Back in 1981, this synth boldly stepped into the future as Moog's very first with onboard patch memory, letting you save 16 presets and even dump them to cassette for endless sound storage—pretty revolutionary for hands-on analog gear back then.
At its heart, you've got two analog VCOs pumping out sawtooth, triangle, and variable-width pulse waves across a wide 32' to 1' range, syncable for that thick Moog bite, plus a noise generator for extra grit. Everything feeds into the classic 24dB/octave ladder filter with cutoff, resonance, keyboard tracking, and its own full ADSR contour generator, while a second ADSR handles the VCA. Controls ditch traditional knobs for a sleek membrane button panel and a single big data wheel that lights up values on the LED display, paired with a 37-note flat-panel keyboard, pitch/mod wheels, LFO for triangle/square mod duties, sample-and-hold, a 24-step arpeggiator, and a simple two-song sequencer holding up to 88 events each.
Players still geek out over its raw, versatile Moog tone—brassy leads, pounding basses, and snarly effects that hold up today—though some note the membrane switches can feel less responsive than chunky knobs after decades.
