In his latest video, synthesist Alex Ball takes a look at the Moog Polymoog, aka the ‘Gary Numan Synth’.
Ball discusses the history of the Moog Polymoog, how it works, and how Gary Numan adopted one of the presets to help define his sound.
Topics covered:
0:00 Intro
0:41 What is the Polymoog?
8:00 Vox Humana and Gary Numan
13:35 Cars Cover
Alex, what a guy.
Polymoog, what a synth.
And Kraftwerk. The Model, and you did a bit of Neonlights here.
For me the Polymoog is always connected to ABBA. You can here its glorious sound on “Eagle” for example.
I got this from the Bob Moog Foundation. Sounds great! Nicely done sampling across the whole keyboard.
in cars. lol.
I watched it today from youtube because I’m subscribed to Alex’s channel.
When I play one of Gary Numan’s songs I prefer ‘Are friends electric’.
Thatfor I choose the older version of this synth. Because I feel like a person can dig out more nice sounds than the newer one.
Incredible video
It’s Alex Ball, so no surprise.
Alex’s input is always noteworthy. I bought his sound set for M-Tron Pro and its very useful. The sounds are cleaner than the usual Mellotron graininess and at the end of it… a set of tuned kazoos. 😀
I always found the Polymoog too thin, but it wasn’t Bob’s design. It was a brute force approach, typical of the time. Cherry Audio’s Polymode sounds like the best of my friend’s Polymoog and then some. It has some good solo voices, but its even better for support pads. Its partly a wad of EQs, so you can easily shape them to fit.