Sorting through the 4,489-piece donation took the Foundation over a year, and has tipped the archive collection to more than 15,000 items.
The Bob Moog Foundation has had one of its biggest hauls yet, with the parent company of Moog Music, inMusic Brands, donating 4,489 items sourced from Bob Moog’s personal office during his final years at the company. Among them are well over 500 schematics and 700 letters, alongside vintage synths and prototype models.
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Hardware-wise, the haul is a synth collector’s dream. A Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype are all in the mix, joined by Moogerfooger prototypes, a Multiple Resonant Filter test fixture and a Moog Phone Controller PC-30. There are also 16 multi-drawer cabinets packed with the capacitors, integrated circuits and other components used to build and repair Moog synths.
The collection includes hundreds of back issues of industry magazines and dozens of rare catalogues from almost every electronic instrument maker of recent decades, plus correspondence between Bob Moog and figures like Wendy Carlos, Herb Deutsch, Felix Visser and Lydia Kavina. First drafts of book forewords and technical articles are amongst them, along with handwritten engineering notes and artwork tucked into schematic notebooks.
Sorting and documenting such a huge donation took the Foundation well over a year.
“Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob’s complex, indelible legacy,” said Michelle Moog-Koussa, the Foundation’s Executive Director. “This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history.”
Earlier inMusic donations include Bob Moog’s 2002 Technical Grammy and the woodworking lathe he and his father George used to build cabinets for the earliest Moog instruments. Much of it the archive is on show at the Foundation’s Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina.
Learn more about the Bob Moog Foundation Archives here.
