innovation can stay in the realms of the mainstream realities rather than the flagship follies, beautiful though they may be.