inMusic Brands has donated 4,489 items from Bob Moog’s personal office files to the Bob Moog Foundation Archives, covering his final years at Moog Music and including hardware prototypes, handwritten engineering notes, and personal correspondence with some of electronic music’s most significant figures.
The collection includes more than 500 schematics and 700 letters, alongside hundreds of back issues of industry publications and rare product catalogs from peer companies spanning several decades of electronic music instrument history. Letters between Bob Moog and Wendy Carlos, Herb Deutsch, Felix Visser, and Lydia Kavina are among those awaiting further study. First drafts of book forewords and technical articles in Moog’s own hand are also part of the archive, as are schematic notebooks containing his handwritten engineering notes.
On the hardware side, the donation includes a Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular synthesizer, and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype. The Fairlight CMI is a notable inclusion: the Australian sample-based workstation, produced from the late 1970s onward, represents a distinct branch of electronic instrument development from Moog’s own analog work, and its presence among his office files speaks to the range of instruments he engaged with professionally. Rounding out the hardware are Moogerfooger prototypes, a Multiple Resonant Filter (MuRF) test fixture, and a Moog Phone Controller model PC-30. Sixteen multi-drawer cabinets filled with capacitors, integrated circuits, and other components used in building and servicing Moog instruments are also included.
The Foundation spent more than a year evaluating, documenting, and cataloging the collection before the announcement.
The Bob Moog Foundation serves as an essential steward of one of the most important legacies in electronic music. We are proud to contribute these materials so they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans.
Joe Richardson, President of Moog Music and Executive Vice President of inMusic
The Bob Moog Foundation is deeply grateful to inMusic for this incredible, generous donation of historical archival material. Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob’s complex, indelible legacy. This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history.
Michelle Moog-Koussa, Executive Director of the Bob Moog Foundation
This is not inMusic’s first contribution to the Archives. Previous donations include Bob Moog’s 2002 Technical Grammy Award and the original woodworking lathe used by Bob and his father George Moog to build early instrument cabinetry by hand.
The Bob Moog Foundation Archives holds over 15,000 items, including a 1954 R.A. Moog Co. Model 201 theremin and the recently acquired Model 351 theremin, Bob’s first-ever electronic instrument (the “Rensitron”), Herb Deutsch’s Melodia theremin from 1961 and R.A. Moog Co. Minimoog from 1971, an R.A. Moog Co. Troubadour theremin from 1962, two Moog modular synthesizers from 1967, a Musonics Minimoog, Gary Wright’s Moog Liberation keytar, the Polymoog Apollo prototype, and the first Minimoog Voyager ever sold. The collection is housed at the Moogseum in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
Bob Moog Foundation Archives
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