DAN AGOSTO: Hi. I’m Dan Agosto with Gearwire.Com, and today we’re taking a look at the Moog Music Moogerfooger MURF. What this is is basically a bank of peak filters, and if we take a look at the pedal, the main feature of this is these sliders. Each of these sliders has a small frequency range that it controls the volume for, so it’s sort of like a graphic equalizer, so if I wanted to, say if this was a graphic equalizer and I want to take out some of the low end, I just kind of do that or you can get like your smiley curve EQ that you get on a lot of like home systems and things like that, but that’s not really what this filter bank, this pedal is for. What it does is it sweeps through all of these peak filters, and you can set the speed and also the pattern and volume independently, and to a lot of people this may be a daunting pedal. When I first approached it, I was a little like what exactly does this do, but as you play with it more, you find a lot of different things that you can do with it, so let’s just hear it. I’m going to go straight into this pedal straight into the recorder so there’s no effect except for the drive on here that you’re hearing.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So, that’s straight in. Now what I’m going to do to start hearing what this pedal does is bring up the mix. I’m going to turn it up just a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

You’re starting to hear some stereo things, starting to hear some sweepy noises.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

You’re starting to hear more of that. And if we turn it all the way up, you’ll hear just exactly what the MURF is doing to the sound.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So, what you’re hearing is it going through all of these peak filters in a certain pattern. On here, I chose bank A, pattern number 3 because I feel like it gives you a good illustration of what the pedal is actually doing. What it’s doing is basically sweeping down, going back up a little bit, sweeping back down, going back up and letting it sweeping back down, and you’re only hearing basically one of these bands at once and you can control the volume here.

Now, one of the most important knobs on here is the envelope. As you can see, we have it almost down to zero.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

That makes the steps -- every step that it takes a lot shorter. It’s quick attack, quick release. If we turn it up a bit, we hear more of the tone.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So, it’s still attacking a lot and it’s still fairly short though. If we turn up some more...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

...playing it so you’re actually able to hear it. It’s a lot longer. There’s a lot more sustain on each step. It’s sort of like what you would use step length on an arpeggiator or some kind of different things. If you know arpeggiators, you might be familiar with this type of control. So, I’m going to turn it up to about midnight and let’s see what happens.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

It’s gotten short again, but it’s different from how it was when it was low. Let’s listen to how it was low again.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

Notice the attack.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So, if we turn it midway up, it will still be short but listen to the attack of it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

It’s a lot less defined. It kind of rolls into the sound a little bit, so we turn a bit more.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So, we’re hearing now is a slow attack, a nice amount of sustain, and a slow release. Turn it up more.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

We’ll turn it back down just a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So now what we’re starting to hear is a slow attack, less of the sustain, and a quicker release, a very quick release almost like an off switch. You turn all the way up and hear that sound.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

All right. So, for this particular pattern, I kind of like around here...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

...and maybe mix in some of my dry signal here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

I’m not going to change pattern but what I am going to do is see what this switch does. What this does here is switch banks, and what’s in the banks are different sequences, 12 different sequences for each bank. So, as you heard this sequence further goes down up, I kind of sweep down, sweep up, sweeps down, sweeps up, all the way down to the bottom and starts to the top. Let’s listen to what the same number three does on bank B.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

It’s basically doing the same thing, only it’s starting from the bottom. Let’s go back to bank A. So, this is kind of how I like the sound -- This is one of my favorite settings on this pedal, and now we can get to the filter controls. One of the cool things that you can do is lower down mostly these and so you’ll only get one little section.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So now we’re only hearing -- we’re only hearing what the pedal is doing when it gets in between these two filters. So actually, if we turn the mix all the way up...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

...you won’t hear anything but those filters.

Some things that are cool to do with this are to sort of -- when it’s going up and down like this in a pattern like this is to turn every one up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

What this is actually doing is giving us sort off an irregular tremolo effect along with the filter effect of the MURF. Now, a real cool thing that you can do now is you don’t have to turn them on all on or all off. You can mix them in each independently. Let’s say I want this one around here because I want a little more low end, this one a little more muted so we’ll keep down here, and then this one nice and high, and this one about to center.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

So, you get some real nice cascading effects with this. We also have the rate knob, so if we can turn that down and get real slow sweeps.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

Turn this up, you get like almost a reverse effect.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

If you turn the envelope the other way, you will get more attack.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

This side of the envelope is where I kind of consider it like the video game side. We’ll turn up the rate a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

Sounds kind of like an arcade almost.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE MOOG MUSIC MOOGERFOOGER MURF]

All right. So, we’ve taken a brief look at the Moog MURF, the Moogerfooger MURF, and seen what we can with the guitar. I personally think that it’s sort of a limited guitar effect and I really like using it with synthesizers. So, in our next video, we’re going to be using it with the Clavia Nord Lead 3. So, thanks for checking this out, and check out the next one./p>