The Roland MCR-8 is a tidy hands-on control surface: eight channel faders, assignable knobs, function buttons and full transport, all sending MIDI to your sequencer, DAW or modules. A simple,...

Before everyone could afford a rack of delays, the SDE-1000 was how you got real Roland digital echo without remortgaging the studio. It has that smooth, musical Roland repeat that...

The Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro (DSP8024) is the swiss-army processor that has lived in countless racks: a 31-band digital graphic EQ, real-time analyzer, feedback destroyer, dynamics and more, all with a...

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...

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 VP-70 is one of those rare boxes that does something genuinely odd: it takes a voice in, tracks its pitch, and lets you process, harmonise and re-pitch it like...

Roland only sold the RDE-1800 in Japan, which is the main reason so few of these ever left the country. It pairs a digital delay with a real spring reverb...

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 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...

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...

Akai's answer to the Juno. The AX60 is a six-voice analog polysynth from 1986, built around the same Curtis CEM3394 voice chip you will find in a clutch of classic...

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...

The Hohner Pianet T is the warm, slightly reedy electric piano that gave the Zombies, the Beatles and countless soul records their signature shimmer. Lightweight, characterful and instantly recognisable, it...

The Akai EWI 3020 is a proper electronic wind instrument: blow, bite and finger it like a sax or clarinet and it translates every nuance of your breath into expressive...

Knobs that move themselves. The Melbourne Instruments DELIA is a six-voice, bi-timbral hybrid polysynth built around the company's jaw-dropping motorized Rotary Recall knobs: load a patch and every control physically...

If a record sounds good on NS-10s, it sounds good everywhere, which is why these white-coned Yamahas ended up on the meter bridge of nearly every serious studio on earth....

If you opened any 90s project studio rack, the QuadraVerb was probably already in it. Alesis built a multi-effects box that ran EQ, reverb, delay and chorus all at once,...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

The Swissonic ControlKey 88 gives you a full eighty-eight keys of MIDI control, plus assignable faders, knobs, pads and transport for hands-on command of your DAW and soft-synths. A practical,...

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...