| abstract | - A synth developed by Studio Electronics around 1986, and one of several products that that company produced in this time period which relied on removing boards from existing synths and re-packaging them. The Midimoog consisted of a rackmount chassis which contained: a power supply, a front panel which imitated the Minimoog's panel in layout, colors and fonts; and a MIDI interface which accepted incoming MIDI data and converted this to CV/Gate signals. This of course made it possible to play the instrument from another MIDI-equipped synth or master keyboard. The chassis contained a number of slots into which circuit boards from an actual Minimoog were loaded. All of the audio circuits, and most of the control circuits, in the synth came from Minimoog boards. The fact that the Minimoog had been designed to have its boards plug into backplane connectors, rather than everything being point-to-point wired, made this a fairly easy process. This left the question of where to get the boards. Studio Electronics had succeeded in obtaining a stock of boards from the factory (intended for Minimoogs that were never built) as the original Moog Music was being liquidated in the late 1980s. The alternative was for the customer to supply a donor Minimoog which would be stripped of boards. A number of Minimoog chassis and cases were scrapped after having their boards removed to make a Midimoog, which was somewhat controversial at the time. The MIDI interface received and processed note, pitch wheel, and a few continuous controller messages, in order to provide equivalent functionality to the Minimoog's performance controls. The interface provided a longer span of note numbers that it responded to than the Minimoog's actual keyboard, increasing the range of notes available to the performer. The Midimoog's circuitry provided a few additional features, such as a dedicated LFO and a front panel master tune control. Estimates for the number of Midimoogs built range from 500 to 700, with 300-500 of them being built from Studio Electronics' stash of boards, and the rest being built using boards from donor Minimoogs. At some point in the production, the company was forced to change the name to "Minimidi" after threat of a lawsuit from the party that owned Moog Music's trademarks at the time. By about 1992, Studio Electronics had run out of their stock of Minimoog boards, and with the prices of vintage analog synths starting to rise, customers no longer wanted to sacrifice a working Minimoog to build a unit. At this point, the company went to work on a new synth of its own design, which became the SE-1. THe MIdimoog/Minimidi was discontinued upon the SE-1's introduction in 1994.
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