Every schoolboy must know by now that the first synthesizer for the masses was the Minimoog, which first appeared in late 1970. The Minimoog Model D—so called because three prototypes preceded it—was the first keyboard synth under $1,500, the first you could simply plug in and play, and the first portable enough to tuck under your arm. It’s no exaggeration to say it launched the electronic music industry as we know it today and altered the timbral landscape of popular music. A few months ago, Moog Music wanted to make another big splash for the Minimoog’s 40th anniversary and introduced the Minimoog Voyager XL ($4,995 MSRP), the most capable (and expensive) edition yet.

At the XL’s heart is Moog’s flagship Minimoog Voyager, a monophonic keyboard synth with a totally analog signal path and a digital control section called the interface panel. To the left of the standard Voyager’s control panel is a control-voltage (CV) patchbay that duplicates and extends the functionality of two optional products for previous Voyagers and other voltage-controlled systems, the Moogerfooger CP-251 Control Processor and the VX-351 CV Expander. You also get a 61-note keyboard (instead of the 44 keys on other Voyagers), an extra LFO, and a 20-inch ribbon controller.

From the Ground Up
The XL is a lovely instrument to behold, with a furniture-grade wood cabinet and lots of lovely knobs, 1/4-inch jacks, and classic red and blue rocker switches. The instrument’s solid construction exudes handcrafted quality, and at 49 pounds, it’s a rather hefty package. Its tilting control panel adjusts to any of five angles, and connections for stereo audio out, external mono-audio in, and MIDI In, Out, and Thru are on the panel’s back panel. The Mixer Out/Filter In jack serves as an insert for connecting external effects. Also on the back are two connections for optional gooseneck lamps, thoughtfully ensuring that you’ll never be left in the dark onstage. Unlike recent editions of Moog’s lower-priced Little Phatty, however, the XL has no USB connectivity.

The semiweighted Fatar keyboard’s action is appropriately light but sufficiently springy, with just the right balance of give and resistance for a synth keyboard. It sends Velocity and Aftertouch data, though I found very few factory presets that responded to Aftertouch. Although the Voyager is monophonic, the keyboard sends polyphonic data for controlling other instruments via MIDI.

The Model D was the first instrument to offer pitchbend and modulation wheels, and the XL carries on the tradition. I was surprised at the pitchbend wheel’s stiffness, though; it took considerably more force to turn than any controller wheel I’ve encountered. It doesn’t help that the wheels are made of smooth, hard plastic, which could make them slippery for sweaty fingers on a hot stage.

As on previous Voyagers, the XL’s backlit LCD is rather small. When you turn a knob or flip a switch, it conveniently shows the new parameter value alongside the stored value. The LCD doesn’t display waveforms, envelopes, or any other graphics, however. Its 1.25 x 2.25-inch size and dark-gray text on a greenish-yellow background make it look like something you’d see on a twentieth-century synth, not a modern instrument.

The Voyager’s touch-surface controller is one of the best real-time modulation controllers around. It’s a 3.25 x 4.5-inch pad that sends control data when you press and slide your fingertip from side to side (the X axis) or up and down (the Y axis), and when you change the amount of area covered by your fingers (the A axis)—an especially useful twist on more traditional X-Y control pads. You can assign it to route any modulation source to any destination, with different assignments for each patch. Instead of being mounted on the XL’s left where it might be more convenient for modulating melodies played with your right hand, it is just to the right of the control panel’s center.

A Moog invention that makes the XL unique among current Moog instruments is the ribbon controller, mounted with its center point just above the keyboard’s middle C. Sliding your finger along the ribbon’s surface or tapping it with your fingertips generates control voltages and gates. The ribbon is a freely assignable control source—so freely, in fact, that you must use a patchcord to connect its Gate or CV output to a modulation destination’s input to use it. Although this arrangement offers optimum flexibility, I wish the ribbon were hardwired to control pitchbend and that the hardwiring could be defeated by patchcords. A more serious problem is that the ribbon’s value latches to the position where you lift your finger, and there’s no way to make it automatically return to zero, limiting its practical usefulness. I hope Moog Music adds a return-to-zero function in a future update.

Go with the Flow
As with previous Voyagers, the XL’s architecture is similar to the original Minimoog’s, but with true ADSR envelopes, multimode filtering, and expanded modulation routing. Not surprisingly, patchcords add even more flexibility to the XL’s mod routing.

All Voyagers have a pair of filters you can configure as either two lowpass filters or one highpass and one lowpass filter. Dual lowpass mode assigns each filter to one of the stereo outputs. The filter’s Spacing knob changes the cutoff frequency of one filter relative to the other, which can enhance stereo separation. You can get some cool pseudo-panning effects simply by applying a modulation source to the spacing parameter and manipulating it in real time using the touch-surface controller. In highpass/lowpass mode, the Spacing knob changes the highpass filter’s cutoff frequency. Because putting a highpass and lowpass in series results in a bandpass filter, this knob effectively controls passband width. In addition, if you dig into the interface panel’s menu pages, you can change the filters’ cutoff slope from the typically fat Minimoog 4-pole response to 1-, 2-, or 3-pole.

Whereas the Model D had fixed oscillator waveforms, the Voyager’s waveforms are continuously variable, so you can smoothly transition from one waveshape to another. The advantage is that you can dynamically shape the oscillator waveform's spectral content using an envelope or any other modulator. The disadvantage is it’s difficult to precisely dial up a sawtooth or square wave, because there are neither click-stops on the selector knob nor a waveform display.

FIG. 1: The XL’s patch panel turns the mild-mannered Voyager into a sophisticated modular synthesizer.

Earlier Voyagers offer two modulation routings: one controlled by the mod wheel and another controlled by a CV source, usually a footpedal. That’s certainly more than the Model D offered, but not as many as modern synthesists expect. Although you can choose from numerous sources and destinations on the front panel, and even more in a software menu, you’re still limited to two simultaneous routings. The XL’s patchbay eliminates that limitation by multiplying your routing options (see Fig. 1).

The patchbay’s top half furnishes CV inputs and outputs, and the bottom half gives you several ways to route and modify CVs, including a four-input CV mixer, two attenuators, and a lag processor. Also in the lower section is the MIDI syncable LFO 2, a welcome addition to the Voyager’s architecture. Other Voyagers have one dedicated LFO, and oscillator 3 can operate as an additional LFO, but the XL’s LFO 2 opens new doors for patch programming. Whereas LFO 1 is limited to triangle, square, and sample-and-hold waveforms, LFO 2 also generates forward and reverse sawtooth as well as smoothed sample-and-hold for less angular randomized modulation. LFO 2 also has CV inputs for rate and clock and independent normal and inverted signal outputs. The clock input allows you to fire single-cycle waveforms. The normal (+) and inverted (-) outputs can be set to output different waveforms through MIDI—a feature that is unavailable on the CP-251.

The obvious advantage of patchcords is that you can easily set up complex patches that would be impossible without the patchbay. Additionally, using the patchbay is often easier than accomplishing the same tasks in menu pages. For example, to produce tremolo, it’s much quicker to simply route a triangle wave from the LFO’s CV output to the VCA’s CV input than to set up the same mod routing in the Voyager’s menu structure. Unfortunately, using the patchbay sacrifices the ability to store that routing with your patch. Patchcord routings, of course, are not memorized as preset data. If use the patchbay a lot, you’ll either need to set up patches that route CVs to the mixer so you can quickly enable and disable them as needed, or memorize your patchcord routings so you can manually reproduce them whenever you change presets.

There’s nothing mini about the Minimoog Voyager XL. It offers all the capabilities of previous Voyagers, with patchcords and a ribbon controller to boot.

Bon Voyager
No doubt about it, the Voyager XL is the most exciting and desirable monosynth on the planet. Like all Minimoog Voyagers, it sounds amazing, with 896 top-shelf, user-rewritable factory presets and 128 presets in ROM, many created by some of the most talented sound designers alive. The XL costs about $1,000 more than the Voyager Performer Edition paired with the optional CP-251 and VX-351. That $1,000 buys you 17 additional keys, a ribbon controller, LFO 2, all-in-one construction, and a boatload of cool. The patchbay turns the XL into an honest-to-goodness modular analog synthesizer, but you’d expect to pay much more for a modular system that could do everything the Voyager XL can.

The front-panel controls have an intuitive flow that makes it easy to find your way around. Foremost on my list of requested improvements would be USB connectivity and a larger, easier-to-read graphic display. The XL also lacks any kind of onboard sequencer, arpeggiator, or effects processor—bells and whistles that synthesists have come to expect on high-end instruments.

Nonetheless, the Minimoog Voyager XL delivers plenty of terrific features that should keep you happily creating sounds for years to come.

Pros: Hundreds of fantastic sounds. Real analog warmth. Practically infinite patchability. Solid construction. Excellent touch surface controller. Off-the-charts coolness factor.

Cons: No USB. Small, text-based LCD. Ribbon value doesn’t return to zero. Stiff pitch-bend wheel. No effects, sequencer, or arpeggiator. Expensive.

Former Electronic Musician senior editor Geary Yelton has been playing and programming electronic instruments for nearly 40 years. He is author of The Rock Synthesizer Manual.