“It can do a lot of things that I would go to a modular for”: Stranger Things composer Michael Stein gets hands-on with the Moog Messenger

You’ve probably heard Michael Stein’s music. Outside the world of screen composing nerds, his name might not have the instant recognition of a Zimmer or Elfman but, alongside his writing partner, Kyle Dixon, his score for Netflix’s Stranger Things has racked up over a billion hours of listening time.

The duo’s retro synth scoring style has gone beyond being an intrinsic part of The Duffer Brothers’ smash-hit show. Along the way, it earned the composers a Grammy, an Emmy, and a slot performing alongside a host of luminary composers at the inaugural edition of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ new composer-centric music festival, Future Ruins. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Moog was scouting for someone to trust with its as-yet-unreleased Messenger synthesizer, Stein seemed like a safe pair of hands.

A compact-powerhouse-monosynth that promises classic analogue sounds and all the modern comforts, the synth community’s anticipation amped up around its early June release. Stein, however, had already heard the Messenger loud and clear.

How the Moog Messenger became Stein’s all-in-one synth

Initially, Stein says he set out to write some original music that would feature the new synth, but ultimately created an entire track using nothing but the Messenger. “It was very different; an edge-case kind of scenario,” Stein recalls of the writing process. “I was playing chords on other instruments, playing through the filter on the Messenger just to figure out the mood – but once I started recording, I just mono multi-tracked everything.

“Some of the chords were probably seven or eight notes,” Stein continues. “I didn’t even know if it would work as a poly synth, but I’d start with a sound, do a four minute pass, and then it’d like ‘okay, I hear it coming together.’ Just to evolve it layer by layer was a really fun way to work, honestly.”

You can hear the results of that process accompanying Messenger’s trippy promo video above. There’s rich bass tones, sci-fi leads, and pulsing percussion, but also some top-tier sound design – such as the surreal bird chirps you can hear in the track’s quieter moments. “I did all of the foley and sound effects on the Messenger, and I wouldn’t actually have been able to do that with a lot of the other synths I have,” remarks Stein. “There’s just this versatility to the filter and the architecture of the feedback and resonance boost. For a lot of those sounds, I didn’t even use the oscillators; I used everything as an FM source to the filter and then used the filter as a resonator and played the pitches of the foley on the keys.”

Stein says that after spending time with Messenger, he’d now consider himself an advocate for the instrument. “It does a lot of things that I would maybe go to a modular for,” Stein says of its capabilities. “I was doing a lot of very active FM percussion with the sequencer, and that’s something I would do on the modular first, but I can achieve those results faster on this.

“To make something driving and repetitive, you have to introduce a lot of nuance to animate the sound over time,” he continues. “So, the ability to modulate the decay or the attack allows you to get nuanced expression into the patch. I can make a sound like that on the Messenger in, like, a minute. If I patched it on the modular, I’d be there 30 minutes later, still tweaking and getting lost. And I can’t keep a modular patch up very long, so I’m just gonna destroy it within a couple of days or a week. And then it’s gone.”

Michael Stein and Moog: A history

Of course, this is far from Stein’s first outing with Moog. After discovering synthesisers in his early twenties and getting “kind of obsessed” the composer says he’s owned a number of the company’s instruments. His initial attraction to the brand? The bass, of course. “They’re always able to go one note lower and keep the harmonic content of a sub bass,” Stein enthuses. “Most things, once you go below C, it starts to disappear. On every Moog, you can go down two steps lower. You can go to A, and it still sounds harmonically there. It doesn’t flub.”

Over the years, those unbeatable bass tones have repeatedly found their way into Stranger Things, with the Micro Moog providing pads, sweeps, and rises on the show’s first season, while a Minimoog was brought on board to add some 70s prog vibes in season two. However, it’s the Mother 32 that gets cited as the most prolifically used Moog throughout the series.

“The Mother 32 has been a very, very relevant synth on Stranger Things scores,” states Stein. “It does a thing where, if you have two of them and you set their sequence time or the pattern link differently, you get these rolling, evolving, kind of Tangerine Dream style polyrhythmic sequences. They can just roll through a scene and keep it moving.”

Analogue warmth has become synonymous with Stranger Things’ most famous musical moments, and with Stein’s work as a composer more generally. “I like the interaction with it,” he says of his lifelong connection to analogue. “I tend to not save a lot of patches, I like starting from a blank canvas rather than a preset. Also, there’s something about the tuning; where you naturally have to tune them all together, and it’s based on how you feel. I like dissonance a lot, so when everything is perfect, it doesn’t feel right to me. Really, it’s just a lot easier to get what I want with analogue equipment.”

Inside Stein’s studio: The hybrid analogue-digital hub powering Stranger Things and SURVIVE

That love of analogue is evident from his recently renovated studio, which bristles with an impressive amount of patch cables, dials, rack units, and general gadgetry. At the same, Stein makes clear that he’s not an “analogue purist”, and regularly makes use of digital tools as part of his process and in the design of his studio.

“Everything has to get to the computer at some point,” Stein concedes. “So that’s easily the hub. My studio is designed so that there’s no limitation on what it can’t do, which means it takes a long time to set up. I like communication from every direction: I can get CV from the computer, all the synths can now talk back to the computer for their MIDI. I believe your studio is like an instrument itself, you have to play the room.”

We’re curious, how does a small form factor synth like Messenger slot into such a packed workspace? “I’m actually a big fan of it, and I like the form factor,” he readily replies. “It’s small and I can move it around. It reminds me very much of my Micromoog. But, because it’s got two oscillators, it’s more like a Multimoog, and then it’s got all these crazy modern probability stuff that is very now.”

Not only is the form factor and feature set a draw card for Stein, but he says one of the Messenger’s biggest strengths is its versatility. “It’s kind of a chameleon,” Stein says after a moment’s thought. “It’s somewhat neutral. It sounds like a Moog, the envelopes are snappy, and it’s got very good routing. But I like that it doesn’t have some built-in saturation or super-acidy filter where it can’t be used for everything.”

What Stranger Things superfans need to know about Season 5’s musical return

When he’s not in the studio scoring alongside Kyle Dixon, the pair also make up half of the Texas-based instrumental-electronic band, SURVIVE. “It’s a little different,” Stein says of his work across the group’s four albums. “It’s instrumental, but there’s no picture, so it’s not like scoring. You need to put in a lot of little sounds and production techniques so that, sonically, it tells its own story.”

Stein says the group are sitting on easily an album’s worth of material and hopes to get it out sometime soon. However, the vast majority of his time and attention, naturally, is focused on the fifth and final season of Stranger Things.

“We’re in it,” he says of the workload. “Deep in the process and working every day, 6 to 7 days a week.”

While the composer can’t give any details regarding the plot, he hints at a musical palette that is coming full circle. “[Sonically] it has a lot of ties to the last season,” Stein allows. “It’s kind of a continuation, but it also definitely feels like it’s arching back to earlier seasons as well.”

That doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of surprises, and Stein emphasises that the music will break out in new ways. “We’re always trying to reinvent how we approach various scenarios,” the composer affirms. “If we’re revisiting themes, then we want to make them new. So, there’s the horror stuff, the action stuff, the cute stuff, and there’s also a lot of stuff we still have no idea about – because we just aren’t there yet.”

With all possibilities on the table, it’s safe to assume that fans can expect Stein and Dixon’s score to continue breaking new ground while delivering those oh-so-nostalgic arpeggios, sizzling sweeps, and warbling pads. Who knows – we might even hear a Messenger in there somewhere.

Learn more about the Moog Messenger at moogmusic.com.

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