Moog Music Minimoog Voyager XL - Manual (Page 2)

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Foreword
In early September 2005, Ileana Grams Moog asked me to go out to Bob’s place in the country and see what
the state of his workshop was. That day in North Carolina was impossibly beautiful. As we drove up a long,
windy gravel driveway in Turkey Cove, we came to this idyllic spot surrounded by mountain laurels, oaks and
babbling creeks. Standing there was a steel outbuilding eerily similar to my own workshop. This was the place
Bob called “Big Briar”.
Feeling a bit like Indiana Jones, we figured out which old key opened the building and turned on the
lights. Piles of papers, parts of electronics, old synthesizers, solder, screws, knobs, and tools were scattered
everywhere. Since I never had the chance to know Bob very well, I felt a little bit like I was transformed
back to a time when he must have been busy tinkering in his shop plying his unique blend of intuition and
intelligence.
After about an hour of poking around, my foot hit something hard on the floor – I looked down and there
was a black trash bag at my feet, just lying there like it had been abandoned and forgotten.
I opened it up and it was one of those moments when angels actually sing (of course, this time the voices
sounded very much like something from an old Wendy Carlos track…).
Inside this bag was a Minimoog in pristine condition. On it was a plaque stating it was one of the last 25 made
on the Minimoog line. I just started laughing. How BOB! This is how I was slowly starting to know him better;
this mythic instrument was probably brought in one night, placed on the floor as he headed to his workbench
to finish some circuit, and then forgotten.
The Minimoog has a very special place in the history of electronic instruments. They are loved, played, abused,
coveted, hidden away so as not be touched, talked about, blogged about, and on and on. They were noisy,
unstable, quirky, funky – everything that makes for a great soulmate! Now it’s 40 years later, and the Voyager
XL was born out of the desire to celebrate this history.
When we at Moog discussed this project, we decided that we needed to celebrate more than the Minimoog
per se, but the larger legacy of Bob’s work. To hark back to the original modular approach and to encourage
musicians to really take advantage of what I consider to be the singular most important aspect of our
instruments: the Control Voltage. Something so basic and simple but it is still revolutionizing the world of
sound.
The XL was born out of a lot of evolving ideas both internal and external since I have been here with Moog.
The request for a larger keyboard, the desire for Ribbon Controller, and for more LFO sources with different
ranges to further expand a musician’s ability to modulate – one of the most fundamental aspects of musicality.
We also felt strongly that this needed to be on the front panel. All these features needed to be immediate,
playable, and fully analog – they DEMAND you to craft your sounds and to architect your soundscapes in the
organic way that made the original modulars so magical.
The XL’s larger keyboard allows you to create much longer harmonic ideas but should also encourage you
to use this keyboard as a polyphonic controller and then further blow down the sonic doors by feeding
this polyphonic source back into the Voyager via the External Audio adding a whole other dimension of
possibilities!