Moog Music Resynthesizes 44-Year-Old Live Recording of the Grateful Dead Into New Tools for Artists

20121227_0531This week Moog Music announced the official release of the Grateful Dead Expansion Pack, which innovatively turns the Grateful Dead’s live performance at the Carousel Ballroom on Feb. 14, 1968 into a source of harmonic content exclusively for Animoog, Moog’s TEC-Award Nominated synthesizer for the iPad. The pack features 82 Presets and 45 Timbres that were carefully extracted from the live recording, and then optimized for the Animoog’s Anisotropic Synthesis Engine.

Mike Adams, Moog Music President and CEO said, “Two very important legacies left by Bob Moog and his life’s work were the idea of looking at new technology and crafting new tools to enable musicians to make music in new and inspiring ways, and also the importance of collaborating with musicians to help shape those tools.  This innovative integration of textures from the Grateful Dead’s live recordings into Animoog’s timbre library is a true manifestation of this legacy.”

The Grateful Dead Expansion Pack is broken into three categories: ensemble, percussion and vocal sounds. In each case the timbres were extracted from individual vocal performances, percussion hits or instrument riffs performed during the Grateful Dead’s concert at the Carousel Ballroom 44 years ago. The pack allows musicians today to create dynamic soundscapes from the Dead’s rare and complex source harmonic content originally performed decades ago.

Cyril Lance, Moog Music’s Chief Engineer explains, “We’re not simply providing samples from the Grateful Dead’s body of work, rather we’ve distilled the essence of notes and phrases in a different way to transform these performances into new instruments — new voices.  Now we’ve made these unique voices available to artists in a way that enables them to create their own music and voices based on this fundamental essence.”

The Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, who visited the Moog Factory on April 19, 2012 to test the development of the Grateful Dead Expansion Pack exclaimed, “Holy transmogrification, Batman… Amazing!” after

hearing the Grateful Dead’s 44-year-old recordings transformed into sound design tools for artists.

The Grateful Dead Expansion Pack comes on the heels of Moog’s release of Animoog V2 on December 21, 2012. Animoog V2 is free for existing Animoog users. It includes many user requested features and product enhancements, such

as: accelerometer integration which gives Animoog owners the ability to tilt their iPad in any direction as an interactive 3D modulation source; note hold and scale lock, and tools for advanced users like, Load/Save MIDI CC maps, Audiocopy/Audiopaste integration and support for the new Audiobus platform.  Also, as a holiday gift, Animoog V2 features a powerful 4 Track Recorder, which gives Animoog users the ability to record audio from within Animoog or import audio tracks directly from their iTunes library. Users can then split, loop, copy, paste, and share individual clips, or mix down entire songs and upload them directly to SoundCloud, all from within the Animoog’s universe. This 4 Track Recorder will be free to existing users until Dec. 31, 2012 at which time it will revert to it’s regular price of $4.99 in the Animoog Store.

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For More Information Visit:
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Animoog on the iTunes App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/animoog/id471638724?mt=8

Animoog product page:
http://www.moogmusic.com/animoog

Moog Music website:
http://www.moogmusic.com

Moog Music on Twitter:
http://www.Twitter.com/MoogMusicInc

Animoog on Facebook:
http://www.Facebook.com/animoog

For more info on the Grateful Dead please visit:
http://www.dead.net

Author: Ralph White