The Source is the most unusual Moog ever built: a 1981 monosynth controlled by a Z80 microprocessor, with no knobs or sliders at all, just a sleek flat membrane panel...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

The Planet Phatt is E-MU's love letter to hip-hop, trip-hop and old-school R&B. Built on the same respected sound engine as the Proteus range, it is loaded with fat analog-style...

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 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...

Yamaha's only real assault on the late-80s sampler wars, the TX16W is a 12-bit rack sampler with a character all its own: grainy, punchy, and (whisper it) arguably more pleasant...

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...

Behringer's CRAVE took one look at the price of a vintage mono synth and lopped off a couple of zeros. Under the hood: a proper analog 3340 oscillator, a creamy...

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 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...

Akai's late-90s reinvention of the sampler: a big graphical screen, a computer-style workflow, and that clean 16-bit Akai character. This particular unit is loaded to the gills, RAM maxed at...

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...

Hand-built in California by Speck Electronics, the Model ASC is a boutique four-band parametric EQ with a cult following: clean, musical and surgical, yet never thin or harsh. This is...

The original Electronic Dream Plant WASP was a cult British synth famous for its filthy, buzzing oscillators and a filter that could sting. Behringer's WASP Deluxe is a faithful, fully...

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...

Released when most synth makers were still scared of giving you too much power, the Arturia Origin was an ambitious, misunderstood beast. Imagine stuffing a Moog Modular, ARP 2600, Jupiter-8...

The Novation Supernova is the analog-modelling rack synth that put Novation on the map: three oscillators and a proper resonant filter per voice, run through seven simultaneous effects, for a...

The top of Akai's classic S3000 line: 16-bit/44.1 sampling, that unmistakable Akai filter, and a build that simply keeps running. This one is fully wired on the back, eight individual...

The Fieldtone Box of Uncertainty is exactly what it sounds like: a beautiful, hand-built boutique sound box that turns audio into shimmering, fragmented, unpredictable granular textures. With controls like particle...

The ambient pedal everyone fell in love with. The Hologram Microcosm chops your signal into granular fragments and rebuilds it into shimmering loops, glacial pads, hypnotic drones and glitchy, tempo-locked...