Arturia bottles the Memorymoog, Moog's rare six-voice polysynth, into a $149 plugin

The Memorymoog is one of those machines that sits in the mythology of dance music more than in its studios. Moog's 1982 attempt at a polyphonic flagship was gorgeous, unstable and rare, and a working one today costs more than a used car. Arturia has now done what it has done to half of Moog's back catalogue and turned it into software: Memory V, 149 dollars, in your DAW today.

What was the Memorymoog, and why does it matter to house?

Take a Moog Minimoog, the mono synth that defines a thousand basslines, and give it six voices. That is the Memorymoog in one line. Each of those voices carried the same three-VCO architecture as the Minimoog and the same 24dB low-pass ladder filter, so for the first time you could play that fat, slightly unhinged Moog character as a chord, not a single note. For deep and organic house, where a warm pad or a moving chord is the whole emotional payload of a track, that is the exact sound people chase and almost never had access to in hardware.

What does Memory V add that the original never had?

The headline is polyphony: Arturia pushes it from six voices to twelve, so the lush stacks the hardware could not sustain are on the table. It is MPE-compatible, which the 1982 machine obviously was not, so per-note slides and pressure are available to anyone playing it off a modern controller. On top sits a four-track arpeggiator, deeper modulation with multiple envelopes and LFOs, randomization, a multi-slot effects engine and a macro system for moving several parameters at once.

The part that decides whether an emulation lives or dies is the dirt. Arturia leans on a vintage dispersion control for what it calls subtle, breathing detuning that sounds alive rather than perfect, and a drive stage that stays gently harmonic at low settings and turns into raw, crunchy grit past halfway, the signature angry Moog moment meant to cut through a dense mix.

A six-voice Moog used to be a collector's flex. Now it is a 149 dollar line item, which is the more interesting story for anyone actually making records.

Is 149 dollars a real price or an opening offer?

Both. The 149 figure is the price, but the introductory rate aimed at existing Arturia owners runs through June 14, 2026, so the cheapest entry has a clock on it. Over 300 presets ship in the box, covering basses, pads, leads and the more esoteric corners, which is the difference between a plugin you demo once and one that earns a slot in your template.