My First Look at Mogees

This week I’d like to highlight a new product that came to me late last year: Mogees. The easiest way to explain them is that they resemble a high-end piezo microphone or contact microphone. However, they’re not designed to record sounds, but to allow you to translate them.

The way a Mogees works is that you stick it to an object (desk, tree, wall, bike etc.), calibrate it with the Mogees software, and then play the sounds built into the software. Alternately, you can send the data out of the Mogees software as MIDI to another destination. This is not too different to Stretta’s Practical Max project - however, Mogees have made the calibration a lot easier.

My first impression of the Mogees was rather big - their inaugural demonstration video is a great watch, and got me pretty excited about them. Getting it setup with Max was a breeze: I simply used the Mogees plug-in as a VST, plugged in the Mogees to my computer and banged on the desk a few times, calibrating three different notes in seconds. By placing an instance of the Mogees VST in a Max patcher, you are instantaneously given a Mogees incoming MIDI port, dropping in a midiin object and running that into a amxd~ synth had me playing the synth like the desk maestro I always knew I was, in a jiffy.

There are a few little things that will make it easier for you to get going with Mogees - one of them being to add gain on the input to boost the signal. In addition, solid objects are not as resonant and are hard to differentiate between different hits in comparison with any object that resonates and gives a variety of tonal differences depending where and how it is struck. I’ll take a greater look at how Mogees can be used in Max in later articles.