The ambient pedal everyone fell in love with. The Hologram Microcosm chops your signal into granular fragments and rebuilds it into shimmering loops, glacial pads, hypnotic drones and glitchy, tempo-locked...

Maxon spent the 1980s quietly building the circuits inside the Ibanez pedals everyone worships, then bolted their own name onto this 1U rack delay. The DMD2000 is the result: a...

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 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 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 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,...

The Watkins (WEM) Copicat is the original British tape echo: warm, characterful slapback and repeats from real moving tape, beloved since the late 50s by everyone from rockabilly guitarists to...

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 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...

When a studio needed a workhorse that sounded like a Studer but didn't cost like one, it bought a Revox PR-99. Built in Switzerland on the bones of the legendary...

The Maxon AD-150 is a rackmount bucket-brigade analog delay from the company behind Ibanez's classic effects. Warm, dark repeats, gentle modulation and that organic BBD smear digital cannot fake.A lovely,...

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...

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...

Sony built consumer hi-fi that obsessed over clean signal paths, then turned the same obsession loose on a studio reverb. The DPS-R7 is a tidy 1U digital reverb from the...

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,...

A step sequencer that feels like an instrument. Eight tracks, 32 steps, 256 patterns, all wrapped in a gorgeous oak-and-aluminium body with a big illuminated button grid you actually want...

Behringer's CRAVE took one look at the price of a vintage mono synth and lopped off a couple of zeros. Under the hood: a proper analog 3340 oscillator, a creamy...

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,...

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,...

In 2011, Teenage Engineering looked at the bloated, menu-diving world of digital workstations and built the exact opposite: a slab of aluminium the size of a TV remote that somehow...

The Prophet 12 was Dave Smith's triumphant 2013 return to the Prophet line, and the first to break from pure analog. Twelve voices of hybrid synthesis: four digital oscillators per...

The Komplete Kontrol keyboard puts Native Instruments' huge sound world at your fingertips: touch-sensitive knobs, light-guided key zones and tight integration with Komplete and your DAW. A compact, clever controller...

Roland's SRV-2000 is a 1U slice of mid-80s digital reverb that has aged into a proper character box. It pairs early digital reverb algorithms with a built-in 3-band parametric EQ,...

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...