The Minimoog Synthesizer

**A final edition Minimoog at the Electronic Music Education And Preservation Project.**

The Minimoog is an amazing sounding, portable, three-oscillator Moog Synthesizer that was first developed at R.A. Moog Inc around 1970. I’ve conducted some extensive research into the sonic characteristics of the Minimoog in conjunction with others at EMEAPP, the Electronic Music Education And Preservation Project. To make a long story short, we determined through rigorous analysis that the instrument turns out to have some fascinating and rather complex distortion characteristics, much of which is a natural result of the type of circuitry employed in the era the Mini was created, along with some fortunate accidents of design. To access this research, one need only create a free account at EMEAPP. One can then access the Minimoog articles and videos directly at https://emeapp.org/secrets-of-the-minimoog/.

This research progressed along several lines: Studying actual Minimoogs; conducting theoretical analysis of the circuitry; and creating a complete simulation of the Minimoog. I developed the latter to the point that it could be used to actually create music from MIDI files. Here is a small part of the Minimoog simulation circuit, which was written in a simulation program called “LTSpice”:

All of this analysis produced graphs and other technical information such as the following, which shows the distortion generation in various stages of the Minimoog’s VCA:

I then imported the output data from the simulations, including the sound files, into some custom Matlab programs to generate the following series of videos: