Patch & Tweak With Moog A Love Letter (And How To And History) For Synthesizer Fans And Creators

Kim Bjorn does many things, including as a design professor at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Copenhagen. But he’s also a musician and music lover who’s tapped his book-publishing experience to write and produce a surprisingly hearty lineup of cross-genre books looking at the beloved tools of electronic music.

Bjorn’s Bjooks imprint recently published his latest labor of electronic love, Patch & Tweak with Moog, a mashup of history, how to, and love letter to the semi-modular synthesizers of Moog Music.

The dense, 200-page book is a more focused variant on an earlier Bjorn natural history of electronic music creation, also called Patch & Tweak, that explored the EuroRack modular synthesizers first popularized in the 1990s. That earlier book has since became something of a must-have for fans, bedroom producers and high-end creators alike, showing up on coffee tables in recording studios on a couple of continents.

The latest book comes with a forward by Oscar-winning synth god/soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer (The Lion King, Inception, The Crown). The book dives into the functions of Moog’s five current synthesizer models, with basic lessons on how to use them, and a decryption of the tsunami of acronyms that makes such tools mystifying to newcomers.

But the book is a lot of other things too. It sketches out the company’s colorful and complicated corporate history, and is festooned with more than 30 standalone interviews of Moog-loving creators such as Oscar and Grammy winner Trent Reznor (The Social Network, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), King Britt and Grammy winner Mark Isham.

Engineer Robert Moog’s eponymous company first made a mark in the 1960s as his company’s first massive, expensive devices landed in the hands of notables such as The Beatles, Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Over time, the company started creating devices for creators with more limited wallets, and recording space, beginning with the desktop-sized Minimoog.

Since then, the company has had its ups and downs, as the book chronicles. But the love affair with its hardware has survived changes in musical taste and production trends, the older models now part of a thriving aftermarket for classic synthesizers.

Bjorn says that affection is a result of complex emotional responses to what the uninitiated might consider an inscrutable hunk of silicon, metal and wires.

“I think it partly is because of the sound, partly because of nostalgia, but also again, with the instrument, sometimes it’s not about the sound, but about the experience of creating the sound, which I find fascinating,” Bjorn said.

It’s safe to say researching, writing and publishing Patch & Tweak with Moog was a labor of deep love for Bjorn, who as a young man became a father and set aside musical ambitions for more reliable income. Creating the latest Patch & Tweak allowed Bjorn to bury himself again in the addictive and creative intricacies of what the music industry calls “gear.”

“The book is trying to explain all the basics of these instruments,” Bjorn said. “And then it goes further by exploring those options within each instrument. And then even further by starting to do the patch connections, which I’ve had a lot of fun with. Sometimes I almost forgot I was writing a book. It was also an explorative process, which I think happens for a lot of people who do music. You can dive into the technology side of things and then you have to pull yourself back to songwriting structure, producing, all that stuff. And that’s this sine wave of being a creative, the left and right brain.”

And in part, that’s why Patch & Tweak is a physical book, rather than a digital one, even if its subject is very much about electronic, non-physical products.

“I never imagined actually, to be honest, that I should do books again,” Bjorn said. “I thought I was all into digital and have to design websites and apps and all that stuff. But I, probably as many others, got myself an Amazon
AMZN
e-reader, downloaded 30 books and I never read them. It’s really been emotionally distressing for a lot of people this whole year, and finding comfort in diving into a book, diving into an instrument, just being on your own terms, exploring. I think that is maybe that break from reality that we all need once in a while.”

Moog Music continues to create new musical instruments; earlier this fall it debuted the Claravox Centennial, a 100th-anniversary homage to the theremin, one of the first electronic generators of sounds not found in nature (though frequently found in soundtracks for 1950s sci-fi films).

The North Carolina-based Moog also has dived into a different kind of electronic music creation, rolling out a series of well regarded iOS/iPadOS apps that emulate its classic synths, including excellent versions of the Minimoog Model D and Model 15 Modular Synthesizer (though if you’re diving in here, make sure you also download the free AudioKit Synth One Synthesizer, created by a consortium of creators)

As for Bjorn, expect more Patch & Tweak books, though he declined to preview what’s next.

“I found something that I’m good at, and that I really enjoy,” Bjorn said. “Why not just keep doing it, because it seems to bring a lot of joy to other people. They learn their instruments better, they explore new things, and the makers and the users and the artists all seem to be happy about it. So why not? So there are definitely other books on the way, I can say so much.”

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