There’s a new analog Moog effect in town. So who better to tell us about it and get us some hands-on time than Moog Music’s Chief Engineer?

Moog’s next Moogerfooger, the Cluster Flux or “MF-108M” if you want to sound more serious, promises to be a versatile analog effect processor. It’s a flanger / chorus / vibrato unit with loads of modulation, meaning you can either go the classic chorus/flange route or go further out with your sound sculpting. Mono in, stereo out, all-analog signal path, coming soon at US$599 list (street should be lower).

That’s the unit. But I often find it’s most interesting to talk to the people who actually design the gear. At our Handmade Music event, presented with Moog and curated by myself and Wilco’s lead keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, we had gathered a bunch of makers of musical devices, from independent one-off production to, well, Moog. Getting to talk to each other was a real gift; makers confessed what attracted them to electronic music instrument making, and the trial and error necessary to make something. (Yes, there are even trials with experienced engineers at mighty Moog.) Videos of all of that will be appearing in the coming days.

Cyril Lance is Chief Engineer at Moog. He’s the guy who’s led a lot of the work behind the MF-108M and many other recent Moog Music inventions. When he talks about the Cluster Flux, it seems he can barely contain a certain glee at why he’s excited to produce it, and what he believes makes it special. And we had a blast with him, not only talking Moog but playing with everything else in our Handmade Music Lounge.

This isn’t a review; it’s a chance to listen to one of the makers of the box talk directly about why it makes him happy. I look forward to getting a Cluster Flux when it’s ready. Our impromptu sound is, not surprisingly, less-than stellar. So, I asked Moog Music to record for CDM some exclusive audio snippets of the Moogerfooger in action – totally dry, just a Moog guitar, the MF-108M, and an amp. Sounds included via the CDM SoundCloud account below:

Moogerfooger Cluster Flux MF-108 – Exclusive Demo Sounds by cdm

Otherwise, you’ll have to take my word for it: whether this box is for you or not, I have to say, it sounds really brilliant. I spent a big chunk of the afternoon with our MeeBlip open source synth hooked up to the Cluster Flux, and I could get used to the combination. (Glad we could share the MeeBlip with Moog, too!)

Coming soon: videos of some of the other folks we shot at Mass MOCA, conversations about making, and a broader chat with Cyril about what it’s like running engineering for Moog (and, incidentally, why he’s excited about the DIY movement, even if it might make things that compete with Moog’s own offerings).

More on the Moogerfooger:
Moogerfooger Cluster Flux: Flanger + Chorus + Vibrato + LFO; Pricing and Availability Details [CDM]

Coming Soon: The Moogerfooger MF-108M Cluster Flux [Moog Music News]

And some specs/features (most illustrated in the video above):

LFO waveforms: Sine, Triangle, Square, Saw, Ramp and Random

MIDI in, for control of Delay Time, Range, Feedback, Output Level, LFO Waveform, LFO Rate, LFO Amount and Mix

CV control of Delay Time, LFO Rate, Feedback, LFO Amount, Mix

LFO sync to MIDI Clock or Tap Tempo

Send/Return Insert for external processing of BBD feedback loop

Configurable Stereo Out

Spillover mode, for “drones and other feedback effects” (actually, didn’t get to play with this one, so we’ll have to do that in the review … I love me some drones.)

Delay Time, Mix, and Feedback configurable in Chorus

Wide-ranging LFO rate (yeah, this bit is a lot of fun)

Bi-polar feedback for flanging, even or odd harmonic emphasis (again, lots of fun, got to play a little but hope to play more)

Full details on the Moog site; more to come.

“Bi-polar feedback” sounds a little bit like Web comments, so it’s worth saying this: I heard the feedback loud and clear that you’d like to see a wider variety of coverage of this kind of gear. We’re on it. It takes some time, but I’d absolutely love to see this kind of coverage — looking in-depth at the gear and talking to the maker — of more devices. And whatever our name may or may not imply, that includes hardware as well as software, analog as well as digital. (Analog and digital circuitry coexist in most gear these days in some sense – certainly, you can find something digital in almost anything analog since the year I was born, so our name lets us do whatever we want.)

I was stunned last week to learn of the death of Keith Barr, the founder of Alesis and a beloved, legendary engineer of music technology. He was 61. An analog engineer gone digital, he led the charge to make digital reverb and studio recording affordable, and even after his Alesis years continued to be one of music’s great engineering minds.

Our condolences to Barr’s surviving family and to the countless friends and colleagues in the music industry and beyond.

Our friend James Grahame, Retro Thing founder and himself an engineer (via Reflex Audio and others, shares his memory of Keith with us:

Keith Barr was a musician’s engineer – his chip designs were all about sounding good rather than padding out spec sheets. A case in point is the Spin Semiconductor FV-1 reverb IC he designed in 2006. It uses a cheap 32.768 kHz crystal that you’d usually see in a real time clock circuit., generating an ADC/ DAC bandwidth of only 15 kHz. He commented that you could run the device from a 48 kHz clock, but you’d simply chew through delay memory faster without dramatically increasing the quality of the audio.

He also gave back to the engineering community by writing ASIC Design in the Silicon Sandbox: A Complete Guide to Building Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits, in which he core dumps everything he’s learned about mixed signal chip design (including a business tips). The Spin FV-1 was designed at the same time he was writing his book, and it brings many of the ideas he writes about to life in stereo. In fact, the Spin Semi site is filled with stuff that’s usually kept inside R&D departments. The chip is extremely well documented with all kinds of useful design philosophies, code snippets and ideas hidden away in the knowledge base. I was stunned by his willingness to share his secrets, and by his almost childlike glee when someone did something unexpected with them.

A brief timeline:

• 1949: Keith Barr is born; spends teen years working with electronics and science
• 1973: Barr co-founds MXR Innovations, maker of a renowned line of pedals (hello, Van Halen)
• 1984: Barr founds Alesis Electronics in Hollywood. Barr focuses on engineering.
• 1985: The XT Reverb, created by Barr, is Alesis’ first product, and a landmark in making digital reverb accessible for the first time at US$799. It’s closely followed by the MIDIverb.
• 1987: Alesis makes a name for itself in sequencers (MMT8) and drum machines (HR-16), teaming up with Marcus Ryle (later founder of Line 6).
• 1987-1991: Barr conceptualizes a compact pro studio recorder, powered by digital tech. The result, released in 1991 as the ADAT, transforms the world of digital recording. (George Petersen for MIX points out this takes the price from Sony’s offering at $150,000 to the ADAT at $3995.)
• 2000: Barr is behind the Andromeda analog synth, arguably the instrument that helps launch a resurgent interest in new analog synths. He also uses his brilliant use of economy to produce cheap, fun instruments with gestural control, starting with the AirFX and 2001′s AirSynth.
• 2001: The victim of a changing business (and waning demand for ADAT), Alesis files for bankruptcy and is acquired by Jack O’Donnell, resulting in its reorganization as part of Numark. Barr leaves Alesis.
• 2002-2010: Barr goes on to innovate in integrated digital chip design, as founder and President of Spin Semiconductor. He continues to create ground-breaking designs, shares free DSP code, and literally writes the book on ASIC design for sound. Spin carries on this legacy of affordability with ASICs combining extensive processing features in single, affordable boards..

Barr remained focused on the future up to his death last week; while he cut his teeth on tube circuits, he had recently led the industry in exploiting ASICs for musical purposes. (ASIC stands for “Application-specific integrated circuit”; by building circuits specific to a purpose, they’re inexpensive, efficient circuitry tailored to a specific purpose, like audio processing.)

Spin’s own description of Barr sums up his vision:

Although an analog engineer at heart, he designs computer architectures, the most recent of which is the FV-1 processor (Spin’s first product). Keith sees ASIC design as the next step in electronics engineering, and designs all of his circuits from the bottom up, from the transistor level.

I hope that Barr’s designs will continue to have a future in production, and that we can bring more news soon.

Obituaries and more information:
Keith Barr – Alesis founder – In Memoriam: Pioneering inventor of Alesis ADAT, MIDIverb and MXR effects passes away [Sound on Sound]
RIP Keith Barr – Founder of Alesis and MXR [Matrixsynth, who also recalls the making of the Andromeda A6]

An extended obituary and history of Keith’s life by George Petersen:
In Memoriam: Keith Barr 1949-2010 [Mix]

Barr’s book:
ASIC Design in the Silicon Sandbox [McGrawHill] / Amazon link

Updated: Sean Costello adds, via comments:

I put up my own memorial post about Keith Barr on my blog:

http://valhalladsp.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/rip-keith-barr/

I shared Keith’s story about how he created the original MIDIverb, and how his intention was to create the world’s cheapest digital reverb, rather than competing with Lexicon et al. His later reverb designs were quite excellent, and he shared a great deal on the Spin Semiconductor website and via email.

Keith seemed like a really nice guy, and was clearly enthusiastic about his subject, even after several decades of being in the thick of it.

Thanks, Sean.

You can be making incredible music, but if no one knows about it you probably won’t be making it for very long. Having a good project name is the first step to getting publicity and having your music heard by a large amount of people.

Don’t be difficult. It has to be easy to pronounce and say over the phone. Try to avoid using numbers for letters (leet speak) since it will confuse people. Yes, there are exceptions like “!!!,” μ-siq, and whatnot, but the object is to make it easy for the press to write about you and for people to talk about you. While you’re welcome to choose a difficult name, it’s only going to make the rest of your publicity efforts that much harder.

Steer clear of profanity. While James Fucking Friedman has a somewhat high profile, whenever he gets listed in local papers that don’t allow profanity they star out either the entire middle word or just use stars after the F. People will get confused–”Did they star out ‘Faggot,’ ‘Fucking,’ or ‘Fellatio’? Should I Google for James Star Star Star?” Also profanity limits the types of publications that will feature you. While XLR8R and URB are magazines that are pretty laid back about their language, you might one day discover that your music has an interesting crossover audience (be it mountain climbers or acoustic engineers) and you want to make it easy for those types of journalists to approach you and write about you and your music.

It sounds good. Pick three of your favorite names. Say them out loud. Ask some friends what they think and notice how they respond. Do they laugh out loud when you’re aiming for a super serious image (“Abfahrt Hinwil” might cause some giggling)? It may sound obvious, but electronic musicians who tend to work alone and communicate through their computers could use some IRL human feedback once in a while.

No one else has it. While I wouldn’t say you should register for a trademark just yet, you should research as best you can if anyone else is using your name. You don’t want to shell out money for a domain name and spend years growing your project and fan base just to be hit with a cease and desist or worse, a lawsuit (look at Dan Snaith’s Caribou (formerly Manitoba) debacle.) Do some web searches to see if you can determine if anyone’s using your name. The US Patent office has an online search engine called TESS where you can search for trademarks in use. Search for all the words in your desired name, and then search for each one alone and see if they return anything similar. If you’re considering trademarking your name, it’s a very good idea but it will cost you a few hundred bucks. You can file online and read more here: http://www.uspto.gov.

It can be you, as long as you’re not already in use. You can use your own name as long as it’s not in use already and you won’t be confused for someone else. Can you imagine being the second Derrick May in Detroit? You might get a huge turnout for your first gig but the promoter and venue will hate you after the riot of pissed off people who thought they bought tickets to see one of the godfathers of Detroit techno. This second Derrick May in question used his middle name instead to avoid confusion, resulting in Derrick Michael.

Webify it. Get a domain name when you’ve settled on your choice. Although you might just want to use Myspace as your website, Myspace is not press-friendly, and if you adopt that early-90s bad-website look with repeating graphic as the background or garish colors it’s going to be unreadable (and incredibly annoying). Plus, with your own website you have total control over your image and don’t have to worry about deleting comments and photos posted by jerks. Then check to see if your choice is a domain in use already. I got lucky because mine is a completely made up word (Quantazelle) so the domain was available. If it’s not, see if you can add “music” “sounds,” or something else to the end of it and then grab it. If not, you might consider finding a different name, but it’s not a deal killer. While you might want to opt for something clever as your domain name, you want to make it easy for people to find information about you. A web search for your project name should return your site as one of the first results because your name is in the domain itself.

Some ideas for generating project names:

Take a passage from a favorite work of literature or a poem,. For example, “Joy Division” is from The House of Dolls by Karol Cetinsky.

Use an anagram. Aphex Twin relied heavily on this to name many of his songs. “Acrid Avid Jam Shred” on I Care Because You Do is an anagram of “Richard D. James”. Here’s an online anagram generator to experiment with: wordsmith.org/anagram.

Try playing with this emo-band name generator: www.bandnamemaker.com

Check out this tool for generating band names: www.greatnameforaband.com. On my first try I got “Galacticide” which is actually really cool.

Here’s another one: www.bandlookup.com. I put in “bandpass’ and got such gems as “Bandpass Disorder” and “Half-Ass Bandpass.”

Create an alias by generating combinations of male or female names with last names: kleimo.com/random. An example of this in action is “Malcom Kipe” who is actually Nautilis aka Skyler McGlothlin.

Take a hint from the Dada-ist poetry methods of William S. Burrows and do a “cut-up.” Grab a newspaper or any other sliceable piece of literature and cut out a bunch of words from it. Then toss them on a flat surface and see what interesting combinations happen.

Make a portmanteau. “Devo” is a concatenation of “de-evolution.” “Quantazelle” is a combination of “Quantum and Gazelle.”

Create a phrase that congers up imagery of what your music sounds like, such as “Explosions in the Sky.” It’s a little difficult if you’re not a poetic or literary type, but you can ask other people for help. Just say “If you could think of an image that sounds like my music, what would it be?” Gathering a group of people in a room together along with some alcohol or other relaxing substance is a very conducive environment for name generating.

So now that you’re better equipped for the first part of your publicity efforts, why don’t you get started on that brainstorming? Good luck!