Moog Labyrinth

A synth of many paths, Moog’s latest semi‑modular may well see you getting lost completely.

Having spent some time wandering the pathways of the Moog Labyrinth I can confirm that it is a bit of a maze. While you can approach it through a single, unicursal thought process, it will quickly pull you through cunning and elaborate multicursal branches of unexplored ideas. It has enough twists and turns to keep even the most curious Minotaur trapped within its electronic explorations. Will you conquer the Labyrinth like Theseus, or lark about within its folds like Bowie the Goblin King? I may be mixing up my Greek myths with the Muppets but whichever path you choose, Moog promise you a classic adventure. Let’s just hope we don’t end up in the Bog Of Eternal Stench.

The Labyrinth is an interesting departure from the usual Moog trajectory. The form fits pleasingly into the now alarmingly tall tower of 60HP wooden‑cheeked semi‑modular units that kicked off with the Mother‑32. But the function is much less familiar. Scanning the front panel we have a wavefolder, inspired perhaps by the Mavis, and we have what in modular terms you would call a complex oscillator consisting of a pair of VCOs where one is designed to modulate the other. We have the curious inclusion of a pair of eight‑step sequencers that appear to be shiftable, flippable and corruptible, and finally the relative safety of a voltage‑controlled filter. It’s a mixture of West Coast and East Coast processes where the generation of harmonics is being leaned heavily into.

I lost a whole morning to a pre‑manual‑reading fiddle. It started with some rather underwhelming noises triggered by hitting the big red Run button, but over time, as I twiddled knobs and pushed buttons, certain interactions started making sense. I was able to pull the noise away, discover folded tones, push into FM clangs and then filter like I know what I’m doing and then, seemingly without warning, nothing was doing what I thought. The large friendly knobs sometimes do a lot and sometimes only a little whereas the fiddly little stubby ones have masses of impact. The sequencers initially feel a bit straight‑laced, but with some encouragement and bold button pressing it falls into some very playful rhythms and phrases. You get the sense you’re going to get the hang of it while at the same time never quite finding the same road twice.

Oscillators & Ordering

The Labyrinth explores some sonic fields that Moog have only dabbled in up to now. The structure, which at times wanders off into many twists and turns, is based upon a two‑oscillator interaction. A sine wave VCO carries the tune while a lower‑ranged triangle wave ‘Mod VCO’ brings in the modulation, although the Mod VCO can be encourage to play notes too. The oscillators meet at a mixer where they are also introduced to a variable noise generator and a ring‑modulated version of the two signals. The little knobs find unity at 12 o’clock, giving you a lot of room for some waveform‑flattening saturation as you push them to the right.

The mixer gives way to a fork in the road between synthesis styles. One path leads to complex spectral generation, the other to the more familiar Moog territory of subtractive synthesis. In simpler terms, do you want to go through a wavefolder or a filter? Ultimately everything goes through both and only at the end can you adjust the blend of which outcome you want to hear. You can tackle this in three ways. Crash through the wavefolder first, then filter out those pesky harmonics, or you can filter first and then fold the result. The third way is in parallel where both do their own thing before meeting at the Blend knob.

I found exploring the ordering of the circuits to be quite invigorating. If you go to the filter first, or in parallel, you find that the sine and triangle waveforms don’t give you much to get the filter’s teeth into. And so it encourages you to push the Mod VCO into the VCO to generate some more complex FM waveforms, which tends to send you on a bit of a side‑quest. But also, the Blend knob subverts the structure because whether the filter goes through the folder, or the folder goes through the filter, you’re still blending the output of both circuits. So your best bet is to experiment and see what happens, which will be a recurring theme with this synth.

The Labyrinth’s back panel is as Spartan as the rest of Moog’s 60HP range, with just a socket for the 12V external power supply and a single quarter‑inch audio/headphone out.

Wavefolding & Filtering

The wavefolder is a diode‑transistor hybrid that when combined with the VCW Bias control can produce nicely complex harmonics from the basic waveforms. Put it at the end of the chain and you are folding already complex waveforms into some very interesting spaces that are sometimes beautiful and sometimes distorted. The VCW Bias adds some positive or negative DC bias to the signal that feels like everything is getting pulled sideways as it turns itself inside out. It’s a nice feeling, though.

The filter is not the usual Moog ladder filter. Instead, we get a state‑variable VCF that can morph between low‑pass and band‑pass modes. It has a 2‑pole slope and some very well‑behaved and possibly too restrained resonance. If you patch a pulse into its input you can ping out some really mellow tones that, if run through the wavefolder, give you a whole other little synth voice to play with that’s very different in character to the main VCO.

The loss of the familiar warmth of the ladder is compensated for by this filter’s versatility. It’s different, has a more aggressive vibe and there’s no drop off at all when you increase the resonance. If you are overdriving through the mixer the filter can get deliciously gnarly, although, because of the blending and re‑ordering of the circuits you’re not always sure where the gnarliness is coming from (and actually the wavefolder should probably take more of the blame).

Modulation

For modulation we have the Mod VCO, which is normalled to the main VCO FM input. It can be dialled down to a few seconds of LFO and patched into other things via the patchbay. And there are two envelopes. EG1 can be applied internally to the pitch of each oscillator, the wavefolder amount and the filter cutoff. You have a bipolar amount knob controlling each of those. EG2 is wired directly to the VCA.

The envelopes are decay‑only and range from around 10ms to 5 seconds. So, there are no lazy climbs of modulation, no sustains, holds or releases, it’s all about the fall. With all the nods to West Coast synthesis you have to imagine that low‑pass gates were considered as an option for Labyrinth. A decay envelope does make more sense for filter control, and removing the attack keeps everything percussive and Buchla‑like to some degree. East Coast synthesists may find the envelopes a little underwhelming but within the context of the sequencer and a DFAM‑like interest in percussion, they are exactly what they need to be.

Sequencing

Each of the Moog desktop synths has had its own unique source of rhythm and movement: from the menace of the step‑sequencing Mother‑32, through the straight‑talking eight steps of the DFAM, to the polyrhythmic structures of the Subharmonicon. Each time we have something new to explore and the Labyrinth does not disappoint. This time we have two sequencers that are independent, combinable, generative and thoroughly corruptible.

Moog have opted to use the word ‘Bits’ to describe the eight steps of the sequencers, alluding to its generative nature as a shift‑register circuit similar to the Buchla 266 Source of Uncertainty. You may also be familiar with the Music Thing Turing Machine, and there are definitely elements of that in here. But where those modules are purely generative in gate and pitch, Moog have taken a more hybrid approach.

Through the use of a couple of button combos you can empty the sequencer’s buffer and start afresh with all the Bits set to off. Using the ‘Bit Flip’ button you can change the state of the current Bit from off to on or on to off and so effectively advance through the eight Bits and program a gate pattern to fire the envelopes. But the Labyrinth doesn’t really want you to do that; it wants to generate the sequence for you through corruption.

However, before we unleash the mutations let’s go back a Bit (step) and look at how the sequencers interact with the Labyrinth’s pathways. When you flip a Bit to ‘on’ it gets assigned a random value between +5V and ‑5V. These values are normalled to a couple of places. Seq1 is patched to the frequency of the VCO and the position of the wavefolder. Seq2 controls the frequency of the Mod VCO and the cutoff of the filter. Each of those controls has an attenuator to set the amount of influence the sequencer has over it. For the oscillators, if you turn the sequencer amount knob all the way to the right it hits a mark labelled QTZ, and the voltages become quantised to notes. You now have two sequencers running the two oscillators independently, quantised to one of 16 selectable scales. You can scale the range of notes of each sequencer from between 1 to 10 octaves using the CV Range knob.

The first bit of cleverness comes along with the way the sequencers interact with the envelopes. Both sequencers trigger both envelopes, but you can control how that happens through the groove‑commanding EG Trig Mix control. Fully left and only the enabled Bits from Seq1 fire the envelopes. Fully right it’s only the Bits from Seq2. As you turn the knob away from the extremes and towards to the middle position the height (or velocity) of the envelopes reduces and you start to get the small bumps from the other sequencers’ triggers as they are mixed in. When you get to the middle both sequencers are firing the envelopes at 50 percent. The neat effect is that when both sequencers fire at the same time you get 100‑percent envelope, which gives it a sort of accented boom. There’s a competing, playful interaction based on how the individual rhythms correspond. Throwing the knob to the left or right during performance lets you tap into a blend of rhythms and counter‑rhythms. It’s quite brilliant.

The other bits of cleverness revolve around some button pressing. Pushing ‘Bit Shift’ shifts the entire sequence one step to the right, with the last Bit wrapping around to the front. The Length button shaves off a Bit at a time to reduce the sequence all the way down to a single Bit. This causes all sorts of variations and puts the timing of the two sequencers, which have stayed together up until now, pleasingly out of whack. You’ve got lots of ways to vary and influence the rhythm and you can also use the Bit Flip button on the fly. However, if competing sequences is not your thing then the Chain Seq button combines the two sequencers into a single 16‑step (Bit) sequence. It does this seamlessly on playback so you can kick off with a single sequence playing both oscillators and then drop into two sequencers running an oscillator each, without missing a beat. A Reset button is available for putting both back to Bit 1.

All these elements come together to form a fabulously interesting intermingling of rhythms and random values. Now it’s time to bring the generation, or as Moog like to call it, corruption. The Corrupt knob and its ability to mutate the sequences is a dramatic way of saying it can generate new gates and new notes. But again, it’s quite clever. From the left to the middle the knob increases the probability that the value of an existing note will change, up to only about 25 percent, so it’s quite a mild mutation. Once you get past 12 o’clock it starts to introduce the idea that the Bit might also flip as the likelihood of note change increases. Turn it all the way and you’re into full‑on Turing Machine territory where each Bit rolls the dice on both its note and being flipped, resulting in an ever‑changing rhythm and melody.

Tonal Excitement

With the sequencing engine pumping out beats it’s time to turn our attention to the tonal qualities of the Labyrinth. The sine and triangle waveforms are all very pleasant, but you are unlikely to hang around there for very long. The Labyrinth wants you to uncover more complex waveforms. Simply turning up both VCOs in the mixer is an opportunity for detuned beating and waveform interaction. If you run the Mod VCO down at LFO speeds it will secretly modulate the VCW Bias just to make you feel unsettled. You can run the VCOs in unison, although the lack of any fine‑tuning controls makes that more difficult than I’d like.

Proper cross‑modulation is available by routing the Mod VCO directly into the FM input on the VCO. It’s a through‑zero circuit and so remains cheerfully tuneful as the oscillators pull, pulse and clang into each other. Add the Mod VCO being sequenced as it modulates or the envelopes dragging on the pitch into the mix and you have a huge range of tones available before you even think about introducing the ring mod or noise to the equation, or diving into the folding and filtering paths.

Many synths claim to have endless possibilities and yet often sound so familiar, whereas the Labyrinth seems to have something new and unexplored around every corner.

With simple waveforms the wavefolding is a delight. With complex FM tones the wavefolding gets intense and spiky. Clangs and metallic scrapes explode and bubble as the rhythms clash and titans fall. Every knob seems to contribute a different something to the chaos as exotic ideas beep and emerge from the complexity. You can quickly move from competing melodies to kicks to zaps to resonant snares and huge rumbling beats with just a few twists. There’s something about the blending of the parallel paths that’s really clever. It’s like even when rearranging the filter and folder you can still pull the output of each and balance the results of the ordering. Many synths claim to have endless possibilities and yet often sound so familiar, whereas the Labyrinth seems to have something new and unexplored around every corner.

Patchbay

While we might start to feel confident that we’ve unravelled the Labyrinth, there’s a 32‑point patchbay that would suggest otherwise. Here you can play the oscillators independently, run external sources into the filter and wavefolder and modulate the folding and cutoff. There’s a utility mixer that is normalled to the ring modulator or can be used to mix audio or control voltage and has level control over input 1. The envelopes get outputs, as do the sequencer CV and triggers. Other perhaps more interesting sockets let you flip the Bits, modulate the blend between VCW and VCF and apply different clocks to the two sequencers.

There’s also a MIDI in TRS port, which will play and trigger notes, and handle MIDI Clock and transport controls. The MIDI notes come in through the sequencer and play both oscillators provided they have their Seq Amt knobs dialled up to QTZ. Playing with a keyboard tends to highlight the raucousness of the oscillator interaction. You have to work quite hard to get them in tune and strip them back to pure unmodulated waveforms. But when you get it right and you slap in an external sequence or arpeggiator, you break out a whole other synthesizer experience that leans into the filter and the wavefolding in deliciously blended ways.

Odds & Ends

I was happy to see that the box, packaging, poster and build quality was exactly as we’ve come to expect from Moog. It came with these fabulous cardboard patch sheets that fit over the top of the Labyrinth so you can dial in some Moog‑approved presets. There’s a slight uneasiness in the synth community about Moog going through a change of ownership and what that might mean for products going forward. Other than slight differences in the screen print, especially around the sizing of the instrument’s name, the knobs, buttons and switches are identical to the other models, although this would have been in production way before any change was hinted at.

The Labyrinth comes supplied with a selection of patch overlay cards, some snazzy Moog artwork and a selection of patch cables.

If the included poster is anything to go by then I get the impression that Moog are sensitive about this. The artwork depicts a world of sumptuous electronic music‑making pouring out from a simple desktop synth. And then on the back, in large, friendly letters, we have the original RA Moog tagline from 1954 saying “Devoted to the Development & Manufacture of Electronic Instruments for the Musician”. It struck me as reassuringly hopeful.

Conclusion

When you step into the Labyrinth it may take a bit of time to find your feet. Its mix of East and West Coast synthesis may mean that some of it is familiar and some of it is not. The modulation routing and parallel paths can be intimidating and it’s very easy to get lost. But as I explored and experimented, digging into the excellent manual for clues and direction, I discovered that finding the right path is not as important as enjoying the journey. Every knob is significant and leads you in different directions.

The dual‑channel generative heart, heavy with Bits and easily corruptible, gives the Labyrinth a syncopated pulse that’s completely delightful. It enjoys barrelling through percussive sounds while you frantically search for melodies, shaping and tweaking like a juggler keeping balls in the air. Sometimes you find them and sometimes you find dissonance and unexpected distortion — but go with it just the same. Plugging it into the Moog semi‑modular universe brings an explosion of excitement and difference, making you realise just how far these tones are from Moog’s safe space.

Information

£599 including VAT.

www.moogmusic.com

$599

www.moogmusic.com

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