Same song, different keys.

PositionWestern

"One doesn't hear much talk of synthesizers here in Western North Carolina," Bob Moog wrote in a column for Keyboard magazine in 1978, a year after he moved to Asheville. That's not true anymore. Moog Music Inc.--which makes the synthesizers he pioneered and other instruments--spends roughly $5 million a year on everything from office supplies to taxes, employs 50 and recently completed a $2 renovation of new downtown digs. Moogfest, an electronic-music festival, contributes about $15 million each year to the city's economy.

At age 20, the native New Yorker started making and selling theremins, electronic instruments that emitted sound without the player's hands touching them, with his father in the early 1950s. More an academic than an artist--he would earn a doctorate from Cornell University in engineering physics--he created his synthesizer in 1963 and founded what would become Moog Music four years later. But demand for his instruments didn't take off until Wendy Carlos used one on her album Switched-On Bach in 1968. It would become a staple of popular and classical music. He sold the company and, seven years later, moved to Asheville to raise his family. There he started Big Briar Inc., which became Moog Music when he regained rights to the name in 2002.

In a planned transition, partner Mike Adams became owner, president and CEO when Moog died in 2005. He has broadened the company's scope, developing products that appeal to more people. Over the last few years, Moog Music has released its most expensive synthesizer as well as designed a...

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