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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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 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...
In 1976 David Blackmer built the first solid-state VCA compressor and changed recording forever. The 160 is brutally simple, three knobs and a big switchable VU, but it does one...
The Maschine MK3 is Native Instruments' flagship groove production system: 16 velocity-sensitive pads, two crisp colour screens, a big browse-and-tweak encoder and deep integration with a massive sound library. Finger-drum,...
The Yamaha EM-90A is what happens when an organ, a rhythm box and a 70s lounge act throw a cocktail party and accidentally record the whole thing to 8-track. It...
The Jupiter-Xm is Roland's love letter to its own history, shrunk into a portable, battery-powered box with built-in speakers. Its ZEN-Core engine runs authentic Model Bank recreations of the Jupiter-8,...
Roland built the Integra-7 as the ultimate SuperNATURAL sound source: a rack-mount brain stacked with thousands of studio-grade acoustic, band and synth tones, drawn from Roland's flagship workstation lineage. Sixteen...
The 1176 is the other most-famous compressor in the world (the FET one), and this is Universal Audio's hand-built reissue of the blackface 1176LN, true to Bill Putnam's D/E-rev design....
The AKG BX20E is the king of spring reverbs: a torsional transmission-line spring system in its own substantial cabinet, giving long, lush, three-dimensional decays that sit somewhere between a plate...
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...
Roland's 12-bit rack sampler from the late 80s. The S-330 packs the same characterful converters as its keyboard siblings into a tidy 1U box, complete with that gritty, slightly lo-fi...
