Review: Moog Muse
If you can afford a hatchback, you can afford a Muse polysynth. We take Moog’s latest monster for a test drive
29 November 2024
Review: Corey Hague
Loading up the Moog Muse into the back of my old hatchback, it occurred to me that the synth is probably worth more than my car. And that’s okay – hatchbacks are a dime-a-dozen, a polysynth from Moog is altogether more rare and interesting. And to be fair, it’s a lot more affordable than its sister poly, the Moog One, which came out in 2018 and is worth more than a <new> hatchback.
Once the Muse was carefully chauffeured home to the test studio, there were no more thoughts of cars. The only thought was about getting it plugged in and seeing what it can do. Oh, and finding a sturdy place for it to live, because at around 15 kilograms, the Muse will not be happy on that cheapie keyboard stand every music room seems to have hanging around.
Thankfully, it’s not just heavy in the way that many old synths can be, it’s genuinely well made and feels solid across the board – from the wood side cheeks to the Fatar 61-note semi-weighted keyboard with aftertouch, it’s a serious piece of kit with no shortcuts taken in construction. That includes the control panel too – it’s covered in knobs, sliders, buttons, rockers and little triangle toggles. The Muse uses all the tactile options available in a pleasingly retro way. Visually, it’s a slight departure for Moog but it’s logically designed. Different control options are used for different techniques or to differentiate signal flow across the front panel.
SYSTEMS GO
Turning the Muse on did give me a minor heart attack: in the 70 seconds it takes to power up, I thought I’d somehow broken it in transit. Thankfully, after a nerve-wracking wait, the Muse happily sprang to life complete with enough LEDs to earn a cameo in a sci-fi flick. It’s another reminder of the clever design that’s at play with this synth – it’s a modern digital brain controlling an analogue body. Moog even suggests that you allow it to warm up for a few minutes before playing it, which is as analogue as it gets.
One of the biggest drawcards of that digital brain is the ability to have banks of presets – allowing you to quickly jump around and audition sounds. It mightn’t seem like a big deal if you’re coming from a plug-in world, but when you roam through the Muse patches you begin to understand the impressive breadth of sounds it’s capable of. It also manages to swap through patches rapidly and with little lag or noisy overhanging notes, which is not always the case for analogue polysynths, even modern ones.
SOUNDS LIKE?
So what does it sound like? Whatever you want it to sound like, pretty much. It can give you the classic Moog basses or tearing leads but it can also give you wide morphing pads, plinky arpeggiations or crunchy percussion. It can deliver unhinged bleeps and bloops or surprisingly convincing electric pianos. With three oscillators, eight analogue voices and two timbral layers, it can really do it all.
The first few hours were spent enjoying the ability to play chords on a Moog, something that really hasn’t ever been an option. But it was when I started diving into the controls and tweaking some sounds that I started to discover what makes the Muse so impressive, and worthy of genuine consideration for anyone considering a serious synth in their setup.
The first thing is that it has a distinctive ‘sound’ without being restricted or defined by that sound. What that means is that while it displays all the best traits of Moog oscillators and filters, it isn’t constrained by it the way many synths are.
A DSI Rev 2 sounds great, but it always sounds like a Rev 2, no matter what combo of settings you give it. Somehow, the Muse manages to avoid this fate, which is a huge achievement. It makes it truly compelling as a single synth that’s capable of many different colours and shades in your studio or performance arsenal.
NEED TO KNOW
Moog Muse
8-Voice Analogue Synthesizer
An easier way to explain it may be that when you find a patch you like, it’s highly likely that it sounds good right across the keyboard, from barely audible sub bass all the way to canine bothering high notes. That has rarely been my experience with hardware synths, even from coveted, highly-desirable models.
Another way to think of it is to consider how many layers of a single synth can you have in one tune without it becoming swamped by similar timbres and textures? Often by the time you have three different synth passes in one tune you’re just piling sounds on top of sounds, even if you go to great lengths to try to differentiate notes and frequencies.
In this case, I could easily imagine making an entire tune only comprised of Muse sounds, including percussion and transitions, without it becoming a giant smear. A media or film composer could easily make it their core instrument and do amazing things.
SECOND IMPRESSIONS
The second thing that impressed me is how good it sounds when it’s not trying to sound good. Once you get over the honeymoon period of all the big impressive showroom patches and start to distress things a bit, Muse morphs from being spectacular into truly unique and full of flavour. It’s like discovering your crush also has a subversively dark sense of humour.
A common complaint with the Moog One was that getting it to sound a bit gritty required deep layers of sound design mastery. Moog must have listened to that feedback, because the Muse isn’t afraid of a bit of dirt and it gets there easily thanks to the noise generator and Overload sliders. As the name suggests, Overload adds drive to the mix with a circuit modelled on the CP-3 module from the 60s, and it almost always sounds good rather than just harsh.
When you start to push and pull at sounds, it’s quickly inspiring and it feels like a new synth rather than yet another clone. And recording the results of sounds that are just on the edge of being inaudible or are unstable make for some brilliant waveforms that can be further tweaked in a DAW, especially patches such as complex sub basses and gritty impacts.
while it displays all the best traits of Moog oscillators and filters, it isn’t constrained by it the way many synths are
EDIT TIME
The method of editing sounds is pretty straightforward with a minimum of menu diving or ‘shift’ keying – most parameters can be altered with the corresponding knob or slider, and if there are menu options, you can simply press the little triangle button to bring up the variables on the screen. Modulation routing is achieved by pressing the ‘Assign’ button from a source and it’s handy for a hardware synth to have such straightforward Ableton-style mapping. It works surprisingly well and you’re unlikely to get lost or accidentally alter a patch in a drastic manner, which is good for experimenting using existing patches as a starting point.
There’s also a sequencer onboard which provides pattern recording (live or step sequenced) complete with pitch, velocity and timbre data. Steps can also contain data for front panel controls or patch changes. And if that wasn’t enough, you can also tinker with ‘probability’ to further manipulate the sound and the repetition.
The arpeggiator is also capable of creating some amazingly rich and complex patterns and I spent plenty of time just playing notes up and down the keyboard and getting lost in the haze of results. Instant Terry Riley or Steve Reich which is never a bad thing.
FINAL MUSINGS
So is everything on the Muse utterly amazing? Almost.
The Diffusion Delay doesn’t do much for me but I’m prepared to accept I’m a delay snob and that others could very well appreciate what it adds to sounds. It’s not a terrible delay by any stretch and it offers plenty of flexibility and character, I’m just not sure it’s a better choice than a reverb or a phaser, particularly how impressive the stereo output is on the Muse.
And to be ultra nitpicky, the process of connecting the synth to a computer feels dated and unrefined thanks to the Muse simply showing up as a disk drive and allowing you to tinker with its banks and patches. It’s better than wrestling with sysex, but it would also be easy to make a mistake with the file structure or delete things you thought you were copying. It seems likely to be updated in the future, considering Muse also features a USB-A port that currently doesn’t do anything. And with an already robust marketplace for Muse presets, hopefully the process can become a little more elegant, because it seems a shame to not benefit from the incredible patches that will no doubt be designed for it.
There are other analogue or hybrid poly synths on the market that have more lengthy spec sheets and the promise of limitless waveforms, but the Muse has an X-factor that is very likely to make it a future classic.
RESPONSES