Chris Stack first heard the sound of the Moog synthesizer in sixth grade, when his music teacher dropped the needle on Switched-On Bach. To the budding musician’s ears, the 1968 album by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos seemed a galaxy apart from the old family piano on which he had been practicing.
“It was like music and Star Trek combined,” says Stack. “The sound was so totally outside the natural universe—purer tones than I’d ever heard, doing frequency sweeps that were not available to the natural world of instruments. I was hooked immediately.”
For Stack, it was the start of a lifelong exploration of the territory where music and technology intersect. With his musical tastes tending toward Yes and other progressive-rock bands, he bought two Korg synthesizers before borrowing $1,500 to purchase a Micromoog keyboard in the late 1970s.
Stack has owned more than 30 synths at various times since—Moog instruments as well as keyboards by Yamaha, Roland, Kurzweil, and Korg—not to mention stacks of support equipment (mixers, amps, speakers, and effects processors among them).
He’s also collected Turkish lutes, mandolins, fiddles, and other string instruments, some accordions and melodicas, one Irish bouzouki, a theremin, and “about 30 flutes.” So, there’s little question that he’s well-suited for his current day job as director of marketing for Greenville’s Sigal Music Museum.
Falling in Sync with Music
“The music got me hooked first, then the instruments made me interested in electronics and other branches of technology, so I went to college to study electronics,” says Stack, who earned an associate’s degree in electrical engineering at Spartanburg Technical College (now Spartanburg Community College) in 1986. “Already having some fairly sophisticated synthesizers at that point, I was able to do things like check my trigonometry homework by using a synthesizer to actually add sine waves of different frequencies and amplitudes together and see the resulting waveform on my oscilloscope. Music helped my electronics, and electronics helped my music.”
By the early 1990s, he had been designing printed circuit boards for a Greenville technology company for about a decade when he got a chance to meet one of his heroes: Robert Moog, the synthesizer inventor who made Switched-On Bach possible, was leading his music technology company from the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina.
“I had no idea that he lived that close,” says Stack, who saw an item in the Spartanburg newspaper that Moog was giving a public lecture at UNC-Asheville. “Afterwards, I go up and introduce myself, hand him my card, and say, ‘If you ever need a printed circuit board designer, give me a call.’ Next day, I’m in my office, and the phone rings.”
Stack remained associated with Moog Music for several years, at first working on technical projects and ultimately taking a full-time position as marketing manager before moving on in 2011. Afterward, he plunged into the Asheville arts scene. Various marketing and multimedia gigs followed before Stack made the move back to the Upstate in 2022.
Now settled in Greenville, Stack calls upon his vast array of instruments to produce his own music, publishing several records—including his latest EP, 2023’s Artifact—on the Bandcamp site. His work echoes his musical influences, including Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, David Sylvian, and Brian Eno. His YouTube channel, experimentalsynth, has thousands of subscribers. Meanwhile, his menagerie of keyboards, wires, pedals, and patch cords remains manageable—for now.
“It is filling a small dining room to the brim,” he says.
Synth Speak
Key terms for keyboard enthusiasts:
Oscillator: The fundamental generator of sound in a synthesizer, creating a variety of repeating waveforms—sine, sawtooth, square, triangle, and noise—that each have distinct tonal qualities.
Envelope: A tool that controls how a sound changes over time by altering properties of attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR).
Filter: A circuit that can cut or boost specified frequencies, amplifying or attenuating the sound produced.
Sequencer: A device or software capable of recording, storing, and manipulating music performance data, often using the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard.
What is a Moog?
A Moog (rhymes with vogue) synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that uses analog circuitry to create and manipulate sound. Invented by Robert Moog in 1964, the synthesizer “revolutionized the face of music,” according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, by allowing users to create with an entirely new palette of sounds.
