Bob Moog-Designed Crumar Spirit To Return

07 Jul 2023 by Adam Douglas |

4,9 / 5,0 | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

The original Crumar Spirit. Will the recreation look exactly the same? · Source: RL Music

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The 1983 Crumar Spirit, one of the wildest analogue synths ever made, is slated for a revival. Hold onto your hats!

Italian keyboard manufacturer Crumar is planning to recreate its bizarre and criminally overlooked 1983 analogue monosynth, Spirit. It will have an all-analogue signal path and will hit the market later this year, according to Synth Anatomy.

Crumar Spirit

This is exciting news for so many reasons. The Crumar Spirit was released in 1983, a time when new digital synthesis technologies like FM and wavetable were making waves and analogue was becoming a dirty word. It was also the age of the big polys. Very few people were interested in a basic monosynth in ’83. This resulted in the instrument getting passed over despite its flexible synthesis architecture and incredible designer pedigree.

The original Crumar Spirit in all its unhinged glory.

Crumar Spirit: How Bizarre

It may have looked basic from afar, but in reality, the Crumar Spirit was anything but. It had an absolutely bonkers signal path, with two analogue oscillators each with unique settings and a dual filter comprising Oberheim-style SEM and Moog-style Ladder sections, the latter with overdrive, bandpass, highpass and off modes. It also had two separate signal paths, with one heading through a ring modulator, a 6dB/octave lowpass filter and a separate VCA. There was also a bizarrely flexible modulation section including two envelopes and unique Mod X and Shaper Y control sections.

Synthesizer Dream Team

If the Crumar Spirit sounds like the end result of a team of mad scientists going a little crazy with synthesis circuits, that’s because it pretty much was. The spirit was designed by Bob Moog with former Moog employees, Jim Scott and Tom Rhea. Talk about your synthesizer dream team.

Crumar Spirit Lives Again

Hunter S Thompson once said, “Too weird to live, too rare to die.” He was talking about his lawyer but it may as well have been the Crumar Spirit. Now it may indeed live again and we’ll hopefully all have the opportunity to try out this wild beast for ourselves.

Details are still scarce but hopefully, we’ll be getting a modern (and stable) recreation of the original this calendar year. Prices and more information to follow as we get it.