There is no overstating this one. The TR-808 is the most influential drum machine ever made: the booming kick, the ticking hats, the cowbell, the snap, the sound of hip-hop,...
The Roland TR-707 is the 707: a clean, punchy digital rhythm composer with that unmistakable 80s click and snap, the classic step-sequencer grid, and a sound that built house, techno...
The RZ-1 is Casio's 1986 oddball masterpiece: a 12-bit PCM drum machine with a built-in sampler, and one of the cheapest ways into that crunchy, grainy 80s sampling sound. You...
Roger Linn's LinnDrum (often miscalled the LM-2) is the sound of an entire decade: the sampled-drum machine that put real kicks, snares and hats into pop, R&B and new wave...
Long before the 808 shook subwoofers, the CR-78 was keeping time in a handsome wood-veneer box built to back a home-organ player. Then everyone else got hold of it. That's...
The CompuRhythm CR-5000 is Roland's 1981 preset-and-programmable rhythm machine, and it sits right in the family tree between the legendary CR-78 and the TR-808. That means proper vintage Roland analog...
Before Dave Smith gave the world MIDI itself, Sequential's first drum machine landed in 1984 with a sound all its own. The DrumTraks packs thirteen crunchy 8-bit sampled voices (bass,...
In the early 1980s Oberheim took aim at the Linn LM-1 and built a drum machine that quietly ended up on more classic records than almost anything else of its...
The Jugg Box DPM-48 is an obscure slice of Italian rhythm history: a digital drum machine with a big blue knob, a wall of buttons and a lo-fi character all...
The Yamaha EM-90A is what happens when an organ, a rhythm box and a 70s lounge act throw a cocktail party and accidentally record the whole thing to 8-track. It...
The Roland DDR-30 is a rackmount digital drum module from the mid-80s, designed to be hit: pair it with pads or triggers and it fires punchy PCM drum voices with...
Clavia's Nord Drum 2 is what happens when Swedish synth wizards aim their talents at percussion. No samples, no presets pretending to be a kit, just six channels of pure...
The MPC60 is where the modern MPC story begins. Designed by Roger Linn, it married 12-bit sampling with the swing and feel that defined boom-bap and built half of hip-hop...
Clavia's original Nord Drum, the little red box that builds drum sounds from pure synthesis instead of samples. Four channels of resonant, subtractive percussion, each with click, noise and tone...
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,...
The MPC4000 is the biggest, most powerful MPC Akai ever built, and the one the heavyweights reached for. Under the hood sits the 24-bit/96kHz Z96 sampling engine borrowed from Akai's...
The Maschine MK3 is Native Instruments' flagship groove production system: 16 velocity-sensitive pads, two crisp colour screens, a big browse-and-tweak encoder and deep integration with a massive sound library. Finger-drum,...
The Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo is the final, fullest evolution of the Space Echo line, and if you only ever own one tape echo, the faithful agree this is the...
The Boss BX-600 is a tidy little six-channel stereo mixer from Roland's Boss line: gain, pan, effect send and volume per channel, a built-in effect loop and that dependable 80s...
The legendary dbx Boom Box: an all-analog subharmonic synthesizer that doesn't just boost your bass, it manufactures it. Feed it a signal and it tracks the bass already there, synthesizes...
When the synth collection outgrows the desk, the MM-200 is the answer: sixteen channels of line mixing with EQ, effect sends and stereo returns, all in a tidy rack. Built...
The TEAC/Tascam M-30 is a proper early-80s all-analog 8-channel console, the kind of warm, characterful little mixer people buy precisely to take the cold edge off digital recordings. It was...
