The S3000XL's clever sibling: the same beloved 16-bit Akai sampling engine with a CD-ROM drive built into the front, so you drop in a sample disc and load straight off...

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...

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 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...

When the S1000 landed in 1988, it did to the studio what the S900 had only hinted at: proper 16-bit, 44.1kHz stereo sampling that instantly became the professional benchmark. For...

The rackmount Tube Driver, and the one to have. This is the TDR-101 from the era when B.K. Butler and Chandler built them in partnership, widely held to be the...

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...

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 EPS 16 Plus is Ensoniq's 1990 sampling workstation and a low-key legend of golden-era hip-hop. It samples at 16-bit with that warm, slightly gritty Ensoniq character, and its killer...

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...

The Xpander is, quite simply, one of the most revered analog synthesizers ever built: a six-voice, keyboardless powerhouse that is essentially half a Matrix-12. Each of its six voices is...

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...

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...

If one synth defines the lush, shimmering pads of the 1980s, it is the Juno-60. Six voices of digitally-controlled analog oscillators, a gorgeous 24dB resonant low-pass filter sharing the same...

The Focusrite Liquid Channel is what happens when a British console legend decides to bottle every classic preamp and compressor ever made and pour them into one 2U box. Using...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...