True Music Legend Passes

While looking up information on funeral arrangements for a friend's grandfather, the KC Star informed me of the passing of Robert Moog. As much as Leo Fender and his fellows affected the rock-n-roll revolution of the '50s and '60s, Moog affected the music from the '70s to the present day. My first 'technology' job was working in the recording studio at the Conservatory of Music, KC. Our pride and joy was a full Moog Synthesizer housed in the second floor of the old Russell Stover mansion. In the '70s Wendy, then Walter Carlos led an avant-garde music explosion. Chip Davis, whose early Fresh Aire recordings used harpsichord and string tracks recorded here in KC, was another innovator in the new 'electronic' music. (I once met Chip's father while visiting the shop where he was constructing a harpsichord to be used in the Omaha based recording studios where the other tracks were laid down. Extra music-geek-trivia points for the first person to e-mail me the name of the hit recordings produced by this Omaha-based recording studio, whose popularity allowed the luxury of producing the high-quality classically-inspired Fresh-Aire records, which had zero commercial potential at the time.)

Now-a-days, entire recordings are produced in home studios that would have required hundreds of musicians and thousands of dollars 30 years ago. Mostly through the direct lineage of Moog's electronic descendents.

You never heard Moog or Fender.

But you heard the fruits of their labor. And the world was forever changed.

RIP Robert Moog

His life and his life's work spanned Millenniums.