Those efforts would culminate with the K2600, but the K2500 is the purest distillation of the company’s vision for synths. Often, this has translated to really good emulations of grand pianos - both in terms of feel and sound - but it also meant an audacious run of synths back in the ‘90s. You can buy Access's Matrix Editor to do that work, though.įounded by Stevie Wonder and public intellectual and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, the Kurzweil Musical Systems company has often been an outlet for next–generation performance keyboards. The Matrix 1000 sounds incredible and tends to sell for around $600, but its minimal interface does make it a drag to program. The guts include two analog DCOs per each of the 6 voices, a great filter, and ramp generators (that’s on top of the more conventionally used envelope generators). The Matrix 1000 was one of the company’s final designs, and an effort to create a true studio synth. But by the end of the decade, the company was facing the same ails as Sequential Circuits and Moog, with digital synths getting better and better at the acoustic emulations that the music industry so craved. Oberheim’s OB series would produce some of the most iconic synth tones of the ‘80s. It’s a powerful and fun synth that basically has all of the power of Ableton Live for a running price of $300 to $500 used. It contains a series of percussion sounds, subtractive–style digital synthesis, sampling functionality, an arpeggiator, a song mode, and, well, a lot more. The MC–808 is effectively a wavetable synth with a step sequencer, souped up to the nth degree. This led to the MC series of grooveboxes (the synth counterpart of the SP series of samplers), and the MC–808 was the biggest and baddest one ever made, first introduced in 2006. In the days before computers took over, Roland saw a market demand for a synthesizer that would become the center of any beatmaker or dance music producer’s workflow. While the lack of keyboard undoubtedly keeps the price down on these hidden gems, they’ll work fine with a MIDI controller and even better when run off of Ableton Live over MIDI. So if you’ve bought your Korg Monologue and feel like you don’t need another fat analog monosynth with a great sequencer for the rest of your life, consider some dirt cheap, high–quality rack and tabletop synths. With that said, not everything on this list is digital, and a couple entries mark some of the best analog circuits ever produced. These synths tend to be total sleepers, thanks in part to unsexy naming schemas including combos of letters and numbers and to the fact that no one is nostalgic for esoteric digital sounds yet. The tabletop and rackmount synths from the ‘90s and ‘00s had exceptionally engineered sound engines, making for a trove of old studio equipment unmined by today’s home recording culture. Indeed, some of the best synth deals of today - according to sheer sound quality and power–per–dollar spent - are available to the intrepid who can live without knobs and keys. The ‘90s and ‘00s saw just about every company in the game developing its own proprietary form of synthesis and putting it into as many packages and price points as possible. In fact, the strides made in digital synthesis were just as accessible to the masses as Korg’s rebooted ARP Odyssey is today. But it’s not like we were living in the dark ages before those synths were in production. The current era - typified by designs boasting analog circuitry, knob–heavy interfaces, or both - likely kicked off in the mid–’00s with Moog launching the Little Phatty and Dave Smith Instruments rising by way of the Evolver and Mopho. It’s pretty common to hear synth buffs talk about how we’re living in a Renaissance period of synthesizers.Īnd there’s certainly a case to be made, what with all of the dirt cheap analog synths that Korg is currently producing, a thriving Eurorack scene making modular synthesis more accessible than ever, and opulent new polysynths coming from Dave Smith Instruments and Waldorf.
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