You are here

Moog The Ladder | Media

500‑series Filter Module By Hannes Bieger
Published June 2012

The following sound files provide an indication of what the Moog The Ladder filter can do, and how it compares with the filters on the classic Minimoog synth.

Minimoog

The first sound example is a classic Minimoog bassline, with two stacked oscillators with square and sawtooth waveforms, and the filter fully open without resonance — so it's the pure, powerful sound of the Mini's oscillator section. In a second section, the bassline has been mangled with the filter section of this classic synthesizer, using both resonance and its super snappy filter envelope. In the third section, the same signal from the oscillators has been fed into the Ladder filter, again playing around with the resonance and envelope parameters.

Drums

This example shows how the Ladder can transform a drum loop. A simple sweep without much resonance yields results that are vital to some musical genres, but with the envelope follower and the filter's self oscillation coming into play, the results get even richer. There are examples both for high‑ and low‑pass filtering.

Rhodes

In this example, a Fender Rhodes piano was fed into the Ladder and again this demonstrates the creative potential lurking in this filter's options. A simple sweep already has some almost magical qualities, but the sound gets really rich with the 'non‑linearities' introduced by the envelope follower and a little overdrive. There are high‑ and low‑pass examples here again. The Ladder was set to the less aggressive 2‑Pole‑Mode for this sounds example.

Self Oscillation

Just like any true Moog filter, the Ladder can be pushed into self oscillation, effectively putting out a sine wave at the corner frequency. This can be used for nice results even without an input signal being fed into the module: by turning the resonance fully clockwise you can use the Ladder for some nice FX sounds. The sound examples show the pure signal as well as a version with a little bit of delay from an external processor, which infuses even more life.