Now just wait one minute here – this is the guy that had a real MOOG and got all pissy about the voice tuning and then bitched about how it screwed up his mixes and gave it a bad review – and then goes out and buys a second hand Behringer clone BOOG and now he really likes it… why should I trust anything on this stupid website?
Of course you should trust this website and no other. Because I don’t give a damn about the history of MOOGS, BOOGS or legendary anything. I also don’t care what I said then – only what I say now. I look at the thing in front of me and whatever it has to offer. And what this offers is some quite astounding analogue synthesiser farts.
First of all it’s BOOG pronounced like Boag.
OK so what you have here is a MOOG Model D clone but it’s got four oscillators. Like the amp that goes up to 11 – you might be doing a synth solo and already be at three oscillators – here you can go up one more. Particularly if you decide to play this paraphonically, which works sort of alright but isn’t the real point of it.
The real joy of this is when you modulate the first three oscillators with the fourth one plus the LFO. Quite a few synthesisers have something like this, but only a few of them do it in such a way as to evoke chainsaws and meat. The KAWAI 100F is such a machine, a real woodchipper. Consider also the Walrus. The BOOG fucks things up with extreme pickles and relish. It makes AWFUL noises that bring joy to the maker. When I had the MOOG Voyager I could get some of this but never quite as fire and brimstone. If you are dissatisfied then you can turn on the distortion and crank that up. If then you still feel under whelmed why not run the headphone out to the audio in and blast that as well? Fuck yeah.
I like that it has a little sequencer in it. It’s not very powerful or easy to use but you can get a riff going pretty easy which gives you rhythmic shit-noise much like SPK’s Slogun 7 inch of yore.
In terms of normal average music stuff, it’s not transcending anything – the MOOG is the thing that has been transcended over and over long ago. ‘That sound’ is not distinctive and every other keyboard has refuted it for decades now. I don’t mind it, it’ll fit into the mix probably (although the Voyager never really did) but I’ll probably eventually replace the sound with something more unusual.
Problems
It’s annoyingly heavy. It’s got wood everywhere – that crazy ‘I Am A Piano’ thing. Pianos resonate, they need wood. It is a synthesiser – it doesn’t resonate. It’s certainly a pretty keyboard but I bet you the smaller BOOG rack version doesn’t sound any different. I chose the larger model simply because wood will keep its value for longer due to all the woody BS.
Another annoyance is that you’ll have to connect a computer to change some of the settings. Like when I tried to use the arpeggio straight out of the box it worked for the first try then stopped dead. The internal/external synch is set by sys-x … that’s not live show ready.
As for whether it sounds like a real MOOG have a look at this eBay price for ‘the real thing’.
I really don’t care.