Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer

Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in almost any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer was truly revolutionary upon its initial appearance. It represented something radically new – an extraordinary rarity in musical culture – an instrument that employed a genuinely novel source of sound: electronics.

How this came to be – how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion – is the story told for the very first time in Analog Days. This compelling book explores the invention of the synthesizer and its profound impact on popular culture. The authors transport us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, a time when the technology was analogue, the synthesizer remained an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and often did transform into spontaneous 'happenings'.

Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would become and how it would be used – from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson – vividly recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and an entirely new world of sound. Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would ultimately provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.