490 pages, hardback, with 60 black and white photographs. Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola. Published by Oxford University Press. Voltage control. Two words, and everything downstream of them: the oscillator that tracks a keyboard, the envelope that shapes a note's attack and decay, the ladder filter that gives a sawtooth its wet, vocal edge. These are the grammar of the instrument, and they are almost all his. Anyone who has turned a cutoff knob has touched Bob Moog's thinking. He died in 2005 having spent a good part of his working life broke, and having at one point lost the legal right to put his own surname on the machines he designed.

Albert Glinsky's Switched On is the first full biography, and it was worth the wait. Glinsky is a composer, and he already wrote the definitive book on Leon Theremin - Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, which carried a foreword by Moog himself and won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. For this one he was given exclusive access to Moog's personal archives: correspondence, unpublished writings, and, crucially, the legal and business papers. The result overturns a number of dates and origin stories that have been repeated in synth histories for decades.

The shape of the story is not the one you expect. A Depression-era kid in Flushing, Queens, building theremin kits in the basement and selling them by mail order while still in school. A doctorate in engineering physics. Then 1964, when a homemade prototype and a collaboration with the composer Herb Deutsch produced something nobody had asked for and everybody suddenly wanted. Glinsky is good on the fact that Moog was not alone: Don Buchla was building in parallel on the West Coast, working from a completely different idea of what the instrument was for, and the book keeps that argument alive rather than flattening it into a founder myth.

Then the flood. Wendy Carlos spent months splicing tape to make Switched-On Bach in 1968, and it went platinum, which almost nobody in the classical or the electronics business could have predicted. The Beatles, the Doors, the Byrds and Stevie Wonder got hold of the thing. Keith Emerson hauled a modular the size of a wardrobe onto rock stages. The sound turned up in A Clockwork Orange and later in Apocalypse Now, and by the second half of the seventies it had migrated into disco and the beginnings of dance music. Rolling Stone would eventually say the instrument had bent the course of music. It had.

What Glinsky does that previous accounts have not is follow the money, and it is grim and frequently ridiculous. Competitors cloned the circuits. The musicians' union came after him on the grounds that his machines were putting live players out of work. Japanese manufacturers moved faster and cheaper. Ownership of the company changed hands and Moog found himself an employee in a building with his own name on it, then a man in Asheville building instruments under a different trading name entirely, then a litigant fighting for the right to call a Moog a Moog. He got it back in 2002, three years before he died. The chapter titles alone tell you Glinsky knows exactly how absurd this is: Genericide, I Bought Bob Moog, The Gelatin Pit.

The technical writing is precise without becoming a service manual. Glinsky explains why Vladimir Ussachevsky's request for a particular kind of note-shaping produced the envelope generator every synthesizer has used since, and he traces how the filter, the oscillator and the control voltage became a standard the whole industry quietly adopted. He is equally interested in Moog's odder side, the near-mystical talk about where ideas come from and about the instrument as a collaborator rather than a tool.

The endorsements are worth noting because of who gave them. Suzanne Ciani, who lived through the period, says the book untangles a story she had watched go wrong in real time. Jan Hammer credits the instrument with giving him his voice. Andy Hamilton made it his music book of the year in The Wire; The Telegraph made it an editorial pick; the scholarly journals have already flagged it as the reference work on the subject. Coppola wrote the foreword.

If you own synthesizers, if you sell them, if you have ever wondered why the man whose name is on half the gear in the room ended up with so little, this is the book. Definitive, funny, and considerably sadder than the legend. Essential.