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,...