Is Moog about to announce a polysynth called the Moog One?

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With a bit of a collective sigh from the music technology news community, we all feel obligated to report on the exciting possibility that Moog may, perhaps, be releasing a polysynth. A sigh because it’s a leak, it sounds a bit dodgy and it’s a shame for Moog to lose some of the thunder of a proper announcement.

Moog One?

It first came to light on the Gearslutz forum – that ever reliable social platform of truth and righteousness – when a topic entitled “The Moog One” was started by forum member cloudswimmer. It offered no further information until a few hours later when SovietSpaceChild posted what appears to be the text of an email originally posted by cloudswimmer but seemingly retracted. Well, regardless of the origins the email lists the specs of an unknown Moog polysynth.

According to the post it will come in 8 and 16-voice versions with 3 VCOs per voice and 3 part multi-timbral. There will be a knob per function, 4 LFOs, a 3 channel arpeggiator and sequencer. It will be sprinkled with CV patch points and have lots of ins and outs for routing synths and effects. There’s also an Eventide reverb built-in. The oscillators can create complex waveforms, there’s dedicated envelope for noise shaping and bunch of filter modes. Each of the 3 parts has it’s own effects bus and then there’s a master effects bus. There are macro controls, a vocoder modulator and an XY pad for expressive control.

All in all a decent sheet of specs that read much like the Korg Prologue or DSI Prophet 6. Where it differs perhaps is in the price. You are looking at $5999 for the 8-voice and $7999 for the 16-voice. Wow.

All of this is, of course, pure speculation and unsubstantiated. The email appears to say that the rep thought it was OK to talk about it – which seems mad as there’s been no announcement from Moog. They had a little bit of trouble with the Grandmother leaking before Moogfest, but Moog quickly responded to the leak by releasing all the details early – or at least that’s my assumption. It may well have been the plan all along. We love leaks and we hate leaks. It’s always exciting to get a sneak preview of something fabulous, but at the same time these companies put a lot of work into marketing and releasing a product and it must be terribly frustrating when people they’ve trusted give the game away.

Well, it is Summer NAMM week and although there’s rarely anything of interest to the synthesizer community you just never know. Maybe Moog is preparing to unload a huge polyphonic synthesizer on us.

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