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 CS6R packs the entire engine of Yamaha's CS6x performance synth into a 1U rack: lush AWM2 sample-based sounds, a full FM synthesis system, multitimbral parts, and a bank of...

The DRV-3000 is Korg's dual digital effects processor from the back end of the 80s, and it carries that slightly gritty, characterful early-digital voice that producers now chase on purpose....

Roland built the Integra-7 as the ultimate SuperNATURAL sound source: a rack-mount brain stacked with thousands of studio-grade acoustic, band and synth tones, drawn from Roland's flagship workstation lineage. Sixteen...

When Korg's ex-Sequential Circuits design team finally emerged from their lab in 1995, they brought the Prophecy: a monophonic solo synth that crammed analog modeling, FM-style VPM and physical modeling...

Before Eventide made pitch-shifting respectable and digital FX racks took over studios, MXR quietly unleashed the 129 Pitch Transposer: a gritty, unpredictable, slightly drunk box of pitch-warping chaos. It was...

Ensoniq's 1996 rack module and a 90s sleeper hit. The MR-Rack crams 64 voices, 886 sounds and Ensoniq's signature 2nd-generation Transwaves into a single 1U space, sample-based bread-and-butter (keys, strings,...

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...

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...

The Sony VT-M5 is the kind of gadget you would expect in a Cold War surveillance van or on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Billed as an Audioscope...

Before reverb came in a plugin, it came in a heavy rack box that cost as much as a car, and URSA Major built one of the finest of the...

The Korg minilogue is the little analog polysynth that reignited the whole craze: four voices of genuine analog warmth, a brilliant oscilloscope display, a proper step sequencer and a hands-on...

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...

Maxon spent the 1980s quietly building the circuits inside the Ibanez pedals everyone worships, then bolted their own name onto this 1U rack delay. The DMD2000 is the result: a...

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,...

Korg's Volca Keys proves you don't need a mortgage to own a real analog synth. Three genuine analog voices, a squelchy resonant filter, and a delay that smears everything into...

The Mutronics Mutator is the rare and revered rackmount analog filter: two channels of fat, resonant filtering with envelope followers, LFOs and ring modulation, from subtle movement to full-on mangling.Used...

The bigger brother of the S-330 and Roland's flagship rack sampler of the era: more voices, more memory, more outputs, and the same lovably gritty 12-bit Roland conversion. With a...

The Yamaha R1000 is one of the first affordable digital reverbs, and it has a sound all its own: a handful of reverb modes, simple knobs, and an early-digital character...

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...

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 PolyBrute is Arturia's six-voice analog flagship and one of the most expressive synths of the modern era. Two Brute oscillators per voice run into dual analog filters (the steely...

Korg's 1981 game-changer: real six-voice analog polyphony at roughly a third the price of a Prophet-5 or OB-X, which is exactly why it ended up under so many 80s hands....

The Behringer Composer Pro is the workhorse dynamics box that's lived in budget racks forever, and for good reason: two channels of compressor, peak limiter, expander and gate with the...