This is the holy grail of Sherman gear. The Quad Modular Filter takes the cult Filterbank, the snarling, screaming, envelope-following distortion filter that producers worship, and stacks four of them...

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...

In the early 1980s Oberheim took aim at the Linn LM-1 and built a drum machine that quietly ended up on more classic records than almost anything else of its...

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 Ensoniq DP/4+ is really four effects processors in a single rack, units A, B, C and D, each a complete 24-bit stereo multi-FX in its own right, with four...

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...

The CompuRhythm CR-5000 is Roland's 1981 preset-and-programmable rhythm machine, and it sits right in the family tree between the legendary CR-78 and the TR-808. That means proper vintage Roland analog...

Some studio boxes are famous; the Dimension D is famous for being invisible. Roland's SDD-320 does not warble or swirl like an ordinary chorus; it uses two synced bucket-brigade delay...

The Waldorf Blofeld packs the German company's legendary wavetable synthesis (plus virtual analog and FM) into a tiny, gorgeous desktop box. Rich pads, snarling basses, glassy bells and evolving textures...

Yamaha's D1500 is the kind of dependable digital delay that quietly did the work on a thousand 80s records. Clean repeats, a genuinely useful modulation section for chorus and flange,...

There is no overstating this one. The TR-808 is the most influential drum machine ever made: the booming kick, the ticking hats, the cowbell, the snap, the sound of hip-hop,...

Long before the 808 shook subwoofers, the CR-78 was keeping time in a handsome wood-veneer box built to back a home-organ player. Then everyone else got hold of it. That's...

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 MU-R201 is Sony's twin-engine answer to the pro reverb market: two independent reverb processors in one box, so you can run two spaces at once or chain them for...

The Yamaha MG124C is the workhorse 12-channel analog mixer that turns up everywhere for good reason: clean Yamaha mic preamps, musical 3-band EQ, built-in compression on the mono channels and...

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 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...

Tascam took Antares Auto-Tune, the technology that quietly rewired pop music, and bolted it onto a proper channel strip. The TA-1VP is a full vocal chain in a single rack...

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,...

Cheap when it launched, legendary ever since. The Roland SH-101 was the synth "for the rest of us", a 32-key monosynth in red, grey or blue that you could sling...

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...

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...

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 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...