Synthesizer

The Polivoks is the legendary Soviet duophonic analog synth, built in the USSR and beloved for its aggressive, slightly unhinged character. That famous resonant filter snarls and screams like nothing...

The Roland GAIA SH-01 is the synth that refuses to hide anything from you. Every function gets its own knob or button, three full virtual-analog tone engines stack into one...

The Roland Juno-106 is the definitive affordable analog polysynth: six voices, that gorgeous DCO-plus-chorus sound, a slider for everything and full MIDI. The pads, basses and stabs on half the...

If one synth defines the lush, shimmering pads of the 1980s, it is the Juno-60. Six voices of digitally-controlled analog oscillators, a gorgeous 24dB resonant low-pass filter sharing the same...

The Jupiter-Xm is Roland's love letter to its own history, shrunk into a portable, battery-powered box with built-in speakers. Its ZEN-Core engine runs authentic Model Bank recreations of the Jupiter-8,...

Cheap when it launched, legendary ever since. The Roland SH-101 was the synth "for the rest of us", a 32-key monosynth in red, grey or blue that you could sling...

The Roland SH-2 is a cult 1979 monosynth and a genuine bass monster: two fat VCOs (with sub-oscillators) feeding that creamy Roland filter, a flexible envelope and LFO, and the...

Roland's first stab at semi-modular synthesis, from 1975, and quietly one of the best-sounding things the company ever built. This is a three-module rig: the 101 keyboard synth at the...

The Roland V-Synth XT puts the full V-Synth engine in a 2U rack: elastic audio, COSM modelling, sampling and deep real-time control, driving sounds you simply cannot get anywhere else.A...

History lives in this one. In early 1983 the Prophet-600 became the first synthesizer on earth to ship with MIDI, the protocol Dave Smith gave the world for free, and...

The Studio Electronics SE-1 is what happens when boutique builders take the Minimoog blueprint and crank it to eleven. A pure analog monosynth with three discrete oscillators, a fat multi-mode...

In 2011, Teenage Engineering looked at the bloated, menu-diving world of digital workstations and built the exact opposite: a slab of aluminium the size of a TV remote that somehow...

The Waldorf Blofeld packs the German company's legendary wavetable synthesis (plus virtual analog and FM) into a tiny, gorgeous desktop box. Rich pads, snarling basses, glassy bells and evolving textures...

Waldorf built the Q for people who wanted German engineering with an attitude problem. This is a virtual-analog synth that hits like a hardware monster: fat, precise oscillators, that famously...

Yamaha's 1977 single-VCO monosynth, and a proper sleeper. One oscillator, a gloriously gloopy multimode filter that switches between low, high and band-pass, an LFO that hits volume, pitch, cutoff or...

Yamaha's clever 1979 take on the preset mono. One section gives you 29 instant presets for grab-and-go sounds, the other is a fully tweakable manual synth with a single VCO,...