In the Moog
by "Laser"
What your Mother never told you about
the Moog Opus 3.

It looks plain enough. Even if you get the tech manual, it still looks like a plain multi-channel keyboard. Then you start to notice things. Like the organ is a fully functional organ, unlike most of the genre, it is not an organ preset or set of presets. To be sure, some things aren’t available like multiple trigger and electronic piano, clav or harpsichord sounds. Also the instrument is an octave lower than most, meaning if you want to play chords on the full organ you really can’t unless you start at the second octave which makes things kind of cramped as there are only 4 octaves of keys.

I will not bore you with things like how to mix the organ to the string section to make a decent organ and Leslie sound or the fact that the string section can be demodulated and filtered highpass, lowpass or bandpass with variable resonance. That’s in the book. To be sure it has its shortcomings, like the aforementioned lack of struck/plucked pitched sounds, no pulse wave other than square, no brass chorusing and no octave switch, but then, this was a $1300 instrument, not a $1700 like the Crumar Orchestrator, and the organ is really nice. So it’s pretty good and could earn its keep as a combo organ alone.

Of course, the owner’s manual tells you it’s a synth. Well, a bit of braggadocio? This manual was written by Herb Deutsch, the guy who introduced Bob Moog to full-bore electronic music as well as writing the book on synthesis. So there must be some justification to the claim. There are three persons in this field that I don’t second-guess, Bob Moog, Tom Rhea and Herb Deutsch.

Mix Dry to Wet

The Opus 3 has 3 outputs, Monaural, L and R. You’re going to use the L and R. Get a hold of a small mixer. I like the DOD passive mixer for this. Connect the L directly to one input and connect the R to your processor of choice then to another input. This lets you use the Pan feature of each of the 3 channels of the Opus’ mixer to mix from dry to wet. Yeah but why should I care? Because you’re gonna use it.

Rock and Roll Piano

Set up the following:
Strings: 1, filter to lowpass, CF about 50%, Emph about 40/50%, chorus off, mod off.
Brass middle position, free, Emph about 60%, attack =0 decay about 20% sustain=0 final decay on.
Articulation mode 2 attack=0 release=20%
Mixer: Organ off, strings and brass on.

Now, try it out with various settings of all the variable controls. The style of play is staccato so that before you play a new key, you have released the ones that are down. There ought to be a little "tail" on the sound. The brass will provided the attack transient and decay quickly to zero leaving the string sound, If you want to add some life, mix the string channel on instrument’s mixer toward wet until you have what you like. The settings I gave you are approximate and you should adjust to your own needs and liking. You may want to add some of the 8’ organ voice to provide some woodiness to the sound and wet that up a bit. This is an excellent patch for ‘50’s rock ‘n’ roll piano chords and some leads. Be sure to let go of any held keys before hitting others as this is a single-trigger instrument. If you do not, the attack transient will not sound. This is an ideal piano for the likes of "The Great Pretender" or other ‘50s/early ‘60s "doo wop" rock, and can play monophonic piano leads.

The Hidden Synthesizer

Believe it or not, you have a very powerful semi-modular synthesizer tucked away in this little bugger. Why don’t you stop right here and see if you can find it: Hint; it’s an additive synthesizer.

Give up? Click here for more information...

The Dirty Little Secret of the Moog Organ

If you consult the owners manual which was written by Herb Deutsch, who was a master synthesist, you will find that the "Organ" section of the Opus 3 uses square waves. The Hammond uses sine waves.

Why is this important? Well, if you look at the Hammond drawbar, you see the usual suspects; 16’, 8’, 4’, 2’ and 1’, but you also see some real bizarre looking numbers like 5-1/3, 2-2/3, 1-1/3 and like that. Well, the whole numbers; 16’, 8’ 4’ and like that are even harmonics and set an octave apart. The crazy looking ones are odd harmonics. On the Hammond, this usually means a fifth up from the nearest whole number except for the 1-3/5.

Now, go back to the Opus 3 organ section and all you see are the even numbers, you know 16, 8, 4 and so on. Raise the 16’ slider all the way up, push the tone control all the say up and play some notes that are next to each other. What you ought to hear is something in tune, yet not quite Therein lies the secret. Even harmonics are an octave apart from each other. Odd harmonics are just multiples of the fundamental.

Waveforms are just multiple sine waves overlaid on each other with the higher ones being progressively softer. Where the Hammond uses just the sine waves, the Opus 3 organ uses square waves and a non-resonant lowpass filter called "Tone". Square waves have only the fundamental or base frequency plus the odd harmonics in progressively descending levels. The net result of all of this is that it has sounds reminiscent of a Vox Continental.

Combo Organs (and a Hammond Percussion)

Unfortunately the Opus 3 uses the bottom 4 octaves - to get any good combo sounds you will need to omit the 16’ and lowest brass sounds in your patches. For a good Vox, mix the organ to the string and brass. The string section has a separate inaccessible filter that softens and resonates the organ section. Mixing to Brass will send the organ through the resonant VCF. Experiment here and don’t forget the vibrato.

To add percussion to a Hammond sound, mix the organ to string and brass and shut the organ mixer off, run the chorus as you like and set the brass filter for a percussive envelope, experiment with the mixer controls for string and brass until you have what you want.

For a Farfisa-like sound unmix the organ from string and brass, set the brass octave to the highest, moderate Emph and CF. Set the strings to both, the filter mode to highpass and the CF about 1/3 from the top. Go to the organ set the tone control between ¼ and ½ up and mix 8’, 4’, 2’. And 1’ at progressively higher settings, this is so that only the fundamental of each footage gets through the filter (the harmonics will be too soft to get through)

What you will have here, relative to the Farfisa will be strings 16’ and 8" (the Farfisa string voice sounds like a sawtooth wave through a slightly resonant highpass filter), the Trumpet voice at 8’ and the flutes at 16’, 8’, 4’ and 2’ (not 2-2/3) or you can push the 2’ so that some of the odd harmonics leak through the filter as it is not a "brick wall" filter but has some rolloff and a little of the 1’ just to add some edge.

For the green Farfisa tabs, the best I can do is set the brass octave all the way down and run it with high CF and medium Emph, the strings to 4" and the organ to 2’ and 1’ and mix it to brass, this give me the All Tone Boost 16’, 4’ and 2’ (the closest I can get to 2-2/3) but I lose the bottom octave because the KB is 16’.

Now, aren’t you glad you didn’t throw the Moog away when you got your DX-7?