The so-called "Moog Sound" is kind of like plugging a Les Paul into a Marshall stack. An easy, yet somehow satisfying default. When I messed around with the Voyager XL in the lab where my wife's getting her PhD in composition, I was like, "Ooooooh." I didn't have to do anything and it sounded like the sound palette from Switched On Bach, something none of my equipment at home could do. And if you want that sound, that's your quick fix. Drop a couple of grand on some variety of Minimoog - just like dropping several grand on a Les Paul and a Marshall will immediately give you that particular sound.
What you do with it, however, is what is really important.
I started getting interested in this field as the late 90s virtual analog explosion was going on, and you'd see these dudes on Analogue Heaven waxing on about what toys these grooveboxes were, and how Rebirth doesn't sound enough like a REAL 303, and no real musician would use this cheap crap to make music.
It's funny to see those same people go on about how amazing The Fragile was. I wonder if any of those guys ever read about the gear Trent used to record that - Roland Grooveboxes, Rebirth (for The Way Out Is Through, no less), that circuit bent SK-1 he has, the Quasimidi Rave-o-Lution driving Starfuckers, recording to digital... all big no-nos. And you read all this shit about how to record acoustically, how you have to treat the room - and in every NIN studio shot from forever ago, dude just uses a mic in his big buzzy studio, no real effort to isolate sound or anything like that... I don't see anyone saying he could have made a better album if he'd stuck to high-end gear -- not that there was a shortage of high end gear either, of course. But I was happy to learn the lesson very early on that it's not always what you have so much as what you do with it.
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Originally Posted by Leviathant
