Minimoog Sound Design

Thanks to a friend getting a Behringer Model D (Boog from here on out), based on the modern Moog Minimoog, y’all now have this post. Enjoy 🙂 Oh and I did try to utilise ChatGPT for this post, but it’s really bad at technical things like synth patches. I stole a few patch names from it, but that’s all. Rest was just playing with my Boog to double-check patches I knew already.

The Minimoog is a fairly humble synth compared to modern ones. Three oscillators, a mixer, a lowpass filter, a VCA, 2 envelopes, an LFO, noise, and portamento. The oscillators don’t sync, but you can modulate the first two (and filter) with the third. You can also have noise, the LFO, or filter envelope do modulation, and can mix any two sources together for modulation. The filter will cut lows as you boost resonance (and on the Boog, the highpass will act more like an asymmetric notch filter). And every single part of the synth will saturate the signal in some way. It’s beautiful, and laid the groundwork for basically every modern synthesizer along with paving its own road to fame. And, much like the Arp 2600 that came after it with a largely similar, albeit much more modular, design, the Minimoog can be a sound design powerhouse once you learn how to use it. Here’s some patch ideas, both musical and experimental:

Lead: run two saws together in unison, modulated by osc3 and a bit of slow LFO, and set up the filter and amp envelopes to have slow attack and decay. set the filter to low cutoff and moderate resonance and mod amount.

Bass: the classic Minimoog bass is two saws in unison with a square an octave below, all at max, into the filter with minimum cutoff, about 75% resonance, 50% mod amount, and set both envelopes to be plucky decay envelopes. Flip the external input switch to add some nice sub-bass. Which reminds me…

Feedback Loop: In the olden days, you’d patch the headphone output to the external input for this, but now it’s hard-wired when not using an external input. Simply turn on the external input on the mixer and turn it up to get everything from distorted tones to extra phatness and even extreme sub-bass.

Ringmod: This is an old Octave Cat trick. Using the 3rd oscillator only, modulate the filter (with high resonance) with the oscillator. Keytrack the filter 100% and you should, in theory and accounting for tuning differences FM will create, have an almost ringmod-like sound. You get bonus glitchiness if you modulate the mod amount knob with your hands (because you can’t actually modulate it), especially when the oscillator frequency is set to a higher octave.

Pad: Use a combination of all three oscillators tuned to a chord and have the envelopes sweep very slowly. set the filter to no resonance and cutoff, set envelope modulation to half, and add a little vibrato with the LFO modulating both filter and oscillators. Add reverb for best effect.

Trance Stabs: Same as above but set the envelopes to be short and plucky.

Percussion: Use a fast attack and decay to create a short, snappy envelope, and experiment with different oscillator and filter settings to create a variety of percussive sounds. Some simpler ideas to build a typical drum kit: noise by itself can be a hi-hat, a high pitched triangle works as a woodblock, noise mixed with a short decay envelope moderately modulating a triangle oscillator an make a nice snare, a lower pitched snare with pink noise and moderate cutoff with moderate envelope amount makes a nice punchy kick, and you can always use filter pinging by turning off all sources in the mixer, setting resonance to max, setting the filter envelope to minimum, and setting decay for the amp envelope moderately.

Lead with Glide: Use the glide feature to create a lead sound with sliding notes. Really you can use this for bass and with any waveform/filter setup, but I like to do this with a saw+pulse tuned just barely apart, filter wide open, amp sustain at max.

Strings/brass: While not exactly accurate, you can use a combination of slightly detuned saws and pulses with all three oscillators along with moderate cutoff, low resonance and envelope amount, and long sweeping envelopes to make an old school string machine sound.

Noise Sweeps: Run either flavour of noise into the filter with a bit of resonance, and sweep it with a long attack and release. You can use this to create wind, ocean waves crashing, risers, downers, etc.

Sci-Fi Laser: Turn off all oscillators in the mixer, set the filter to half cutoff and max resonance with a short plucky envelope controlling it, and keytrack it. you’ll get the classic 70s sci-fi laser sound.

Unstable: set up any patch, but allow a tiny bit of pink noise to modulate the oscillators. it’ll give a slightly unstable sound, allowing you to set the mood for something creepy or whatever. Bonus points for mixing in vco3 as an lfo!

Spacey Ambience: This will require reverb BUT you can use the LFO, oscillator 3, and filter envelopes together to modulate the filter, which has both other oscillators playing a minor third or other fun 2-note chord. Set oscillator 3 to be a sharktooth wave off-time from the LFO (turn off keyboard control), and use the keyboard/midi to trigger the filter envelope. Apply heavy reverb and voila!

Vocal Sound: Despite not having a sample and hold, the minimoog can make a vocal patch. simply set VCO1 to 32’ saw at max volume and VCO3 to triangle, 2-4’, but off in the mixer, and set VCO3 to modulate the filter by about 75%. Set the filter to 25% cutoff and 60% resonance with a tiny amount of modulation from the moderate AD filter envelope, set amp envelope to sustain only, and you’re good!

Delay: Main point of this patch is utilising VCO3 in low frequency mode set to a saw wave to modulate the filter. With a long amplifier decay and low cutoff, and when the other two oscillators are doing anything at all, you’ll get a nice fake delay sound. Mix this with an even slower LFO to get delayed sounds with the filter opening and closing!

Sub Drop: Y’know that boomy sine drop before a big drop in like bigroom and stuff? Minimoog can do that too. Just set all the mixer section off, set the filter to minimum cutoff, maximum resonance, and about 25% envelope modulation, then set both envelopes to be long decay-only envelopes, and you’ll get that classic sound.

“Granular” Sound: OK, no, it’s not actually granular. It is cool though! Modulate the filter (minimum cutoff and resonance, moderate envelope amount) with pink noise, turn off the noise osc in the mixer and turn on any VCO(s) set to a high pitch. The random modulation along with generally low cutoff will intermittently and randomly cut the high pitched sound in and out, similar to a randomly-modulated granulator.

Hope you have fun with this! Be sure to play around with each patch, and trigger the synth (play notes, whatever) as you go between patches to find more and interesting new sounds. If you want more, check out the book (now free pdf), Minimoog Sound Charts by Tom Rhea. Sound on Sound’s Synth Secrets, which is a good read in general, has several patches designed specifically for the Minimoog, and because it’s an ancient synth that Behringer has so graciously sold to us for so little, almost anyone can go through decades of patch notes with their own little slice of history.