A step sequencer that feels like an instrument. Eight tracks, 32 steps, 256 patterns, all wrapped in a gorgeous oak-and-aluminium body with a big illuminated button grid you actually want...

The Komplete Kontrol keyboard puts Native Instruments' huge sound world at your fingertips: touch-sensitive knobs, light-guided key zones and tight integration with Komplete and your DAW. A compact, clever controller...

One of the very few synthesizers ever built on true additive synthesis, and Kawai's top-of-the-line workstation when it landed in 1996. Instead of starting from samples, the K5000W builds every...

The Mo'Phatt is the Planet Phatt's bigger, slicker descendant, built on E-MU's Proteus-2000 platform. It is packed with modern urban, hip-hop and R&B sounds: deep sub basses, crisp kits, synths...

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...

When Access dropped the Virus C in 2002, it didn't so much join the synth world as colonise it. This is the desktop module that turned up on countless trance...

Out of Austin, Texas came a graphic EQ that quietly became the studio standard while flashier rivals grabbed the magazine covers. The White Instruments 4400 skips the fragile faders and...

Here is a properly special rig. The Akai AX60 is a fat six-voice analog polysynth built around the legendary Curtis CEM 3394 chip, with sliders, a real resonant filter, an...

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...

The Oberheim Matrix-6R is the rackmount heart of one of the 1980s great analog polysynths, and this one comes paired with the Access Matrix Programmer, the dedicated hardware controller that...

The E-MU Proteus 2500 is a powerhouse rack sound module and command station: over a thousand ready-to-go sounds, a deep synthesis engine, real-time knobs and an onboard 16-track sequencer. From...

The OSCar, built by the Oxford Synthesiser Company, is one of the most distinctive monosynths ever made: two oscillators with additive waveform shaping, a powerful multimode filter, an onboard sequencer...

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...

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,...

The Prophet 12 was Dave Smith's triumphant 2013 return to the Prophet line, and the first to break from pure analog. Twelve voices of hybrid synthesis: four digital oscillators per...