Within the music technology industry, few people are deserving of the title 'legend' in quite the same way as the late, great Bob Moog. The reason is simple: he created, on more than one occasion, synthesised instruments that produced sounds that were simply unique.
A huge part of the richness of the Moog sound can be attributed to the filter section. Enter Universal Audio, which now provides what it claims is 'the first truly analogue-sounding VCF emulation' ever.
Overview
The Moog Multimode filter is only available for the UAD platform. Upon downloading, you'll actually discover that two plug-ins are added to your UA plug-in list: an SE 'CPU lite' version of the plug-in sits alongside the main iteration.
The plug-ins offer almost identical feature sets but where the 'SE' version has white panelling, the main version takes its blue and red livery from Moog's Voyager instrument.
Both effects will run in mono or stereo and the main filter controls are entirely as you'd expect. Cutoff and resonance dials sit atop a rocker switch which provides two or four-pole filtering. Below this is a filter mode selection dial which lets you switch between low-, high- and band-pass modes.
The LFO section is, unsurprisingly, designed to get your sound moving. There are separate controls for Amount and Rate, the latter of which can operate 'freely' or be slaved to your sequencer's tempo.
Six LFO waveforms are available, as is an Offset dial, which enables you to alter the LFO's phase between left and right channels. At its most extreme, 180-degree setting, this means that the filter movement from one side to another is completely inverted, resulting in each side of your sound 'chasing' around from speaker to speaker. Great for dynamic, moving loops.
For those of you keen to drive your filtered sounds into distortion, the Input Drive control is the one for you.
This overloads the input signal before the filter stage and can be used in conjunction with the 20dB boost switch to completely saturate the input stage if you wish. The SE version features a more basic Gain dial here to save processing power.
In use
The Moog Multimode Filter is joy to behold. We've no doubt that sonic purists will be busy with their original Moog, comparing the UAD recreation for differences in sound quality, but there's no doubt that UA has taken the process of building this filter incredibly seriously.
The sound is rich, warm, harsh, overdriven, speaker-blowingly loud and everything in between. Most importantly, we think the great man would approve.
Hear what the Moog Multimode filter can do:
Drum loop filter sweep
Jazz piano circles
Flightcase bubbles
Trip hop loop
Massive bassline
