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...
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...
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...
Before everyone had a thousand soft-samplers in a laptop, you had a rack, a floppy disk, and twelve glorious bits. The Akai S950 is the box that chopped the breaks...
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 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 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 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...
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,...
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 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...
Ensoniq's 1996 rack module and a 90s sleeper hit. The MR-Rack crams 64 voices, 886 sounds and Ensoniq's signature 2nd-generation Transwaves into a single 1U space, sample-based bread-and-butter (keys, strings,...
If you could own one stereo bus compressor for the rest of your life, a frightening number of top engineers would name the Neve 33609. Derived from the legendary 2254...
Do not let the 25 keys fool you. The Subsequent 25 packs the full-fat Moog ladder filter, three oscillators and a re-tuned multidrive circuit into Moog's most compact keyboard synth,...
Don't let the cartoon fat man fool you: the HHB Radius 3 is a genuine valve stereo compressor with a glowing VU and a brilliantly simple program-based front end. Pick...
