[JASON DANIELLO AND CYRIL LANCE PERFORMING WITH MOOG GUITARS]

MOOG MUSIC REPRESENTATIVE: The inventor of the Moog Guitar, Paul Vo. I’d like to ask Paul to come up and talk a little bit about his inspiration for the guitar.

PAUL VO: It’s been a sequence of inspirations over quite a few years, but really the very first inspiration was just understanding the physics of a vibrating string and being a guitar player. The vibrating string is just this wonderful resonator which is, you know, uniquely capable of vibrating in a lot of different modes at the same time, and it’s, you know, it’s almost vocal in its nature. It can sustain on on a single string all kinds of combinations of harmonics, almost the way the human voice does or the way perhaps the drawbars of an organ do.

And most devices that have been made for the guitar, and they’re brilliant, brilliant, you know, engineering -- wonderful devices that have been created for the guitar, but they all take the guitar signal after it’s been produced and the post process the signal and turn it into something else and very often something very wonderful. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to get right back to the actual guitar string and try to get more out of the basic guitar string before any later processing was done. I wanted to manipulate those harmonics. I wanted to enhance and put under the musician’s --the guitarist’s control all of these nuances of vibration that I knew, you know, were locked in the guitar string and could perhaps be gotten out.

[JASON DANIELLO AND CYRIL LANCE PERFORMING WITH MOOG GUITARS]

I did a lot of research over the years and gradually came up with a system that full controls the vibration of the guitar string, so in our instrument here we can start the string vibrating, we can sustain the string vibrating, and there have been sustainers before. The dimension that we add, which is a very important dimension, kind of like brakes are important to a car, is we can stop the string altogether, and we can stop some harmonics of the string and, you know, start others. So, if you can imagine the vibration of a string as kind of a fluid and the harmonics of that vibration as different colors of fluid, through the one pickup -- You know, there’s two pickups on the guitar. Each one operates independently. Each pickup can kind of flow some colors of fluid into the string and drain some other colors of fluid out of the string, all under the guitarist’s control. So, now you can change the color of the tone, you know, by controlling what’s going on.

So, you know, that’s sort of the essence of the instrument, and that’s how the inspiration started, and I’m just -- You know, Moog has been a wonderful organization to do this with. They understand strange ideas and they’re capable of believing in strange ideas before they really fully exist, and that is much rare in this world than I knew when I started out, and I’m just very happy to be associated with them. And you know, here we are and we have instruments and they work, and that’s it. I’ll turn it over to everyone else.

[GUITARIST PERFORMING WITH THE MOOG GUITAR]