Rear panel keyboard out placement on the Moog Matriarch is a royal pain for people who keep the synth in a crowded setting. For example, I have another synth (the Pittsburgh Modular Taiga) just above the Matriarch, and their stands are flush against a wall – you can see this arrangement in my former post. I came up with two solutions to address the issue.

1) Permanently attached long patch cables

That is, plug a set of cables into the keyboard outputs and leave them there.

My choice is the Korg SQ-CABLE-6 set.

These are 75cm (29.5″) long. Despite being in color wavelength order, I prefer to have them labeled to make sure I grab the correct one.

When not in use, the free end of the bundle is laid over the sustain and expression pedal plugs sticking out from the rear panel. I have enough space between the synths to reach behind the Matriarch and grab the whole pack when needed.

I can even use these cables to patch into the Taiga.

But they are not long enough to reach some synth modules sitting on the nearby “shared corner” of my desk. Instead of longer cables – and the associated clutter – I use another solution for this scenario.

2) Routing keyboard outs to ARP/SEQ outs

If you happen to have a Grandmother, where the keyboard outs are in the front panel’s ARP/SEQ section, you probably tried to use the similar connectors on the Matriarch – only to realize that by default they only output anything when the arpeggiator or the sequencer is running.

Fortunately you can change this behavior with a global setting. The best way to do it is with my Mother Global Settings app.

Highlighted on the following screen shot is the pair of settings that control the association between rear keyboard outputs and the connectors in the front panel’s ARP/SEQ section. Click the picture for a larger view.

ARP/SEQ OUTS MIRROR KB is what we need here. It tells the synth to copy the logical signal of the rear CV, GATE and VEL connectors to the front panel’s CV OUT, GATE OUT and VEL OUT jacks when the apreggiator/sequencer IS NOT running.

The other setting, KB OUTS MIRROR ARP/SEQ, instruct the synth to copy the arpeggiator and sequencer logical signals to the rear keyboard jacks when the arpeggiator/sequencer IS running.

If you feel that the naming is a little backwards… We designed the app’s interface to resemble the nomenclature Moog uses in the Matriarch manual.

Signal copying is at the logical level, meaning that you can have different voltage output ranges for the original and the mirrored signal! You can set the actual voltage ranges for the ARP/SEQ outputs with the three switches next to the mirroring buttons. Voltage range settings for the rear outputs are on Page 2 in the app.

I like both mirroring settings to be turned on. Having a “my defaults” preset in Mother Global Settings makes resetting all synth settings – mirroring included – to my preferred values a breeze.

After making this setting adjustment, it’s pretty straightforward: just use the output jacks in the ARP/SEQ section. You can connect them to other jacks on the Matriarch, or to external gear.

As you can see on the following picture, the ARP/SEQ jacks are close enough to the “shared corner” to be able to connect any desktop module with relatively short cable runs.

Read this if you are wondering what the green stand beneath the Mavis is

I do prefer to use the Matriarch as a keyboard for the Mavis and other Moog desktop synths, because unlike the majority of small MIDI/CV keyboards (Arturia KeyStep for example), it can output the Moog standard -5V to 5V range on the CV out jack. Well, the Grandmother can also do this, but my Matriarch has a proximity advantage: it sits next to my desk’s “shared corner” on one side, and to my Moog semi-modulars on the other.

So far, so good. But I had to fix another issue that heavily impacted the usability of the Matriarch as a CV/Gate keyboard controller, regardless of whether I used the rear or the front panel outputs. It will be discussed in my next post.