A Moog for the Masses?

It was about four or five years ago that we read a pitch from Moog’s PR team for a synthesizer that was beautifully designed and emitted wonderfully textured sounds and cost as much as a down payment on a small house.

It wasn’t the first or last pitch for a Moog product priced in chunks of an annual wage but with cities burning and unemployment at a 70 year high, I just couldn’t think of anything less relevant at that moment than a $7,000 synthesizer. Gear coverage is often aspirational. It’s pornography. I’m writing analog pornography and you’re reading it. Few will buy but many will fantasize about it. Quite a lot of Moog’s catalog is like this.

So the rumors and leaks about the company producing an “entry level” Moog were dynamite. Messenger is not the first product released by the brand after its purchase by inMusic a year ago, but it’s probably the first to show its influence. There’s nothing “aspirational” about owning a Messenger. Not to get too gross after the pornography metaphor, but it’s a product from Moog that the reader can actually feel and touch.

Drilling down to the details, the Moog Messenger is a fairly compact analog monosynth that aspires to “re-imagine” signature Moog circuitry with modern features. Messenger features dual oscillators with wavefolding functionality, “a sub-oscillator with continuously variable waveshapes, dual looping ADSR envelopes, 32 semi-weighted full-size keys with velocity and aftertouch, and the legendary Moog ladder filter augmented with resonance bass compensation, multiple filter slopes, and true multimode functionality.”

To their credit, Messenger is not simply a cut-rate version of a premium product from Moog’s catalog dragged about as a lure for upselling. This is a new machine that will feel familiar to users of Novation’s Bass Station II and other products outside the Moog ecosystem.

Of course, “inexpensive” is a relative term. Calling a $900 synth “cheap” is sensible if you’ve just read about a Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D, which tops out at $5,500. Despite this, Messenger appears to be a product that has real potential to bring Moog’s unmatched quality down to a place where mere mortals can experience it without visiting a museum.

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