Synthstuff Moog Realistic Concertmate MG-1
Enter the Realistic Concertmate MG1, build by Moog for Radioshack in 1981.
Designed as a cheap consumer synth (a “volkssynth” so to speak) to be sold at the Radioshack chain this is actually a pretty nice advanced little beast, surpassing a few of moogs own more ‘professional’ offerings at that time. This is like a supercharged Moog Rogue and Liberation with a very ‘cardboard’ feel – but adding a lot more features like a ringmodulator and a divide down polyphonic organ-esque synth section.
Whats under the hood:
A monophonic analog synth with 2 detunable oscillators with sawtooth and rectangle waveforms, osc sync, a noise generator, ring modulation, a juicy moog filter with resonance, glide, an LFO with sine, square and random waves assignable to pitch and filter!
The polyphonic section is extremely simple, just one square wave which sounds kind off harsh, blocky and cheap. Cool thing is that you can filter this polyphonic section and use the LFO filter modulation on it, only the filter – no frequency modulation in this part. Another cool thing is that you can mix the monosynth with the poly synth part at the same time…you can also control the monosynth externally with cv/gate and play the polyphonic part with your hands over it.
There are no release envelopes for the poly section making it a quite stumpy affair to play…but a little delay or echo does wonders for that most of the time. A chunky gritty synth with a lot of raw energy…like if the Forbidden Forest videogame was a synthesizer this would be it!
Cosmi style Forbidden Forest vibe