Review: Moog Guitar Model E-1

Moog's cleverness and skill at making imaginative instruments is unprecedented. And the E-1 guitar is no exception. Its ability to add or subtract vibrating energy from its strings in a variety of ways seems like it could potentially reinvent guitar playing.

But when the E-1 arrived in Wired's offices, our reaction was mixed. Like a blind date, you can usually tell in the first five seconds whether or not you and a new guitar are going to hit it off. And we got nothing but awkward chills from the E-1. There were uncomfortable pauses; we stumbled over each other's sentences and robotically checked the time every two minutes. No chemistry. But because infatuation had been building for so long, we persevered.

The sorcery of the E-1 (backed up by nine pending patents) is that it can magnetically vibrate or deaden the strings, all at once or selectively, as you play it. If you turn it on in the right setting, for example, all of the strings will just start vibrating without you touching them, giving off a beautiful, ghostly drone. The feeling of a guitar vibrating in your hand, as if by magic, made me laugh out loud.

The E-1 can also take energy away from the strings as you play them, to lend both a muted feel and sound. These are not effects built into the guitar: It's done by changing the way the strings themselves vibrate. Even if the E-1 is not plugged into an amp, you can hear and feel the vibrations and the muting acoustically.

When you do plug the guitar into an amp, you have two choices: Either go through the E-1's own foot pedal via a five-pin XLR cord that comes with the guitar (which gives you access to a few tasty filters and effects) or use the 1/4-inch output to go straight to your pedal chain or amp.

This is where the wonder starts to fade a bit. The level of the guitar signal going out of the Moog pedal is significantly quieter than bypassing it with a regular guitar cable. So the filters and modulations that the Moog pedal provides are rather weak. And since these effects are relative to the incoming signal, even cranking the amp didn't really improve them.

Our spider sense tells us that this pedal most likely comes to life with additional Moog accessories like a Control Voltage Processor, MIDI Clock Sync program on your computer, or MoogerFrooger pedal, all of which can interface with the E-1's pedal. In one of the company's demo videos, someone has hooked up a motion-sensitive accessory so the guitar strums itself whenever he punches the air. So cool!

But not having any of those things, we found leaving the pedal out all together gave us a meatier signal. And this leads to the ultimate drawback of the instrument. As an ordinary electric guitar, it doesn't sound very good. Either because the pickups have to do double-duty as magnetic sustainers, or because of the sonic preferences of the engineers that designed the guitar, the sound that comes through is thin, buzzy and kind of fake, like a synthesizer's approximation of what an electric guitar should sound like.

The guitar has a piezo pickup in addition to the two magnetic pickups that you can blend with your regular signal, and I initially thought this was to blame for the sound. But the E-1 still sounded thin even when I took the piezo out of the blend.

The E-1 can be fun to play and there are tons of sounds to get out of it, but the basic sound of the unaltered strings didn't inspire me to any new heights of sonic innovation. It's true that you can do everything that the Moog reps do in their web videos, but we just weren't able to do anything that sounded good to me, aside from the basic drones.

Maybe if we had a Moog technician coaching me through the process, we would've found a sound that we liked, but as far as plug-and-play fun, this was a surprisingly uphill battle. (And I'm not exactly a novice — I'm always tweaking my tone with pedals and troubleshooting gain loss.) We just found ourselves wishing to install the vibrating abilities on a guitar with a better tone.

It wasn't the worst blind date ever, and we know there are lots of people out there who would love this guitar, but we won't be calling the E-1 again.