IT ALL BEGAN WITH PATCH-CORD TANGLE OF MOOG.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

Thirty years ago, an odd-looking instrument debuted, looking like a telephone switchboard and festooned with a spaghetti factory's worth of wires hanging from its front. Soon enough, it and its successors would turn the music business upside down.

The ungainly console, standing about 4 feet high and nearly as wide, was the Moog synthesizer, named after its creator, Robert Moog.

What Moog, an engineer with little musical ability, had come up with was an electronic device that generated musical tones. Plug the patch cords into different jacks, and you could create different kinds of tones, often mimicking existing instruments by the fistful, or creating entirely new kinds of sounds.

Soon enough, musicians of all kinds would thoroughly exploit the new kind of instrument to help create a dozen or more new subgenres of rock and pop.

``It was a lot of fun then,'' said Moog, now 65 and with something of the air of an absent-minded professor. ``And after all these years, it's a very gratifying thing to see how it all turned out (with synthesizers). We're lucky.''

Moog now lists himself as ``grand poobah'' on his business card for Big Briar Electronic Musical Instruments in Asheville, N.C. Instead of making synthesizers, his company specializes in an offshoot, analog effects modules that expand the sounds a synth or other instrument can create, and theremins, the creepy electronic sound generators used in many '50s horror movies and the Beach Boys' ``Good Vibrations.''

``When I look back at how I got through all those two-hour shows without too many breakdowns, it was a miracle,'' said Keith Emerson, founder of prog-rock stalwart Emerson, Lake & Palmer and an early Moog fan. ``If I had one of those now, I don't know if I could stand it. I'd have a nervous breakdown myself.''

Emerson first heard about the Moog when a friend played him a Mooged version of Bach's ``Brandenburg Concerto'' by Walter (now Wendy after a sex-change operation) Carlos. He went ``searching madly'' for Moog, finally locating his factory in Buffalo, N.Y.

``I tried to get a free (synthesizer), and word came back, `I'm very sorry. the Rolling Stones have bought one, and you'll have to as well,' '' Emerson said.

He ponied up the money and played it regularly thereafter. For all its quirks and limitations, Emerson said, ``one great thing about the Moog is that it was like an Action painter: You got a big canvas and would just throw paint against it.''

Synthesizers have come a long way since then, as demonstrated at the event that brought Moog and Emerson together, a Century City reception for the Van Koevering Co.'s Interactive Piano that was also attended by such musicians as former Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh.

Van Koevering is a Des Moines, Iowa, company whose instruments look like regular, if elegant pianos. But inside the black wood exterior, they hide a sophisticated synthesizer mixed with a highly tweaked, 350-Mhz Pentium II-powered computer, an icon-driven touch-sensitive screen and a pile of software for learning, creating, transcribing and playing music.

Through the touch screen, you can call up three years' worth of music-teaching software, automatically transcribe music as you play it, make a paper copy through a built-in printer port, play or record tracks from a port for a recordable CD-ROM drive and more.

You can record up to 256 MIDI (a synthesizer-friendly computer protocol) tracks and, through the built-in microphone jack, two voice tracks. Don't like something you hear on playback? Fix it in the mix, re-recording the track and then having the instrument play it. It even comes with a talking metronome and, blessed be, two headphone jacks, so beginners' travails won't unduly burden others within listening range.

``Our mission is to try to make the musical experience easy and enjoyable,'' said April Morris, Van Koevering's chief executive officer. The Interactive Pianos aren't cheap, however, costing between $8,500 and $15,500 and only available at one dealer in Los Angeles, David Abell Pianos.

Emerson loves his Van Koevering so much he that allowed the company to display it as part of the Century City event. And he loves the way it looks on stage when he's playing it on tour.

But for all their virtues, Emerson said, new synthesizers are missing a certain showman's theatricality that always came with having to manipulate the Moog in performance.

``They've gotten more reliable, but these days, you can get a synth and punch a few buttons, and you're all set, and it's no big deal,'' Emerson said. ``But when the audience gets a look at the Moog and sees you changing all the cables and moving them around, they see you're really doing something.''