Minimoog: Portable Synthesizer

What would modern music sound like, were it not for the synthesizer? Electropop wouldn't exist, Ellie Goulding would be an acoustic act, and the Beatles' Abbey Road wouldn't have as much pizzazz. While modular synthesizers existed and were used in music studios, it's the Minimoog — the first portable analog synthesizer and the first-ever electronic analog instrument, pioneered by Robert Moog — that changed the sound of music. It graced the music scene in the 1970s, introducing electronic sound modulations to the music-making process and dramatically expanding the kinds of sounds that could be produced by an instrument.

Robert Moog's (rhymes with rogue) company was known for creating theremins — early electronic instruments — but he moved into new territory when he developed the analog, monophonic synthesizer in the 1960s. This synthesizer makes wave forms by electronic means, and it plays one note at a time. Moog developed standardized modules for the synthesizer sounds and proposed a standardized scale of voltages — the Moog oscillators and keyboard, for example, have a standard progression of one volt per octave. He debuted his prototype at the Audio Engineering Society conference in October 1964 and began taking orders.