There are some people whose advice is worth listening to and, if you’re a musician, legendary keyboard player Greg Phillinganes is probably one of them.

Alongside synth programmer Anthony Marinelli, Phillinganes has recently been in the studio recording a bang-on recreation of Baby Be Mine, a song from Michael Jackon’s Thriller that was written by Rod Temperton. Both Marinelli and Phillinganes worked on said album, and it was during a discussion about that time that Greg dropped his truth bomb.

It came as they recalled what producer Quincy Jones used to tell them: “You’re never more of a musician than you are a human being”. This is something that Jones was himself told by Nadia Boulanger, his famous music teacher, and Phillinganes suggests that it’s still as valid today as it ever was.

“That comes in the music,” he says. “That’s infused in the music.”

Explaining further, Phillinganes argues: “You have to respect the groove, and there’s certain musicians that understand that and there’s certain ones who don’t. And you can tell – you can tell if they’re respecting it or not. No question. It’s painfully obvious.”

Reiterating what he’s just said, Phillinganes adds: “Respect the groove – by any means necessary, respect the groove. Or else, stay home. What’s the point?”

Addressing the camera and wagging his finger, he says: “Yeah, I’m talking to you. Stay home. If you can’t respect the groove, just stay home. Wash dishes. Sell shoes. What’s the point if you can’t respect the groove? [If] You can’t respect the groove, you can’t respect people. If you can’t respect people, what’s the point. Yeah, I said it.”

Consider us told.

Phillinganes’ respect of the groove is certainly evident during his runthrough of Baby Be Mine. He plays a variety of synths, including the actual Minimoog and Prophet-5 that were used on the original recording.

The drums and synths were programmed by Marinelli, and the guitar played by Jarrett “Bueno” Goodly. Ray Monteiro, Jesse McGinty and Garrett Smith made up the horn section.

Featuring just one octave’s worth of keys (plus an extra C at the top, giving you 13 in total), this has the advantage of being barely larger than a smartphone, so is certainly portable. It also features a built-in multi-wave synth engine, a rechargeable battery, speakers, a 3.5mm audio output and MIDI I/O.

The not so good news is that the keys aren’t velocity sensitive, which will limit the amount of expression you can generate, and although it’s possible to shift the keyboard up or down three octaves, there’s no getting away from the fact that there’s not a great deal of serious playing you can do with just 13 notes in front of you. Even simple basslines could be tricky, and you can forget about forming anything other than basic chord shapes.

In fairness, it looks like the Orphea is primarily being aimed at kids who simply want to “explore melody and composition,” but even absolute beginners might hit a creative wall with it pretty quickly.

The people will be able to make a judgement, though, when the fate of Orphea is determined via a soon-to-be-launched Kickstarter campaign. No news yet on how much the device will cost or when it could potentially ship.

The significance of the Prophet-5 synthesizer, in the evolution of commercial music and production cannot be overstated. Where the Minimoog brought pseudo-affordable synthesis to the masses, the Prophet-5 picked up the torch and single-handedly reinvented synth production, with real musicians in mind. All of this was courtesy of Dave Smith and his company Sequential Circuits Inc (now just known as Sequential).

Initially released in 1978, the Prophet provided 5-note polyphony, coupled with the ability to save and recall patches. This was a revelation for keyboard players, alongside a five-octave keyboard and the immediacy of hands-on control, thanks to the beautiful control panel. As one successful UK session keyboardist commented to us recently, “it was the only synth you needed!”. That might not be quite true today, but it certainly was back in 1978, with little choice or competition.

After three major revisions of the original instrument, production ceased in 1984. Dave Smith released several other synthesizers with a slight nod to the Prophet moniker, but it wasn’t until 2020 that he revisited the original format, with the release of Version 4, in both five- and ten-voice iterations.

There have been many software versions of this legendary machine since the dawn of the plugin era, but we have had to wait until now for synth behemoth GForce to offer its own model on the original. Impressively, its Prophet-5 is the only example with official endorsement from Sequential.

Performance

GForce has included all the usual plugin formats, as well as a standalone version. With its scalable interface, this allows you to get lost in the programming by blowing it up to the full size of your computer screen, and just playing… and playing!

We are fortunate to have a hardware Prophet v4 in our studio, which allowed us to place the two against each other for direct comparison. The software also includes all of the original patches, which are present without any additional layer of effects, so this was the perfect place for us to start.

We probably shouldn't be surprised by what we heard, given GForce’s amazing reputation. The attention at the sonic level is exceptionally good. The behaviour of the pots is a little different; the software pots tend to offer a greater level of detailing and accuracy, particularly with the lower values, which is just where you want the fine-tuning. By comparison, the hardware offers conventional, equally-measured operation from 0 to 10.

Reducing both synths to their basic waveforms equally provided no clues in our attempts to separate the two, in our blind testing. Maybe the filter section would reveal differences between the two? No! In fact, much like the v4 hardware, GForce has included the original Mk1/2 SSM filter, alongside the Mk3 Curtis chip filter, and other than a difference in pot position, there is nothing to choose between the two, sonically.

In fact, despite keeping our own hardware in V.4 territory (which should be very stable), our own hardware had a tendency to wander in terms of its pitch stability. A Vintage pot was introduced to allow users of the hardware to engineer how stable they would like their Prophet to be, and in a nice touch, GForce has included this pot, not that you will want the instability of a v1 Prophet-5!

More notes good

Despite the revelation of five voices in 1978, later polys did attempt to address the problem of note stealing, for more grandiose synth pads with long release tails. This is not going to be an issue here, as the software allows 10-voice operation, effectively like the Prophet-10. Where GForce goes further is with the ability to stack voices into layers, with both layers offering full 10-voice operation.

If we add this to the exceptionally good effects section, we can't be surprised that the overall stature of the effected output is stunning, and all of this with the ability to control parameters on screen, or using automation within the DAW. Like other GForce products, the mapping of modulations or control through MIDI CC is very simple. There are several hardwired modulation paths, just like the original instrument, but one of the most eye-catching is the inclusion of the XLFO and XADSR sections, which offer more flexible, capable and advanced sources for modulation. Assigning these elements is as simple as selecting the modulation destination and adjusting the settings in the ‘X’ section. We were even able to modulate the Vintage pot in this way, although it might be more useful to generate pulses and gates in the direction of the filter.

If working within a DAW, a dedicated CC button allows the assignment of MIDI CC to pretty much any parameter, and certainly all the ones you need.

The other Poly

One element which we have to pay particular attention to, is the Poly-Mod section. This was always a unique form of cross modulation, which quickly became part of the Prophet sound, allowing the generation of metallic tones and thunderous effects. Experience tells us that this can be very difficult to capture in software, but GForce has really nailed it. It is every bit as effective as it always was, but if anything, offers a greater degree of control, thanks to its software domain.

Located down in the performance control area, there are a number of other tasty tidbits that were never available on the original instrument. Firstly, the original Prophet only ever offered a mono audio output. Thanks to a pan mode, with spread amount, you can quickly generate stereo depth, before using the onboard effects.

There is also the addition of chord memory and the exceptionally useful arpeggiator. In standalone mode, the latter really does allow you to get lost in the sound, particularly when used alongside the hold control.

Verdict

We have to conclude that this is a pretty special release. Firstly, the Prophet-5 holds a very special place in people’s hearts as the first machine of its kind, and GForce has really looked after its legacy beautifully. If you are a purist and just want an original machine in software, you are firmly in luck. You can dial back any of the additional elements, and just use this like an original Prophet-5.

However, for more contemporary or stylised work, the software has an incredible amount to offer. With over 420 new patches, alongside the original 38 factory patches, the programming team has taken full advantage of everything this new iteration has to offer while truly respecting its heritage. The subtle detuning of the oscillators, with the greater control of the envelope section, means that you have the sound of an original, with extraordinary levels of control and greater depth of modulation. It is undoubtedly the best of all Prophet worlds, and an enormous testimony to the original machine and the brilliance of GForce for looking after the details in software.

Hands-on demos

GForce Software

Alternatives

Specifications

UDO's Super Gemini is one of our favourite synths of the last couple of years, so we obviously have sky-high expectations for the company's new DMNO, or Domino, another double-timbre beast with a massive amount of onboard tweaking. This time, though, you get less polyphony in favour of more interaction between these engines, and a fabulous screen to help peel back the synth's many layers.

As with Gemini, DMNO is double the synth fun, but the end result is different enough to make it another ridiculously characterful UDO synth, and one aimed fair and square at proper 'synthusiasts'.

UDO is one of the most exciting synth brands around – and we’re not just saying that because (like us) it is British. The company has an obvious passion for creating cutting-edge synths that might sometimes borrow the best bits from the odd synth icon, but always deliver something completely new and without compromise, and machines that often feel alive and unpredictable – traits again shared with their vintage forebears.

Gemini, which we reviewed a couple of years ago, is a prime example: two synths in one, a nod to the Yamaha CS80, and with a signal flow between both engines that can create an all-new and awe-inspiring sound. The company’s new DMNO follows a similar path: two independent 4-voice synths, this time with design cues from the Oberheim 2-voice, but again resulting in a synth that delivers sound design options in spades.

Unlike Gemini, DMNO has a superb screen to help you navigate around the all-important signal flow, which is all about the interaction between those two synth engines. DMNO also allows you to shift between eight different Play modes for extra performance versatility, but it still delivers a similar Gemini user experience where things might not always go according to plan, but they do always seem to go right.

And while DMNO lacks the polyphony of Gemini – four binaural/eight mono compared to 10 and 20 respectively on Gemini – it’s another gert lush synth from our local Bristolian neighbours which looks like succeeding in extracting cash from our bank account. But will it do the same to yours?

Performance

You can think of DMNO as two synths in one because that is exactly what it is: DMNO 1 and 2 have almost identical controls, sitting side-by-side on the front panel, and they each have their own effects, arpeggiators and modulation setups.

The hybrid workflow starts with two FPGA Digital Oscillators per voice, before going into an all-new analogue, dynamic multi-core analogue filter with parallel, series and stereo connection modes.

The digital FPGA-based 'super-waveform' oscillators deliver classic analogue waveforms and user selectable wavetables. They also feature six of what UDO call ‘sister oscillators' which come into play in ‘super mode’ where you can pretty much 'super trance' up any of your supplied waveforms, of which there are plenty.

With Osc 1 you get six basic waveforms and you can load in another six wavetables from 32 options. It's a similar story for oscillator 2, but here you only get three additional slots rather than six, as the other three are taken by Osc 2's 'keyboard off' options. This is where the oscillator can operate in LF mode as a sub or, handily, as an LFO and modulation source. And while DMNO is not a wavetable synth per se, you can morph between waveforms, upload your own, and generally tinker with your core ingredients beyond what you'd expect.

The filter section is pretty incredible with parallel, series and stereo modes, each with several filter setups to choose from. And with a dozen LP, HP, BP, all pass, and phase shifter filter types available – most with selectable poles plus two resonance choices for LP – there is a lot to choose from.

The all-pass mode is particularly worth auditioning, where resonance becomes the main operating parameter, driving certain sounds in a more unpredictable way, and great fun at extreme settings.

DMNO's screen is a real bonus, and while we didn't miss one on Gemini – with that synth it almost helped not having one as you focused on your hands-on tweaking – the one on DMNO kind of shows you what your were missing. It combines brilliantly with the four rotaries beneath, and certain parameters go brighter as you select them, very useful, especially great when modulating, as we'll see.

To the left of this is a mixer for the synth layers, with panning and effect sends to overall reverb and delay for your mix. There are other drive, chorus and EQ insert effects plus reverb and delay send effects within each layer. You can tweak up to four effect parameters at a time with those rotaries beneath the screen, and again the screen is a highlight, indicating graphical changes like EQ.

Extra performances

With DMNO's ingredients, then, you're already starting with something different, but it's the interaction between DMNO 1 and 2 where things start going on a tangent, and it's a path you will gladly follow – just make sure you have a few hours to pass, because this thing will eat your spare time, albeit richly rewarding you along the way.

Chief among these workflow extras are the eight play modes which we'll list simply because they tell you all you need to know, and reveal an insight of the leftfield thinking behind the synth. Single, Dual and Split are the most obvious. The first allows you to play either DMNO with maximum 8-voice (mono) polyphony; Dual plays both synth layers together, each with the polyphony halved; while Split simply puts each synth on a selectable range of the keyboard, as you might expect.

Fourth mode One-Two allows you to play the first synth with your first four notes of polyphony but switches to DMNO 2 for the rest; Cycle alternates between each engine, so press one note for DMNO 1 and the next plays DMNO2, then swaps back and so on. Random alternates between the layers randomly based on user definable probabilities; Chaos is Random plus random pitch changes (by octave, fifths etc); and finally Series is where the audio of DMNO 1 can be routed into 2.

Whether you'll use all of these modes is, of course, debatable – some might be a little too out there for you – but we love anything that adds performance variation, and particularly like Chaos mode, especially combined with the arpeggiator, as you can keep things relatively in control while sounding off-beat and a much more interesting player than (in our case) you might well be.

Modulation

Each DMNO layer has two LFOs, although, as we said above, Osc 2 can additionally be used as one in LF mode and one of the envelopes can be looped to act as an LFO – this doubling up of functions across DMNO is very 'on brand', if you think about it. Similarly there are two envelopes with a not-so-hidden third able to shape the VCA.

To the left of the keyboard there's a dedicated block for more performance/keyboard based modulation, and one other feature well worth picking out is the envelope follower. Here you can modulate with an external signal, a bit like side-chaining with a kick through a compressor, and it's yet another small addition with big dividends.

There's a lot of modulation to delve into here, and like Gemini, DMNO can be incredibly hands-on and instant, but its screen again adds another dimension. You'll be switching between fat, detuned super waves (not just saws) by way of several three-way switches to select more obvious sources and destinations, and the screen acts beautifully here, highlighting each options as you shift.

However, the display comes into its own when offering more complex modulations that can be set up by way of the modulation matrix, with seven slots, 10 sources, 15 destinations, and levels all controlled with the four rotaries beneath. Easy and plentiful.

Verdict

All of these features add up to a synth with a very big and layered sound, which is particularly suited to sound designers and, really, those after something a little different. Sure you can get huge, analogue-style leads, basses, sequences and the like, but it's really what happens when you combine your Dominos using either the play modes or straight audio routing.

Here DMNO stands out and, like Gemini, it seems to be another synth designed from the question, 'what can we make that would be really cool?' rather than 'what can we make that will sell?'. That's not to say it won't sell – it certainly deserves to – but this isn't yet another analogue synth, another wavetable or another wacky hybrid. We have enough amazing synths that fit the bill in all three of those categories, but DMNO tends to forge its own path around and through all of them.

In that sense it very much has its own character, but perhaps makes it a harder sell, especially if you are after the huge pads that we love about Gemini. For those, you might find DMNO's polyphony lacking – you're only getting the full eight voices in mono mode – but if you think of DMNO as a massively souped up dual mono synth or a twisted paraphonic, you certainly won't be disappointed.

So where Gemini is all about rich, massive and expressive walls of sound, DMNO is more like its rather unruly nephew – less to say, a massive attitude, probably a chip on its shoulder, but it talks the talk and you listen when it does.

Hands-on demos

UDO Audio

Alternatives

Specifications

The history of commercial music is littered with instances where a new technology has inspired creativity to go in a different direction: acoustic to electric guitars, acoustic to electric pianos, drum machines and, of course, synthesizers.

While synths took a little while to take hold of the mainstream, there were moments of backlash, with the '90s being an example, through bands such as Oasis. But it was in 1997 that Roland released a hardware synth called the JP-8000 that would notably change the sound of commercial music forever. This initial influence was evident through the style of electronic music known as trance, but quickly infiltrated other styles, remaining incredibly fashionable in today’s commercial production landscape.

The JP-8000 introduced the concept of the supersaw waveform to the world; it was a sawtooth wave, but with clones of itself that could be detuned in a controlled way, giving rise to the enormous-sounding synth pads that were popularised in trance. It also influenced other commercial synth products, with the Virus range of machines, from Access, being notable supersaw ambassadors.

These sounds are fully omnipresent in pop and commercial culture, with a majority of synths providing some form of capacity to embrace the sound. It is, however, sometimes difficult to get the exact sound you want, so wouldn't it be great to have a specific software instrument that embraces this technical trait and stamps its endorsement on the name of the product?

Performance

Super*Saw (pronounced as SuperStarSaw) is a new plugin from Native Instruments, designed in collaboration with critically acclaimed producer AG Cook. If you are unfamiliar with his work, search out his album Britpop, or his work with Charlie XCX, and you'll hear plenty of evidence of supersaw usage.

Apart from integrating seamlessly with other NI products, such as Komplete Kontrol and Maschine, Cook has supplied many of the patches, while the visual aspect of the plugin includes design elements from his longtime visual collaborator, Simon Whybray. It is very striking in its appearance, albeit in green and pink!

The new Super Star

Upon loading Super*Saw for the first time, there is a degree of familiarity, which begins with the oscillator section on the left-hand side. To be honest, this rather undersells the concept, as we will quickly discover!

Super*Swarm is equipped with two partial sound sources, which are identifiable by a pink and green dot, located on the top left-hand side. Each of these sources is identical, but they are described within the context of the instrument as Swarms. Each Swarm is equipped with its own set of parameters, which begins with the number of audible sawtooth oscillators, which can then be detuned. You can't start with a single oscillator, but what's the point of that in this context, particularly when you can increase the Swarm up to 16 saws per partial? You can see how many are in play from the square graphic located on the top left-hand side of the Swarm section. Once you have selected your Swarm level, you can then de-tune and spread the oscillators across the stereo field. Even with only one Swarm in operation, it sounds gigantic!

In the lower half of the Swarm section are a host of modulation elements. Changing parameters is simple enough, once you get the hang of it, but requires the movement of the mouse over a particular parameter, at which point a value will appear, allowing you to increase or decrease with the mouse. Your connection with this interface may just depend on what you are used to. It is an elegant and simplistic piece of design, but as with all levels of minimalism, sometimes things aren't as obvious as you might hope! Like anything, once you know how it works, you quickly get used to its modus operandi.

Mix it up

Moving to the central part of the instrument (and with previous thoughts on the design ringing in our ears) you definitely have to do some experimentation.

Located at the top in the centre is a mix control, which indicates levels between the pink and green Swarm layers, as a circle. This fills or depletes with each click and drag. It's elegant, but you have to get used to it. This is also where you can change the tuning of each Swarm layer, with the ability to transpose up or down two octaves, either side of the core note.

This central section is described as the Morpher, as it allows you to take a snapshot, using the target icon, located in each corner. Much like an X/Y pad, it then allows you to seamlessly shift between the snapshots, and does so very smoothly indeed.

At the bottom of this section, icons relating to amplitude envelope and filter quickly reveal a host of control elements related to each menu category. To be honest, this felt a little bit fiddly, as a lot of information is displayed in a relatively small space, and while the elegance is maintained, a larger display area would certainly be beneficial here. The filter itself is very in keeping, stylistically speaking, with the genre intended for a synth of this kind. You can switch between 2- and 4-pole filters, with lo, band and hi-pass filters being available.

The central display is also switchable to Voice Control mode, which allows the engineering of a host of different elements, particularly relating to control of polyphonic playback. Here you can engineer all sorts of glides and bends, which can be particularly useful for creating risers or quirky synth sounds.

FX and more

The section on the far right is switchable between the effects section, which provides chorus, delay and reverb, and further modulation sources, which include LFO and two ADSR envelopes.

Verdict

It becomes very clear, very quickly, that Super*Saw is an immensely powerful sound source, as long as you don't mind starting with a sawtooth as your main constituent component. No problem there, because that's the whole point, right?

In order to get you going, there are a considerable number of presets, all placed in categories to guide your path. It doesn't take long to hear how complex sounds can quickly become, and we have to admit that despite our admiration for the concept, we felt like we only scratched the surface with its capabilities. A large part of this is because of the hieroglyphic and graphical nature of the interface, which is really fun to use, but does find you scratching your head occasionally. Of course, in an ideal world, you would work with the synth to fully understand its operational elements, and make no bones about it: if you have a requirement for huge-sounding saw-based pads, this is a fantastic synth which is going to reward you continually, but you’ll need to have the manual on hand to get the absolute most from the instrument.

Hands-on demos

Native Instruments

Alternatives

Specifications

Native Instruments’ Komplete is the company's ‘everything you could wish for’ bundle of instruments, effects and sounds, and it has just been upgraded to 26, from 2024’s v15. This isn’t a jump of 11 versions that you missed, rather NI’s new and logical annual naming convention.

And now that NI has been bought by InMusic, you can be pretty sure that Komplete has a decent future, into the '30s at least, we’d hope.

As ever, when it comes to reviewing Komplete, we’ll give you the meat of what’s new, and assume you have some knowledge of the more established NI titles. Don’t expect 340 individual reviews – we’ll give you a flavour of each level, but the ‘konclusion’ might end up back in your court with the old ‘how much can you handle’ versus ‘how much do you want to save?’ arguments.

Performance

First up the various Komplete bundles are still called Standard (£494/$549 for 315GB of 180 instruments and effects, 70+ expansions and 63,000 sounds); Ultimate (£1,124/$1,249 for 950GB of 280 instruments/fx, 100+ expansions and 116,000 sounds); and the Collector’s Edition (£1,754/$1,949 for 340+ instruments and effects, 150 expansions and over 180,000 sounds).

Yes, when it comes to Komplete, reviews tend to be numbers, lots of them, and large ones at that.

And before we delve in deeper, we should mention the three additional Komplete Select editions: Electronic, Beats and Band, where you get titles dedicated to those broad genres and styles. At just $99, these are a very good intro to the Komplete universe and even pay for themselves with a $99 discount should you upgrade to Komplete Standard.

On to the more expensive bundles, and each of the three comes with what NI rightly calls its flagship products comprising Absynth 6, Massive X, Kontakt 8 and Guitar Rig 7 Pro. Just in the last title alone you have pretty much every effect ever created, and not just for guitarists – it's a superb suite of plugins.

The synths are pretty awesome too. Absynth 6 is new to all three and is an update to one of NI's longest-serving instruments and slots easily into a 2020s DAW rack, while Massive X has become the mainstay of dance music producers everywhere. Between the two, you have all your dreamy textures and pads, and feisty basses and leads properly covered, and a lot more besides.

As for Kontakt 8, well, this instrument shell, player and organiser has also recently been beefed up with more creative tools and we're using it more than ever. You pretty much have everything you need with these four titles, then, and we've only just started.

A lot more newbies

Time for the newcomers at each level, so grab yourself a big cuppa. Starting with the Standard edition, you get two titles from NI's Definitive Electric Keys Collection, namely Jade and Teak. Jade is designed more for gritty and punchy sounds, suitable for more pop and rock piano styles, while Teak has a warmer tone with a '60s vibe, better for sparser arrangements to our ears.

These new electric piano titles now increase depending on the Kontakt bundle you buy, so for the Ultimate edition, you get two more (Ember for more rhythmic and percussive keys and Moonshell for light and soulful), and with Collector's Edition you get all six pianos, with the addition of Phoenix, more of a Fender Rhodes/'70s style piano, and Diamond, a '60s version more suited to jazz. That's a lot of electric pianos – overkill perhaps.

Back to the newcomers for Standard and you get Electric Neon Essentials, one of NI's Session Guitarist titles and aimed at pop and EDM guitarists, although there's a decent amount of flexibility under the bonnet, meaning you can easily stretch these sounds into a wide variety of genres. It's slick, and the very definition of 'mix ready', almost too smooth on occasion.

As with the pianos, you get more guitars as you step up Komplete levels, so Ultimate adds Session Guitarist – Electric Ruby Deluxe. However, both Ultimate and Collector's have the same 12 Session Guitarist titles and, as it turns out, the same pianos, organs and drums, so if sampled instruments are your thing, Ultimate might get you what you need for less outlay than Collector's.

In fact, as far as major upgrades go, that is it for the Standard edition, as most of the new fun does sit with the more expensive options. For example, both Collector's and Ultimate now feature Claire: Avant, a virtual version of the world's biggest piano.

Bigger doesn't always mean best, of course, but Claire does deliver an impressive and varied sound covering jazz, soundtrack, mellow, distorted and even harpsichord. In the (perhaps unlikely) event that you find yourself short on piano sounds, this definitely fits the bill. Collector's Edition (of course) boasts more, another Claire piano called Avant, which adds a more experimental edge to your piano sound.

Another big, new title – again only for Ultimate and Collector's – is Erosia, an instrument for cinematic sound design. This is one of the most impressive of the new additions, combining four soundscape parts for eerie pads, grain effects and shimmering atmospheres. It also has a very decent amount of tweaking available, where you can dig into some waveshaping, harmonic resonance and effect parameters – a very solid '26' inclusion.

Along similar lines, but with a very different UI and approach – although, it has to be said, a similar soundscape vibe – is Circular, only available for the Collector's Edition. It's essentially an instrument that combines layers, each with its own sequencer, so you can create dynamic and evolving chords, while being able to adjust parameters on the UI circle.

You get 30 sound types to choose from, each with its own presets, so there are a lot of ingredients, and while it is basically another way of layering four parts, it does offer some intriguing and usable results.

The final two big NI offerings are both orchestra-based and available for the Collector's and Ultimate bundles. LCO Strings is a recent release that allows you to combine those four layers – NI loves its four layers – with high-quality samples from the London Contemporary Orchestra. Bland UI aside, it manages to not only deliver realistic orchestra sounds pretty quickly, but also has enough articulations, LFOs, and core samples to deliver expressive and flexible results that can be pompous and dramatic or eerie and atmospheric.

Cremona Quartet Ensemble is another orchestra engine, this time with a string quartet taking up those four layers. The instruments are modelled on the kinds of antiques that cost tens of thousands, including a Stradivari cello and violin, and Guarneri and Amati violins.

Of the newcomers we have discussed so far, this is probably the one with the most realism attached to it. It includes a playing style where the quartet only plays its individual parts as mono instruments, so if you play two, three or four notes, the other instruments kick in; or play them polyphonically – your choice. Either way, the results are very good and this is likely to be one of the additions we'll be keeping on our drive.

Other brands

Of course, NI is now offering Plugin Alliance/Brainworx and iZotope plugins as part of Komplete. Rather than attempt to go into depth on all of these, all three levels of Komplete offer the iZotope Elements versions of Ozone 12 (for mastering), Neutron 5 (mixing), and Nectar 4 (vocals), so that's pretty much all your production plugins sorted, albeit with less grunt than the full-fat versions.

Other iZotope highlights include FXEQ, which is a rather brilliant (and cheap) workhorse plugin that lets you add effects with ease as you would an EQ. You also get VocalSynth 2, which might be old but still does exactly what it says on the tin; and Trash, a distortion, filtering and convolution plugin which is a production favourite, although we were less than impressed by its current version. Still, good to have anyway.

The Brainworx/PA standouts for all three Kompletes include the bx_enhancer saturator/ compressor/EQ, and the multiband compressor, bx_glue. Ultimate adds the bx_XL mid/side mastering plugin and bx_clipper, while the top-tier Collector's bundle adds the excellent bx_console AMEK 200 (our only criticism was the price), and bx_masterdesk PRO, a full mastering plugin which delivers great results, fast.

While Komplete can often look like NI throws everything at the bundle, these third-party inclusions do make sense in the overall scheme, as the iZotope plugins bring their AI assistant technology to your productions, while both Plugin Alliance and Brainworx fill the gaps and make it more hands-on if that is your thing.

Finally – and we're almost breathing a sigh of relief just writing those words – all three Kontakt bundles now include 28 Play Series titles (that is, streamlined sound collections/instruments for Kontakt) which have been bolstered by half a dozen newbies including Marco Polo Drums, 24k Drums, Hypr, Halo Vox, Luxa and Roux. Look, they're free, there are 28 of them, you get them whatever. Never look a sonic gift-horse in the mouth.

Verdict

It's so easy with Komplete – whatever the bundle level – to get swept away by the sheer numbers, the savings and the absolute might of these great tools and how they could and really should positively impact your music making. We all love more for less, right? And with that in mind, Komplete is as big a bundle, upgrade, bargain, and bloody huge outlay as it’s always been. Better in fact!

You will not need another plugin (whichever version you opt for).

But right about now, and in every Komplete review, we get to that nagging question as it starts emerging from our sugar-rushed brains: do I really need it all?

Here we go again, back at this argument and always the Komplete Kaveat: that throwing plugins at a project doesn’t always make it better or indeed finished. The tyranny of choice is real and sometimes a deliberately slimmed-down plugin setup can be more creative.

Yet, short of allowing you to pick and mix your own titles – which would be great but, we suspect, messy – NI has probably got the balance just about right between the various Komplete bundles in 26, and, of course, upgrades are possible if you just want to go small to start with.

But do balance up your needs, your hard drive size, your time, the style of music you make and, of course, your budget. There’s no doubting that Komplete really is 'complete' but, as we pointed out above, certain editions might just do – Ultimate over Collector's for example, especially when it comes to recreations of 'real' instruments.

Either way, with the incorporation of many excellent titles from Plugin 'The Rebel' Alliance and iZotope, Komplete is still the greatest music software bundle(s) you can buy (or subscribe to from $15 a month with NI's 360 deals).

But is your music missing focus or plugins? That is the question, and only you can 'Komplete' the answer. We've done our job and warned you about the tyranny of choice, but we're still quietly making space for the Collector's Edition anyway. As your dad used to say: 'Do as I say, not as I do, my young Padawan'. (Well, ours did anyway.)

Hands-on demos

Native Instruments

Alternatives

Specifications

Nowadays, however, you can’t take two steps on the internet without tripping over a loud and confidently stated opinion on the “correct” way to make music. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, they’re all lined with hot takes masquerading as unbreakable rules, purists and gatekeepers claiming that analogue is always better than digital, Behringer gear is garbage, and your cheap-ass monitors must be ruining your mixes. What’s an up-and-coming musician or producer to do? In short: ignore them.

Many of the most transformative genres to emerge in the last 50 years - from punk to jungle to trap - were based around breaking the rules. Producers of old didn’t worry about what they were supposed to do, or waste their time pondering the opinions of beard-stroking strangers. They just got on with making the music that they wanted to make. Many of the most persistent myths that get repeated as fact don’t even hold up in real life. Here’s our number one rule: if it sounds good to you, it is good.

In the spirit of those legendary rule-breakers of old, here we take a closer look at ten oft-repeated music tech myths that fall apart in the harsh light of day.

1. Analogue is better than digital

Let’s start with this old chestnut. Many people will try to tell you that analogue synthesis is somehow inherently ‘better’ than digital. They don’t bother with any of that virtual analogue nonsense (despite the power, flexibility and convenience that digital can provide), nor will they trouble themselves with wavetables, FM or indeed anything other than tried-and-true, old-school subtractive synthesis.

Analogue can sound great, it’s true. It’s hard to top a vintage Minimoog or CS-80 in top condition for sheer sonic deliciousness. But objectively better? That’s a stretch. Limiting yourself to just one flavour can lead to bland results. It can also be a real challenge to get a lead to pop out of an all-analogue mix. And if analogue is the be-all and end-all, why are digital synths like Serum so popular? (Hint: because they sound good.)

Choose a synth because you like the way it sounds, not because of what’s under the hood.

2. Behringer gear is garbage

Comments about Behringer gear tend to fall into two main camps: it’s either complete garbage, or it’s incredible, and the company is going to save the world by releasing budget synths. Somewhere in between these two polarities is the truth: products from a mass-market retailer occasionally do fail, but no more than those of any other manufacturer working at a similar scale.

So why the hate? This appears to be a holdover from users who got burned by unreliable products in the ‘90s before Behringer made a number of manufacturing changes. It also restructured the company, with Behringer now just one of many brands under the Music Tribe banner, an umbrella that also includes respected outfits like Midas, Klark Teknik and TC Electronic. They can’t all be bad, can they? And why would Behringer's products be inferior and the others' not… even though they’re all made by the same company?

It’s not just poor musicians that use Behringer products, either; plenty of big-name artists do too. Hans Zimmer famously took his Behringer 2600 on the road to spare his vintage ARP the abuse, while the acid clone TD-3 has been caned by Squarepusher, KiNK, Anthony Rother and many more. Some may question their imitative designs, but Behringer makes solid gear at an unbeatable price. Don’t let the past grudges of others prevent you from enjoying what the brand has to offer.

3. Korg Volcas are a joke

In 2013, Korg released a trio of tiny instruments, the Beats, Bass and Keys. These were all part of the Volca line, and they kick started a trend of low-priced, diminutive synthesizers, samplers and drum machines that continues to this day, with Korg now offering 10 Volca machines and plenty of other companies copying their style. And yet somehow, the name Volca has become synonymous with ‘joke’.

This smacks of gatekeeping. While the Volcas may be limited compared to other items in the Korg catalogue, they’re also much, much more affordable. This low price makes them ideal starting points for newbies looking to explore music production, or wanting to make the jump from software to hardware.

With their built-in sequencers and motion sequencing capabilities, Volcas are also exceedingly fun. Many also feature circuitry borrowed from much more expensive units too, ensuring that they sound just as good as their bigger siblings. They also have some pretty famous fans, with artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Octo Octa, Gorillaz and Mura Masa all having used them.

The next time someone calls a Volca a toy, take that as a recommendation - toys are fun to play with, after all.

4. FM synths sound cold

In 1983, Yamaha’s DX7 completely disrupted the synthesizer world, knocking analogue off its perch and introducing the world to the possibilities of digital synthesis. With its precise sounds and metallic, glassy tones, FM soon gained a reputation for being icy cold - particularly when compared to warm and fuzzy analogue synthesis.

While the famous EPiano 1 - the electric piano preset that dominated a thousand ‘80s hits - is admittedly on the chilly side, FM synths don’t have to be frostbite-inducing. A lot of this is down to the way you program them. While FM may excel at colder timbres, it can certainly do warm strings and brass too - you just don’t notice them as often, because they don’t stand out as much in a mix.

And, as FM synthesis has evolved over time, it’s also gotten warmer along the way. FM synthesis circa DX7 had only sine waves to play with. Modern FM synths are much more varied, with the Korg opsix (pictured above) offering 21 different waveshapes, ensuring many more toasty harmonics in the sound. They also often have analogue filters now, which can also heat things up a few degrees.

FM synthesis has a lot to offer. Frigid tones are just a small part of its repertoire.

5. GAS is bad

According to the armchair doctors of RedditMD, GAS is the worst affliction that can befall a musician. Short for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, it’s a colloquial acronym that describes what happens when purchasing new gear becomes more important than using and making music with said gear.

There’s a persistent attitude online that if you’re not making and releasing music with your gear or software then you’re some kind of worthless poseur. If you believe this, then getting caught up in buying gear can become shameful. Really, though, what’s so bad about it? As long as you’re having fun, who cares? And, with local music shops fast disappearing, there’s really no other way to try out gear than to buy first and ask questions later.

Not everyone sees it as a negative either. Take this anonymous Reddit user, for example: “(GAS) seems to be common in musicians, they love their instruments, and each one brings something a little different. Inevitably you have your favourite that you use all the time, but loving the tools you work with is not a problem, in my opinion.”

Of course, if you’re buying gear with money that you don’t have, that can become an issue. But having fun acquiring new gear within your means? Have at it.

6. Roland has lost it

Spend enough time in the online synth community and you’ll start to see a pattern, especially when a new Roland product is announced. The story goes that the company has fallen off - it just isn’t as good as it was back in the day. This is largely due to the fact that it famously doesn’t “chase ghosts”, meaning that it won’t clone its own past products.

This refusal to dwell in the past is particularly irksome to those who pine for the halcyon days of analogue - never mind the fact that clones of the instruments they want are already available from a variety of competitors, both large and small.

Whether Roland is as innovative today as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s is certainly up for debate - many of its most lauded products, such as the 808, 909 and 303, were actually failures at the time of release - but it remains a reputable company with a wide variety of successful product releases every year.

Just because it’s not focusing solely on the development of retro-styled analogue synths (although it occasionally still does), that doesn’t mean Roland is no longer a force to be reckoned with. The company continues to release affordable and innovative products that consistently rank highly in our reviews: just a few months ago, we included its P-6 sampler in our round-up of 2024's best gear.

7. Your monitors suck

Have you ever experienced this? You post a flex photo of your studio to a Facebook group, fishing for a few compliments on the set-up that you’re really rather proud of, and then the insults begin to roll in: “When are you going to get new monitors?” “I’ll bet you don’t mix your own music with those speakers.” “Ew, Rokits.”

Despite being consistently well-rated and used by, well, pretty much everyone in the entire world, KRK’s Rokit monitors have become a target of internet scorn. Perhaps because they’re popular, or perhaps because they’re not quite specialist enough, they’re the gatekeeper’s first port of call when they want to take you down a peg.

Are there better monitors out there? Of course there are. But not everyone has that kind of expendable income, especially not in these days of mindless tariffs and sky-high inflation. Isn’t knowing your monitors and how they react to the room the most important thing anyway? And speaking of rooms…

8. Without sound treatment, your studio is worthless

Once the trolls get tired of picking you apart your monitors, they’ll inevitably move on to the next low-hanging fruit: the lack of acoustic treatment in your studio. Oh, the eternal shame to be sans rock wool, bereft of bass traps, and short of sound-deadening panels. You may as well put your gear on Reverb and take up golfing because with those bare walls, you’re now persona non grata.

Don’t worry. Many home studios are without sound treatment of any kind. You can happily - and successfully - make music without it. Proper treatment could make things easier, sure, but only after spending a lot of money and/or time setting it up. Not to mention the fact that not everyone owns their own home and most landlords won’t take too kindly to you drilling a bunch of big holes in their property.

If you’re concerned about your room and don’t have the means to put up treatment, there’s always room correction software to help out.

9. DAWs have their own sound

Here’s a myth that refuses to die, despite plenty of tests having irrefutably proven otherwise. Every DAW has its own sound, some say, with Ableton Live leaving a different sonic fingerprint on a track than, say, Pro Tools or Logic Pro. And now even Bob Horn is claiming that Pro Tools meters have a sound too?

Let’s put this to bed once and for all: DAWs (and meters!) don’t sound different. They’re recording digitally to ones and zeroes. There’s no ‘sound’ being imprinted on them. Of course, a DAW's stock plugins will affect the sound you get out of them - but bouncing out audio as-is will give you the same audio file, every time.

10. Moog synths are low-quality now

Whenever a beloved company changes owners, rumours start to circulate. This is doubly true for Moog Music, who were bought by inMusic in 2023. Moog synths were famously made in Asheville, North Carolina and now that’s all changed, leading to a drastic drop in quality. Or so the gossip says.

While inMusic hasn’t gone into too much detail about what, in fact, has changed, it seems that Moog may have been manufacturing components in Asia all along, with assembly happening locally in Asheville. That will continue for Moog’s high-ticket items, while the rest of the products will be put together where the components are made.

As for a change in quality? While it’s true that some users are vocal about issues they’ve experienced with some modern Moog products such as the Grandmother, just as many have attested to their robustness and roadworthiness. Is this just a case of a vocal few dominating the conversation? Or a bias from people who disapprove of an independent brand being eaten up by a corporate giant? Either way, the vast majority of Moog users are not reporting problems.

Moog synthesizers continue to be highly-rated musical instruments with a sound that thousands adore. If you’re concerned about quality control, hang on to your warranty card (not a bad piece of advice for any purchase, certainly).

One notable example is Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever, which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 almost exactly 30 years ago and remained there for nine weeks.

Born in Cardiff, Wales, Lewis was all but unknown before the song became a hit. Remarkably, what you hear on the finished record is pretty much exactly what Lewis recorded in her home studio – but as we’ll discover, things could have worked out very differently.

These days, it’s taken for granted that you can make a release-quality track from start to finish in your bedroom, but in the mid-’90s, most aspiring songwriters were working with far more limited technology, and Lewis, who had spent years trying to get a record deal in England without success, was one of them.

“I was working with my Tascam PortaStudio eight-track recorder and my little Alesis MMT-8 sequencer [an ‘80s multitrack MIDI recorder that enabled DAWless music-making before DAWless music-making was ever talked about],” she said in an interview with Sony Music Publishing earlier this year.

“I probably manifested that song because I was walking around the streets in Birmingham [UK], and I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder what it's like to write a song where you get on stage and everybody knows it as soon as you start singing it?’ And so I had this ‘feels like’ [opening line from the song] in my head, that little melody, and got to Martin, my husband's office, and said, ‘Give me some paper. I need to just jot this down. You know, I did some manuscript lines, to write the melody, so I didn't forget it, as we didn't have phones in those days.”

There’s definitely something quaint about the idea of someone rushing to notate a musical idea rather than humming it into a phone or mobile recorder, but Lewis clearly knew she was onto something, and was determined not to lose it.

“I think some songs come on the wind and you just go with it,” she says. “I think that probably took a day or so to write because I was obsessed with the single note sound on the Korg M1 [a synth that Lewis had recently bought] so I started sequencing that, and then adding all these atmospheric sounds around it, and then I was ready for the melodic ideas.”

Discussing the song’s lyrics and title, Lewis explained: “Originally, it was called Lydia when I wrote it because at the time I was reading the book For the Love of Lydia by H E Bates – just a simple romantic novel set in the 1920s in the English countryside – and I just thought, ‘Oh, the verses will work well, you know, falling in love for the first time in this descriptive wonderful world.

“There's a line in the book – ‘I love you always forever, near and far closer together’ – and I just thought that was great. So that ended up being the chorus.”

Lewis has said that she had doubts about this main hook: “I remember trying to rewrite the chorus because it sounded too much like a nursery rhyme,” she told Celebrity Parents Magazine in 2023, “but when I did, it didn’t work, so I kept it the same.”

A good idea, as it turns out, but there were other potential changes along the way that could also have scuppered the song’s ultimate success. The demo eventually got into the hands of Jen Stark, who worked in Atlantic Records’ A&R department, which resulted in Lewis being flown out to the US to meet company boss Doug Morris.

“I wasn't that optimistic because I thought, ‘Oh, probably just another rejection,” Lewis admitted to DJ Bowie Jane in a podcast interview last year. “So I sang a bunch of songs for him, and then he said, ‘Congratulations, we'd like to offer you a record deal. And who do you fancy producing – Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson? And it was like, you know, all my heroes. And so it's a bit like a fairytale at that moment.”

Ultimately, neither Horn or Lipson was available, so Lewis ended up working on I Love You Always Forever with Canadian producer Pierre Marchand. After a while, though, she began to feel like the song was going in a direction that she didn’t like, so she ended up back in New York working with another producer, Kevin Killen.

“I’d recorded everything on my Korg M1 keyboard - the brass organ, the sequence, everything – and then when we came to record it [in the studio] he said, ‘Why don't we get Chris Botti [US trumpeter and composer] in to do all the brass section? OK, that sounds great. And we did a bunch of different things with it. But then when I went to meet with Jason Flom [record company exec] after it was finished, he said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I do feel it's lost the magic.’”

At this point, it sounds like frustration was starting to creep in in some quarters: “I did have a couple of people saying, 'Oh God, you're being so obsessive, Donna.’ But it had – it had lost the magic, and so he said, 'Do you know what to do?’ And I said ‘I do.’

“So we went back in the studio. We got rid of – it sounds crazy – we got rid of all the real brass. We brought in all the Korg M1 corny brass organ, everything.”

The result is that, other than a re-recorded vocal, the finished version of I Love You Always Forever is pretty much identical to the demo. “I'm glad I stuck to my guns,” says Lewis. “It was hard, you know, because you can so easily say, ‘OK, yeah, you're right,’ but it definitely lost magic, and so we brought the magic back. And thank God, you know, it did what it's done.”

The original MicroKorg is a tough act to follow. Released in 2002, the MicroKorg dominated its corner of the synth market in a way that few other instruments have this side of the Millenium, shifting units in the hundreds of thousands over the course of two decades.

It’s tough to say exactly why the MicroKorg was so much more successful than other synths of the era. It was neither the most powerful nor the most groundbreaking virtual analogue of its time, being largely based on the engine of Korg’s existing MS-2000. Its matrix-style programming interface could be fiddly too, and made designing patches something of a slog.

But there was also a lot that the MicroKorg obviously got right. It was affordable and accessible, with a genre-based approach to presets that made exploring its sounds feel fast and fun. Crucially, many of those presets sounded great too – it was capable of convincing retro pads, basses and lively arp patterns, as well as acting as a vocoder via its detachable gooseneck mic.

Having tried, with mixed success, to evolve the MicroKorg concept with the XL and XL+ in the late ‘00s, Korg finally launched a true successor in 2024.

The MicroKorg 2 is another virtual analogue synth, although its oscillators are now also capable of generating sounds through additive synthesis and PCM samples. Once again, at the core of its workflow is a chunky dial that lets users browse through eight banks of presets that are grouped by genres.

The biggest change from the original MicroKorg is an increase in polyphony, from four voices to eight. The MicroKorg 2 is also bi-timbral, allowing it to simultaneously play two patches of up-to four voices each.

As with the original, the instrument ships with a gooseneck mic for use with its internal vocoder. That section is further upgraded with harmonizer and hard-tuning vocal processors, all of which can be used alongside the synth engine thanks to the bi-timbral design.

More recently, significant firmware updates have refined the MicroKorg 2 – so how does it stack up to the legacy of the original in 2026?

Pricing

Launch price: £479 / $549 / €599

Performance

It would be doing the MicroKorg 2 a disservice to imply it’s merely a vessel for presets, but as with the original version the eight banks of genre-themed patches are the core of its design. Each of these is broken into four categories, the first three of which are labelled Classic, Modern and Future, while the fourth is saved for user sounds.

This method of selecting sounds feels like a throwback, particularly compared to something like the plugin-style library found on Arturia's AstroLab 37. I quite like the MicroKorg’s retro approach, although I’ll concede this may be down to nostalgia, seeing as the original was the first hardware synth I ever owned back in the mid-’00s. Other might understandably find it a little naff.

The sounds are generally good quality and many feel highly usable. Despite coming labelled with specific genres, a key part of the original MicroKorg’s appeal lay in how versatile many of its sounds were – even if a few verged into cheesy territory. Unlike some synths’ presets that come overloaded with modulation and effects, the MicroKorg was a great source of classic virtual analogue basses, pads and – a particular speciality – arp lines.

This successor does a good job of building on this legacy, although the increased complexity of the synth engine and the addition of effects does mean that some presets veer a little into ‘show off’ territory. For the most part the banks are full of sounds you could easily imagine using in the real world, either in a DAW project or for jamming with other musicians.

Take control

As with the original, parameter changes are handled by the five rotaries that sit to the top right of the interface. Here, however, the overall experience of editing sounds is a vast improvement on the original. This is largely thanks to the 2.8-inch colour LCD display, which is probably the MicroKorg 2’s smartest addition.

Although it’s not massive, it’s streets ahead of the basic numerical display of the original version and also a vast improvement compared to the simplistic displays found on other recent Korg synths like the Modwave or Opsix.

Thanks to the new display it’s easier to keep track of what the five parameter controls are doing and as a result they’re able to do more. Rather than controlling a set parameter across every patch, these function more like macro controls, changing what aspect of the synth sound each alters depending on the currently loaded patch.

The screen is most useful when editing deeper parameters or designing sounds from scratch. The original MicroKorg relied on the user navigating a convoluted matrix printed beneath the controls and then setting values numerically. The enhanced screen makes finding parameters much, much easier, and visualises things like envelopes and filters in a clearer and more engaging way. It’s a radical improvement.

The bi-timbral design works well too. As with the original, arpeggiated synth lines are a speciality of the virtual analogue engine and these work particularly well for dual layer patches, allowing users to pair a melodic arp with underlying chord progression, a wash of ambience or a deeper bass patch.

That arpeggiator has always been a core part of the MicroKorg’s personality, and little has changed in this regard for the MicroKorg 2. This is an easy-to-use and immediate arpeggiator, which makes use of a hold function and ten selectable patterns to quickly turn chords into melodic patterns.

Thankfully, the MicroKorg 2 keeps the step arpeggiator feature of the original, which lets users engage or disengage individual notes in an arpeggio using the preset selector buttons. It’s always been a nice feature for quickly creating and editing simple riffs and patterns.

Whereas the arp is a fairly like-for-like copy of the original, other aspects of the MicroKorg design have been more significantly overhauled.

The most notable of these is the vocoder. The MicroKorg 2 once again ships with a gooseneck mic that can slot into the rear panel of the synth and connect to its audio input. As on the original this can be used to input a modulator signal into the synth’s vocoder engine. Here, however, that engine has been upgraded and expanded into a full vocal processing module.

Alongside the existing vocoder the module now has hard tune – real time Auto-Tune-like pitch correction – and harmonizer modes. Both can create effective, if slightly dated-sounding effects, although neither offer the comprehensive functionality you'll find in dedicated software or hardware competitors on the market.

Synth section

The expansion of the synth engine itself is more successful. MicroKorg 2 layers a third oscillator into the virtual analogue engine, and all oscillators have been expanded with additive DWGS and OneShot PCM sample modes.

The oscillator section is also now capable of cross modulation, allowing for ring mod and phase modulation. As of the v2.0 firmware update, the third osc also has a ‘low’ mode, allowing it to function as a wide-range LFO that can act as an additional modulation source.

These new features make MicroKorg 2 a more versatile synth than its predecessor and, coupled with the improved editing workflow, make it a much more interesting environment to build sounds from scratch. That’s enhanced further by a simple but effective modulation matrix, which lets users route two mod sources for each destination, making use of the synth’s LFOs, envelopes, and a random voltage-style Analog source.

It’s arguably a shame that the filter section doesn’t offer the various emulations found on other recent digital synths from Korg, which can make use of virtual recreations of the distinctive circuits found on the MS-20, Polysix and more. The MicroKorg 2 offers a more straightforward resonant multimode filter with 2- and 4-pole low-pass and high-pass, and 2-pole band-pass modes.

The onboard looper and effects module are the MicroKorg 2’s strongest additions, and both were significantly enhanced with last year’s free 2.0 firmware update.

The Loop Recorder can capture and overdub audio from the synth itself as well as the mic and aux input. That in itself is a fun tool for basic recording and layering, but the functionality has been expanded further since launch, adding capabilities including step sequencing and loop slicing.

This latter feature is particularly fun, as it allows users to capture a loop of audio and then slice and retrigger segments across the keyboard. It all adds up to a module that is great for instantaneous fun, and feels refreshingly different to the sequencers found on other synths at this price point.

The effects section, meanwhile, is pretty run of the mill in its basic functionality, with modulation, delay and reverb effect slots, although each sounds great and there’s a good level of control over both sound parameters and routing options.

The effects modules became more noteworthy as of the v2.0 firmware though, which opened them up for use with Korg’s Logue SDK. This is an open source format, originally developed for the company’s Prologue and Minilogue XD synths, which allows third-party developers and users to code their own effects and oscillators that can be loaded into the synth via a librarian.

Although there are a variety of paid and free expansions that make use of the SDK, Sinevibes is the developer most closely associated with ‘Logue’ expansions. The company’s site offers a range of MicroKorg-compatible expansions that include granular reverb, multiple types of distortion, new modulation effects and much more.

Verdict

Overall, the MicroKorg 2 does an excellent job of updating the formula of the original in a way that modernises the design while still feeling familiar.

It’s a shame, however, that the keyboard itself does little to improve on the 25-year-old design of the original MicroKorg. Although the three-octave keyboard has a nicer action than the springy keys of the first generation MicroKorg, the mini keys themselves are the same fiddly size and, although the keyboard is velocity sensitive, there’s no aftertouch (as is found on the similarly priced Arturia MiniFreak, for example).

Given the expanded capabilities of the engine and improved modulation system, it feels like a real missed opportunity to not offer aftertouch within the synth itself. It's a shame too that the MicroKorg doesn't respond to poly-aftertouch or MPE, although it's more understandable that these options aren’t included for the keyboard itself.

Things like this might sound small, but could prove to be make-or-break for the MicroKorg 2 in the long run. Although this is still an excellent and approachable synth at this price point, it has entered a far busier and more competitive market than the original did in the early 2000s.

Microkorg 2 is a great workhorse virtual analogue, but it runs up against more characterful synths from the likes of Arturia and Korg themselves. It’s a worthy successor to one of the most recognisable synths of all time – but it feels unlikely to replicate its predecessor’s iconic status.

Hands-on demos

Korg MicroKorg 2

Alternatives

Specifications

And it isn’t a memoir. Well, not a straightforward one anyway. Instead, it's a proper weighty tome that tells the story of electronic music, a genre he played a not-insignificant role in shaping himself.

Machines: History Of Electronic Music will be published via Thames & Hudson in November and purports to cover the whole nine yards, from Luigi Rossolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto The Art Of Noises, via Surrealism, Bauhaus (the art school not the goth band), Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Kraftwerk. The book also charts the technical breakthroughs, such as tape manipulation, the switch from analogue to digital recording and AI-assisted music.

Contributors include Vince Clarke, Gary Numan, Nicolas Godin of Air, Richie Hawtin, Armin Van Buuren, Hans Zimmer, Gillian Gilbert of New Order and - perhaps rather more unexpectedly - Pete Townshend.

But as well as being a history of the music, Machines sounds like it will be a must for devotees of the actual hardware, too. The publisher’s blurb promises that Jarre "invites readers into his formidable archive - one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of electronic and electro-acoustic instruments.

“Through these machines, Jarre traces the evolution of a century of sonic experimentation, underscoring the ideas, technologies and cultural movements that shaped electronic music as we know it today.” It also features “130 curated, specially photographed examples - from iconic modular synthesizers to rare prototypes and bespoke one-offs.”

It also sounds like there will be plenty of personal reminiscing from the 77-year-old electronic pioneer. Machines, Thames & Hudson say, “is the account of an artist whose life and work are inseparable from the history of electronic music itself. Jarre reflects on his childhood fascination with reel-to-reel tape machines… Personal anecdotes and expert commentary are interwoven with rare archival material, technical schematics, recreations of sonic experiments, and sequenced stills from legendary live performances.”

The book is out on 24 November and, if you’re into doing the pre-order thing, head over to the Thames & Hudson website.

The MD-7's two discs can not only be used to navigate menus, dial in parameters and scrub through sequences – as demonstrated in the Instagram video embedded below – but also provide haptic feedback that the company promises will allow users to "stop looking at the screen and start feeling the patch". (This will be helpful, as the screen is fairly compact.)

What this means in practice is that the discs don't merely sense rotation, but also communicate information to the user through the varying response of their FOC motors. The synth will adjust the resistance of the discs' rotation depending on the parameter that's being tweaked, and can simulate mechanical detents that represent stepped values or even create "virtual walls" when the end of a parameter's range is reached.

MD-7 is also equipped with a backlit keyboard comprised of 13 button keys, three smaller buttons and the aforementioned 1.65" IPS display. In the product images, the display squeezes oscillator, filter and envelope controls for the MD-7's synth engine into its limited real estate, which admittedly looks a little crowded. (Mach Devices notes that the UI shown is in development and subject to change.)

Speaking of the synth engine, no specifics have been provided, but the display shows a basic subtractive architecture with four oscillator waveforms, a resonant multimode filter and a standard ADSR envelope. The promo video also shows a drum looper and 16-step sequencer, its playback being controlled DJ-style by the motor discs, which is an interesting touch.

Aside from the haptic discs, the most intriguing aspect of MD-7 is its open-source software platform: Mach Devices says that the instrument's firmware, including its DSP engine, modulation system and sequencer, will all be publicly available on GitHub, meaning that owners can customize its operation and build their own features, workflows and even new sound engines.

As for connectivity, MD-7 features dual USB-C ports – one for power, and the other for MIDI and audio output and mic input from compatible USB microphones. There's also a 3.5mm headphone output and a microSD card slot for storage.

Comparisons are unsurprisingly being drawn with Teenage Engineering's distinctive designs, but the MD-7's price is one point on which the two companies diverge: the synth is generously priced at $299/£230.

After going viral on Instagram, the MD-7 is currently sold out for pre-orders, and Mach Devices says it will be available in September 2026.

Find out more on Mach Devices' website.

The vast collection of 4,489 items includes a Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular system, and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype.

There are also letters and schematics from legendary synth pioneer Bob Moog's personal office files and effects, alongside rare product catalogues and industry magazines dating back decades.

The donation shines a light on Moog's personal and professional life, revealing thoughts, ideas, and providing fascinating insights into his relationships with other visionaries like Wendy Carlos and Herb Deutsch through letters of correspondence.

The Bob Moog Foundation was established in 2005 to pay tribute to the godfather of subtractive synthesis and an icon of electronic music. The collection now consists of over 15,000 materials, preserved at the so-called 'Moogseum' in Asheville, North Carolina, where Moog lived for the final 25 years of his life.

"The Bob Moog Foundation serves as an essential steward of one of the most important legacies in electronic music," said Joe Richardson, President of Moog Music and Executive Vice President of inMusic.

"We are proud to contribute these materials so they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans."

The Foundation's Executive Director Michelle Moog-Koussa added: "This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history. Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob's complex, indelible legacy."

Visit the Moogseum's website.

"This is Vangelis' very first Yamaha CS-80," the product description reads. The seller Synthesizerman describes the synth as "fully functional with its original stand and lid", and says it's in "excellent condition", aside from small cosmetic blemishes and a cigarette burn on one of its keys.

"This is the real deal. Early prototype no serial number. It can demolish a whole block of flats. This is the 'Spiral' CS-80, historic. Priced accordingly."

If this is a legitimate claim — and it's important to note that there's no evidence provided that this synth actually belonged to Vangelis, other than the seller's word — then this would be a "holy grail" synth and a collectors' item of historical significance.

The CS-80 is one of the most sought-after vintage synthesizers and regularly fetches five-figure sums on the second-hand market. A well-maintained example that was verifiably owned by Vangelis (the musical figure most closely associated with the instrument) would represent a rare, museum-grade piece of musical history.

What's more, if someone forks out the asking price for this CS-80, this could well be the highest price ever paid for a celebrity-owned synth, far surpassing the $115,200 paid at auction last year for Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk's EMS Synthi A. (Interestingly, Schneider's Sennheiser VSM-201 vocoder fetched more than double that, selling for $256,000.)

Though this CS-80 has the potential to smash that record, the fact that it’s been casually listed on Reverb rather than sold through a professional auction house with independent authentication is likely to dissuade buyers from parting with their cash.

The seller claims that the CS-80 was used by Vangelis on Spiral, widely regarded as a landmark release in electronic music history, and an album that laid the groundwork for the vastly influential Blade Runner soundtrack and demonstrated the power of Yamaha’s then-innovative CS-80.

The CS-series instruments were some of the first fully integrated polyphonic synthesizers and some of the earliest commercial synths to feature preset memory. In a 1984 interview, Vangelis himself called the CS-80 “the most important synthesizer in my career", describing it as "the best analogue synthesizer design there has ever been.”

This iconic instrument was pivotal in shaping the futuristic, ethereal soundscape of Vangelis’ score for 1982 classic Blade Runner, but even if this CS-80 was indeed used on Spiral, there’s no guarantee that Vangelis – who recorded with multiple CS-80 synths – reprised it for later projects.

Whether the listing is genuine or not remains to be seen – we've reached out to the seller for comment.

At the insistence of his mother, Jones took lessons as a child, but in a new interview with Rock & Roll High School, he says that she also had a love of pop music. And, as he was looking for someone to inspire him, he found one artist in particular who was able to bring these two worlds together to create something truly spectacular.

“I saw the classical music as my way to get good at playing the pop and rock stuff, because Keith Emerson was my hero, and he was a brilliant concert-level classical pianist and also the best rocker you could get, for keyboards,” says Jones. “So he was an absolute hero.”

Jones’ first foray into rock music came at school when he formed a band, Warrior, writing what he describes as “complex, 20-minute, multi-sectioned pieces that were very, very difficult for the rest of the band to learn and play.”

They managed it, though, and it was the drummer from that band who gave Jones his first taste of owning a synth.

“He made me a monophonic synth from an electronics magazine kit,” he confirms. “Having seen Emerson at the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1970 playing the huge modular Moog, I'd heard how amazing synths could be in that context, and [I was looking for] any chance to get anywhere close to it. The synth he made me would go out of tune all the time, but it was a synth, and it was amazing.”

What of the ‘one-man electronic band’ concept that would eventually become a Jones trademark, though? Where did that idea come from?

“I was teaching piano, and one of my students lent me a drum machine,” he remembers. “And so I put the drum machine on top of the piano and was playing along to the terrible, like, bossa nova rhythms and stuff that you had in those days. It was very primitive, but it sparked this idea of the one-man electronic show – that I could have keyboards and the drum machine and, you know, link everything together with MIDI and triggers and little sequences, and that's what I set about doing.”

Jones would go on to have hits on both sides of the Atlantic, carving out a successful niche in the ‘80s synth-pop landscape. The influence of Emerson remained, though, notably on the synth blasts that feature in the intro to 1983 hit What Is Love?

“I think there's a lot of Keith in my work,” agrees Jones, “But yeah, you know: fanfares – that's what I think of it as. Absolutely, 100%.”

Super*Saw is inspired by the supersaw, a classic synth patch that has figured prominently in Cook’s production work. Built by layering multiple detuned sawtooth waves together, it’s a bold, bright and aggressive sound that’s closely associated with trance music of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Though the technique itself predated the synth, it was Roland’s virtual analogue JP-8000 that popularized the sound through its dedicated Super Saw oscillator.

Native Instruments says that Super*Saw seeks to push the supersaw “further than it was designed to go”, turning a "time-consuming production technique into a fast, fun, and flexible workflow” and producing everything from “rich harmonies to metallic dissonance, ravey leads to impossible glides, euphoria to tension, all from the same sound source”.

At the heart of Super*Saw are two independent 16-saw oscillator banks, Swarm 1 and Swarm 2. The Swarms panel, on the left-hand side of the interface, adjusts the number of active oscillators in each swarm and fine-tunes the pitch, panning, and amplitude of each saw wave, and three Motion controls introduce modulation to these parameters that’s applied to each oscillator individually.

In Super*Saw’s central panel is the Morpher, an XY pad that can morph continuously between four different patch states in each corner of the grid. (You can also hit the dice icons underneath to instantly generate a random patch.)

Here you’ll also find controls for the amp envelope and filter, which can be applied to each Swarm individually and offers both 2-pole and 4-pole slopes, along with high-, band- and low-pass modes and keytracking. Super*Saw also has three onboard effects: chorus, delay and reverb.

Super*Saw is an eight-voice polyphonic synth, but also features monophonic, unison and poly-unison assignment modes. In the Voice Control menu, you’ll find controls to adjust the detuning and stereo width of the voices in Unison mode, along with sophisticated glide controls that can be used to set individual portamento times for each of the synth’s eight voices, and a Shape control that adjusts the contour of the portamento.

The synth features five modulation sources, each of which can be assigned to an unlimited number of parameters. There’s a single tempo-syncable LFO with rate, shape, phase and retrig controls that can be applied per-voice or globally, and this is joined by two tempo-syncable, velocity-sensitive ADSR envelopes.

You’ve also got the mod wheel and the Voice Offset section, a bank of eight faders that each represent one of the instrument’s voices: when routed to any potential modulation target, that control will be offset by the value dialled in at the fader.

Though there’s plenty of scope here for manual sound design, Super*Saw also comes with a broad preset library of AG Cook-style patches, covering basses, leads, pads, plucks, soundscapes and more.

We spent some time with Super*Saw prior to launch, and were impressed by the depth of control and diversity of sound on offer in an instrument that’s designed to explore the possibilities of a single synthesis technique.

Much more than just a Native Instruments plugin with a famous producer’s name stamped on it, Super*Saw feels like a genuine collaboration that represents an extension of AG Cook’s artistry. Capturing the bold and distinctive hyperpop sound design Cook experimented with on projects like Charli XCX’s Brat, the plugin takes the classic supersaw sound to new heights with its focused but versatile architecture.

“It’s funny having my own synth plugin,” Cook says in the video embedded above. “It’s something that’s always been a goal of mine… I’m really interested in very specific tools, and I’ve been excited when I’ve seen certain artists do their own tools around the ideology they have.

“I’ve really enjoyed building on what was established as the supersaw in the ‘90s. A lot of instrument design is about taking things that exist in the world and looking at the corners of it, like: ‘what could we do?’, or ‘what could be improved or flipped on its head?’ To actually be involved in that sort of process, that’s the enjoyment – you’re building into this family tree of a musical idea that was started a long time ago.”

Native Instruments Super*Saw is available now for macOS and Windows in VST3/AU formats, and is priced at $99/€99/£89.

Find out more on Native Instruments' website.

Released in 1972, the Synthi AKS was designed as a portable development of EMS' VCS3 synth, repackaging the modular instrument into a suitcase-sized enclosure with a built-in touch keyboard and digital sequencer. Among its many quirks, the AKS is known for its joystick controller and 16x16 pin matrix, which acted as a modulation matrix and routing system.

Behringer's take on the AKS is loosely based on the architecture of the original synth and retains some key features, like the X/Y joystick, while adding a handful of modern enhancements and dropping the pin matrix. A compact instrument that weighs only 360g, an AKS clone it is not, but more of a quirky mini-synth that draws some playful inspiration from EMS' classic '70s instrument.

Behringer's paraphonic AKS Mini is equipped with three analogue VCOs (voltage-controlled oscillators) with variable saw and square waveforms and a large blue AKS-style detuning control, running into an analogue resonant low-pass filter. Behringer says that both the VCOs and VCF are based on a "faithful reproduction" of the original EMS Synthi AKS' circuitry.

These are complemented by a dedicated LFO with sine, saw, square and random waveforms that can modulate both the pitch and filter, and a four-stage envelope inspired by the original synth's trapezoid-style controls.

Behringer's AKS Mini also features a two-axis joystick that can be assigned to any two parameters for hands-on control, and a 27-key touch-sensitive keyboard. Sequencing is available via the 16-step sequencer with 10 pattern slots and parameter automation, and there's a digital spring reverb emulation onboard.

On the connectivity front, Behringer's AKS Mini features a 5-pin DIN MIDI input on the front panel, along with 3.5mm headphone output and sync input. There's also a USB-C connection for power and MIDI.

The Behringer AKS Mini is priced at £99/€119 and now available for pre-order.

Find out more on Behringer's website.

The synth went unexpectedly viral after creators Martin Grieco and Rocío Gal shared a video of a prototype produced for a design competition, picking up nearly three million views in the space of a week.

Three years on, and the small but passionate team behind Nopia has finally finished development, and is almost ready to share the finished product with the world: Nopia MK1.

Ahead of its release later this year, we invited the Nopia team to visit the MusicRadar Tech HQ and show our viewers what the instrument can do. Fortunately for us, they obliged, giving us an exclusive first look at a synth that, until now, has only appeared in a handful of short videos produced by its creators.

As Martin explains in the demo above, Nopia’s harmony-focused workflow is built around three core controls: the Chord Builder (a one-octave keyboard) the Tonal Selector (12 buttons laid out keyboard-style) and the Extensions Dial.

Between them, these can be used to play all diatonic chords from every key, with the Extensions Dial adding colour and character through chord extensions, the slider above the Tonal Selector allowing the player to explore different octaves and voicings, and a switch on the front selecting major or minor tonalities.

These feed into a multitimbral sound engine that draws on a combination of virtual analogue synthesis and samples across four distinct modules: Keys, Bass, Arp and Pad. Individual notes from the chosen chord can be played via the touch-sensitive strum plate in the top-right corner and the slider beneath the Tonal Selector can be used to perform polyphonic pitch-bend between chords.

Nopia is also equipped with a number of effects, including a filter, delay, reverb, saturation, tape emulation and beat repeat, and offers comprehensive connectivity that covers per-module MIDI output via TRS, MIDI input, clock in/out, stereo TRS audio outputs, USB MIDI and a sustain pedal jack.

While the team behind Nopia have yet to share an official release date, we’re told that the instrument is “basically finished” and that they’re aiming to launch within “a couple of months”. We also learned that Nopia will be priced at “around £550”, though this is subject to change.

Find out more on Nopia's website.

Korg turned up to Superbooth in a rather coquettish mood this year, teasing attendees with a new synth displayed proudly at the centre of its booth, albeit covered with a blue tarp to mask its identity.

This mystery forthcoming instrument wasn’t the company’s only surprise though, as the Korg also used the show to quietly soft-launch a new addition to its DIY Nu:Tekt range, the NTS-4 – which is now getting a proper release.

The NTS-4 is a six-channel analogue performance mixer. It ships in DIY kit form, like other products in Korg’s Nu:Tekt range, but building the device requires no soldering or electronics experience and according to Korg the build should only take a matter of minutes.

Its six channels are fed via four stereo and two mono minijack inputs. These latter two are equipped with attenuator switches that can flip the inputs between line and Eurorack level operation. There are also stereo send and return minijacks on the mixer’s top panel that can be used to integrate external effects.

The NTS-4 also has internal effects of its own though, in the form of both Send FX and master Total FX. The former can select between delay, ping pong delay, two types of hall reverb, two slap reverbs and chorus. The Total FX has low- and high-pass filters, along with isolator, flanger, phaser, decimator, drive, distortion, compressor and limiter modes.

Each of the six mixer channels is equipped with mute and cue buttons – the latter routed to the top panel headphone output – along with a send level control. The two mono channels also have pan position controls.

The NTS-4 has a pair of unbalanced ¼-inch main outputs on its rear panel. It can also act as an audio interface to stream to Mac, PC or mobile devices via its USB-C port, which is also used for power. The top panel also features a minijack MIDI output that can be used to route MIDI from a DAW or USB device to external hardware.

The NTS-4 isn’t Korg’s first attempt at a desktop mixer. Back in 2018 the brand released the Volca Mix, a mixer companion for its popular collection of compact synths and drum machiners. We were fairly underwhelmed by the Volca Mix, however, due to its fiddly controls and lack of MIDI or USB connectivity.

The NTS-4 looks like it fixes many of the Mix’s failings though, and as a result it has the potential to be a far more competent hub for a Volca setup – or any collection of mini synths you might have to hand.

The NTS-4 is available now priced at $249/€219/£189. Head to the Korg website for more information.

It was Bob Moog and Don Buchla who took these raw building blocks and added musical control, and the rest is history. But for a certain subset of musicians, this original equipment is very much not history; it still holds plenty of potential for sonic experimentation.

Curious about how to incorporate test equipment into your own studio and productions? Grab some ear protection, sign this waiver, and get ready to hear the most beautiful sine wave you’ve ever heard in your life.

“Test equipment has very little to do with traditional synthesizers in terms of workflow and signal chain,” says musician Andrea Taeggi, who often works with the gear. “With a standard synth, you typically think in terms of oscillators, filters, envelopes, VCAs and a defined signal path. With test and measurement gear, that structure often doesn’t really exist in the same way.”

Keyboard synthesizers - and even modular setups, to an extent - present a structured and interconnected whole, a finished product built upon components that started life as scientific equipment. Early pioneers in electronic music discovered that with a little coaxing, they could make sound with it, and by recording it and manipulating the tape, create music.

This equipment is generally referred to as test and measurement equipment. Rikkert Brok, the studio manager at Willem Twee Studios in the Netherlands, which has one of the world’s most sophisticated examples of such a setup, explains.

“Test equipment was used, for instance, in radio and telecommunication to measure signals, but also for acoustic measurements,” he says. “For instance, a sine wave oscillator could be used in radio to test a transmitter.”

Some gear didn’t make sound on its own but could still be used as part of a music production system, like lock-in amplifiers and boxcar integrators. “They don't make sounds themselves,” says Rikkert, “but you can more or less see them as really complex kinds of filters.”

Housed inside a 1960s nuclear bunker somewhere near the Welsh border is Cold War Synths. Run by producer and archaeologist Matt Thomas (King Unique), Cold War Synths is the culmination of Matt’s interests in a number of different facets of music production. “It is a decision to do something with a load of equipment and a load of interest, and bring it together in a physical place,” he explains.

Although you can find some pretty amazing synthesizers there, including a Yamaha CS-80, Roland Jupiter-4 and EMS VCS3, the special focus is on test and measurement equipment.

“The earliest piece I've got is [from] 1948, which is within a year of the phrase ‘Cold War’ being coined,” Matt explains as to why test equipment. “That's basically an LFO. It's a 0.1 Hertz to 1K sine oscillator. Looks like it's been taken out of a Lancaster bomber. (And the) sound of these things. There shouldn't be better sine waves because it's a sine wave. These are better sine waves. They just are. Tonally, they just sound lovely.”

Matt continues to list the appeal of this old and esoteric gear. Aside from the pure sonics, there’s the relative affordability. “Financially, while they're not cheap cheap, they are compared to the levels that synthesizer collecting has driven things to now,” he says. “It's a chance to get really unaffordable, unavailable ‘50s and ‘60s tones into the work I do. (With) 1960s Moog modules, there aren’t enough kidneys to even buy one.”

The gear also allows Matt to experiment in a way that traditional synthesizers no longer do. “I'm very familiar with making electronic music,” he says. “I know what's going to happen. Playing with this gear, I'm much more likely to do the wrong thing. Infinitely more likely.”

The gear itself encourages this, he stresses: “The interfaces are, by their very nature, going to deliver different outcomes. The impenetrability of some of this equipment, which was never meant to be used for sound in the majority of the cases, means you're going to bump into wrong outcomes for which you go, ‘God, that's amazing’.”

Willem Twee Studios is a four-room studio complex in The Netherlands. For fans of test and measurement equipment, however, it’s Studio One that is the real Mecca. Packed floor to ceiling with rare and unusual pieces, it’s the kind of place that experimental electronic musicians dream of visiting. Much of it was originally sourced by musician Hans Kulk, who started collecting it in the 1990s when institutions were letting it all go as part of a move towards digital technologies.

Uniquely, Studio One has been organised with a specific workflow inspired by the WDR studio in Cologne in the early 1950s, the place where Karlheinz Stockhausen made some of his most famous electronic works.

“Those instruments weren't used in the, let's say, more traditional electronic music studios, which started popping up in the mid-‘50s,” says manager Rikkert Brok. “We try to keep that intact, that workflow of setting up a certain patch with a certain technique, using the mixing desk as a part of your instruments, using some basic treatments like filtering, echo, reverb, ring modulation, and then creating a sound.”

Although it may look like a modular system from a distance, just with larger pieces, it is in fact quite different. There’s no MIDI or even CV control, for starters.

“We call it the manual studio,” says Rikkert. “All modulations you have to do by hand. There are some function generators that have voltage control, but they're from a later area. Really early stuff like the equipment from the ‘50s doesn't have any CV or input usually.”

There are also certain techniques when working with test and measurement equipment that don’t apply to modern modular systems - and that can be daunting for first-time visitors. “Studio One can be intimidating for people when you first get in,” notes Rikkert. To help visitors to the studio overcome this, there’s an engineer always on staff to make sure that you understand techniques and how to make a patch.

One of Willem Twee’s most unusual pieces of equipment - and possibly the ultimate example of this kind of music production - is its Hitachi 240 analog computer. Unlike digital computers, which process computations with ones and zeroes, analog computers use physical processes like electricity to solve mathematical equations. And when you amplify that electricity, you get - you guessed it - sound.

“It's a bit between a breadboard and a modular (system) of test and measurement equipment,” explains Rikkert of the Hitachi 240. “There are many more patch possibilities in an analog computer than in a regular modular system.”

One artist who has done extensive work at Willem Twee is Andrea Taeggi, a trained jazz pianist who has found inspiration in making music with this unusual gear. “In many cases, the flexibility you get from a dedicated studio with test equipment is actually greater than what you’d achieve with a self-built Eurorack or standalone modular setup,” Andrea says on why someone might want to take this approach, “because the tools are infinitely more flexible and designed for high-precision signal manipulation rather than strictly musical needs.”

Like Matt Thomas of Cold War Synths, Andrea also prizes this ancient equipment for its sound quality. “Signal generators in particular can be extremely raw and harmonically rich,” Andrea explains. “High-precision oscillators are capable of producing sine waves with a level of purity that is difficult to replicate with almost any other type of gear. Some units are designed specifically just to output a highly accurate sine tone, and that level of beauty, precision and clarity can be very inspiring.”

Although Andrea has worked with all manner of test equipment, he declares Willem Twee’s analog computer the most unique. “These machines were originally used as flight simulators, by NASA and even the military to model and predict complex systems, things like the stability or instability of a structure, for example. When translated into a musical context, this opens up the possibility of generating functions with extremely unusual shapes, as well as unusual control sources.”

Andrea also identifies the open-ended and experimental nature of the Hitachi 240 as a key creative aspect: “Unlike a conventional synthesizer, it doesn’t come with predefined functions. You can patch it to behave like a filter, an oscillator, or many other signal-processing blocks depending on your configuration.”

You can hear Andrea’s work on the analog computer in his albums Zimní Král and Nattdett.

“It does help to recognise that part of this journey is getting your head a bit around electricity,” answers Matt Thomas when asked if he has any advice for people wanting to try working with test equipment.

“Most gear has an output which is in volts. Try and keep it under one if you want to be absolutely within your mixer spec.” To make sure you’re not going to blow anything up, Matt recommends, “Always remember: it's not spitting out sound, it's spitting out voltage.” One way to make sure you don’t destroy any of your regular gear by running test equipment through it is to put it through a burner mixer first, or better yet, a passive (non-powered) mixer to act as a voltage attenuator.

Finding the gear probably won’t be difficult. Pieces are available on online auction sites like eBay, as well as at car boot sales. Also, try second-hand fairs for radio enthusiasts. If you’re really serious, you can try calling universities or government institutions to see if they have any old gear lying around that they don’t need anymore, like the filter that came off a nuclear submarine from the 1960s in the Cold War Synths studio.

As for pieces to start with, Rikkert at Willem Twee suggests function generators. “They’re basically oscillators with multiple waveforms,” he says. “They’re pretty versatile and depending on the brands, you can find them. They're still available for a reasonable price.”

When you’re ready for more, you can expand. “Definitely your oscillators, a filter, a noise generator, and some kind of pulse generator, which you already have inside your function generator,” continues Rikkert, listing other pieces that beginners should be on the look out for. “There you have the basic core elements, which in the ‘50s you would use to create electronic music. Of course, don't forget an analog mixing desk, which is a big part of your instrumentation.”

As for working with a vintage analog computer, your best bet is to contact Willem Twee Studios about using theirs.

“Another accessible entry point,” says Andrea Taeggi, “is hardware like Bernd Ullmann's THAT (The Analog Thing), which is an affordable and portable analog computer. It allows you to begin learning how these systems function and how they can be applied creatively in a musical context.” Andrea also recommends exploring Eurorack modules like Make Noise Music’s Maths module, which, “like analog computers, does not rely on traditional ADSR envelopes, but works through attenuators. It is a powerful control signal generator as well, definitely in line with what one can achieve with an analog computer.”

Lastly, there is also software that emulates test and measurement equipment available. Musician and YouTuber Hainbach has made a variety of plugins in collaboration with AudioThing that recreate devices like a passive bandpass filter, the Hewlett-Packard Word Generator 8006A, and much more.

Modal Electronics has had a turbulent few years, running into financial difficulties in 2023 and consequently undergoing a fairly lengthy restructuring process. This delayed the release of the synth on test here, Carbon8X, first previewed at Superbooth in 2023 and now finally available in 37-, 61-key and module versions.

The company's range of synths has been varied to say the least, from high-end and very well-regarded synths like the 001 to the (much) more budget-friendly Skulpt and Craft Synth. In fact, all the synths have been pretty well received, so it was disappointing to see the company – a UK one at that – in trouble.

However, Modal appears to now be on less choppy waters (under the banner of Hong Kong-based WT Technology Development), and with a more streamlined set of products, which should help make the company's synth proposition much clearer and more attractive.

Argon8 is Modal's 8-voice wavetable synth, packing a lot of the company's 00 synth into a much cheaper unit, while Cobalt8 is the company's more virtual analogue offering.

Carbon8 boasts double the power of these (although the same eight voices of polyphony) and can, in some ways, be seen as a 'best of' Modal synth, packing a lot of sonic punch and clout into a very solid synth proposition.

Performance

One thing you can't ignore is Carbon8X's build quality. This thing feels like it's built to last, with a steel and aluminium body, and could take on any gigging/transport situation… should you have the muscles to carry it. It's not light, put it that way, and if you have to lug a keyboard around, this might be off-putting, but at least you can be sure it's not going to get easily damaged should you manage to venture out with it.

The screen, at less than 4cm wide, is a bit small, but functional, and displays many features, like the envelopes and filters, with graphics not unlike a 1970s amusement arcade, but it certainly does enough without adding too much in the way of frills.

Probably the most important buttons are on either side of it, used for stepping through presets – which we'll cover later – or adjusting any parameter you like. Here you can access the 58 cores for both oscillators, which gives you an idea of how Carbon8X sounds on a ground level.

There are 38 wavetables and 18 algorithms, which give this synth a lot more sonic flexibility than others in its price range. Extra parameters here include a Contour dial to change the timbre of the selected Core, plus the Xmod/XCore. This controls the amount and type of extra cross modulation for oscillator 2, either with Osc 1 as the source or a so-called 'hidden' oscillator.

You can adjust six oscillator modifiers like phase distortion, wave shaping, ring or amplitude modulation – great for extra real-time control and well worth exploring as a sound design option in their own right. It's very easy, for example, to completely rebuild a preset from scratch and create your own right here, and that's before taking advantage of other modulation features.

These are pretty good too, with three LFOs (one with direct controls, two switchable), each with 16 shapes, and three envelopes for Amp, Mod and Filter. You get 12 sources and 55 destinations, but only eight slots to set up, which could be seen as a bit tight, but we'll assume these can be added to with a software update.

Setting these up is easy with the left-hand screen button, although with all selections, you are only given a few seconds to make your changes before the synth reverts back to its previous setting. Not really a problem, just something you might need to get used to.

A Shift option accesses a second layer of parameters on most buttons, and a couple of other nice touches include a joystick which can be (and has been) assigned to popular parameters to adjust in real time (think filter frequency, modulation depth and so on), and a Vintage dial to introduce gnarl and tuning issues just like an old analogue, which this clearly isn't.

Sounds

That said, some of the sounds are surprisingly lush and 'vintage', with lots taking advantage of the up-to-32-step arpeggiator for some full-on, classic synth movement, and even more can be created by way of a 512-note sequencer. Both steal the LEDs from other parameters to show you 16 steps of whatever mode you're in.

Meanwhile, the filter section adds the most diversity, featuring 34 filter types – analogue, digital and hybrid – and large Filter and Resonance dials to make the most of them. Here you get typical HP/LP/BP options plus a huge range of static, ladder, and dual 2-pole filters with continuous morphing.

It's really simple to get a feel of these in action with the screen pulling its weight and enabling you to see the different filter shapes and home in on the resonating frequencies for extra bite, not to mention the Warp dial, which allows you to add extra grit and drive.

A small niggle again comes down to the screen workflow where, as you step through filter types and adjust their frequency, you then have to go back to selecting filter type to keep auditioning – essentially the screen doesn't always seem to return to (or stay at) the parameter you hoped. Again, it's not a deal breaker, just a workflow step or two that you'll need to get used to.

While Carbon8X is clearly a digital synth at heart, it doesn't come with too much in the way of sonic harshness that (if you were our age) you might associate with the medium. In fact, it's right up there with one of our current favourites, Arturia's MiniFreak, in terms of sheer variety of sounds, with impressively programmed presets that you can easily and cheekily make your own, and plenty of hands-on action to call up should you wish.

You'll be tempted by that joystick, for example, and wonder why your favourite keyboard doesn't come with one as standard – Carbon8X makes it such a natural tweaking process. And use it you will to turn some already superb sounds into more dynamic and evolving textures. These are here aplenty, along with other pads, sequences, evolving and pretty nondescript atmospheres, and imaginative key, pluck and bell sounds.

We should also finally mention the three effects engines, each with 26 options to choose from, which add even more to your already bristling list of design options.

Verdict

Carbon8X has some features and workflow niggles, small ones if we're honest, and which might be sorted with system updates. But really, its sound blows these away and we were surprised by how much we were drawn in by what's here sonically, and what you can do with it.

The synth certainly wears its digital credentials proudly and has a character of its own which can really be appreciated by stepping through those presets – few synths boast quite as good a set of sonic adverts as this, and if you do nothing else, audition these sounds in your local dealer if you can.

This character is its clear raison d'etre and big draw, and a necessary one as hardware synths have really got to work for their lodgings in your studio over your plugins. However, it's joining a fairly crowded line-up of digital hardware synths – think Korg and that Arturia (see our alternatives for more) – which all offer a great deal of sonic mayhem for similar or less cash.

However, Carbon8X is pretty unique, even compared to some of the more unruly and 'trying to be out there' contenders, all within a (very solid) package. Of the three Carbon8Xs on offer, we'd probably opt for one of the keyboard versions over the module, simply for the extra controls that make using them much more intuitive, and for not much extra cash, but whatever you opt for, you'll wrestle some fantastic new textures out of it and create some inspiring and cutting-edge sounds.

Alternatives

Specifications

The album that birthed the multimillion selling Firestarter and the controversial Smack My Bitch Up, were key strikes in rave culture's invasion of the mainstream.

The Prodigy had a long-established reputation as a superb, invigorating live act, but wider exposure led to their expressive frontman Keith Flint terrifying middle England, and besieging the homes of everyday folk via Top of the Pops.

Preceding the album by 8 months, the single Breathe became the band's most successful single (at least before Firestarter was released) but its development took quite a while.

“It was an instrumental for ages,” The Prodigy’s chief musical director Liam Howlett recalled in an interview with Addicted to Noise. “We were playing it on stage and the guys were just dancing to it and stuff. It was just like an instrumental track. And I thought that it was so obvious to put a vocal on it.”

It's Breathe's distinctive opening and recurring 2-bar, guitar-sampled riff which we are going to examine and try and re-build here.

As we will discover, we can create an interesting facsimile using our own software, using many of the identifiers from the original track, but without the initial samples, it's difficult to re-create note for note.

Therefore, think of this as an opportunity to take the spirit of the track in a different direction, using a slightly mutated sound of your own choosing.

Though some speculated that Liam Howlett had in fact sampled the theme from the iconic James Bond music cue (undoubtedly because of the twangy guitar sound), in reality, it stemmed from a recording of the Prodigy live-band member, guitarist and contributor, Jim Davies. His processed and mono guitar sound was tracked to DAT, leaving Howlett to extract a couple of notes and re-mould them.

“I just got him into the studio and he played a couple of notes,” Howlett told Addicted to Noise. “I just took those single notes and basically put them through the sampler. I constructed the riff, in other words. Everything you hear on the track is basically from my head. All the riffs are mine. I've never sampled a whole riff of someone else's stuff. A lot of people get confused 'cause when they hear ‘sampler,’ all they can think about is sampling other people's tracks, you know. It's not like it used to be, like with Pump Up The Volume, when it was just built around someone else's track. This is actually rock music written on electronic equipment, you know? With Breathe, I made the riff.”

Breathe is, therefore, a very sample-heavy production, reliant upon sampled material at just about every turn. Thin Lizzy’s Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed supplies the drum break, while Wu-Tang Clan’s Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ provides the identifiable whiplash effect, used throughout.

Rather than get caught up in the wormhole of samples, we're going to examine how we can recreate the opening riff ourselves, with workarounds that might provide an simple alternative for achieving a similar sound in a different context.

How to get the sound of Breathe in your DAW

You may be limited by the tools at your disposal, but the good news is, you can create something similar with a basic soft synth or sampler, a DAW, some distortion effects and EQ.

The preferable choice for your synth or sampler will be anything that has a band-pass filter. Don't worry if this isn't something you have, as you can adopt EQ to acquire similar results. It’s preferable to be able to control your filter cutoff using velocity, although once again, there an alternative solution, which we’ll come to later.

If using a synth, we are looking to create a fairly sharp wave upfront, so while you can use conventional subtractive-style synths, try using a modulated pulse wave, or better still, some form of sync, bright digital or FM tone.

Alternatively, use a sampler (which is what we are choosing to use here). We are using the EXS24, which is the stock sampler from Logic Pro.

The beauty of this approach is that we can select a sound source which will pave much of the way for a similar sound.

Step 1: As a starting point, we have selected the ‘Clean Electric Guitar 1’ patch, from the default EXS24 library. It's a clean sound, which is played/sampled by using a pick or plectrum.

Step 2: In order to easily work with this sound, create a simple 2-bar loop or cycle, which will make it easy to audition the sound.

For reasons of copyright, we have used a loop which is slightly different from the original, but we have kept this rhythmically the same. Also note that all of the notes have been entered in step time, and are set to the same velocity value of 70. We will return to this later to make further adjustments.

Step 3: Returning to our sound, we’ll start by making some filter settings. One of the luxuries of working with the EXS24 sampler, is that we can employ two filters, which on this occasion we’ll assign in series.

We are setting filter one to ‘HP 24db Edgy’, which is a 4-pole high pass filter, and selecting filter two ‘BP 12dB Edgy’, which is a band-pass filter.

Between the two filters, you can see the ‘Series’ icon, which needs to be highlighted in yellow.

Turning to the Cutoff and Resonance settings, these will differ from one synth or sampler to another, but as a general guide, aim to set the high-pass filter cutoff to around 30% and resonance to 45%, with the band-pass filter cutoff set to around 25% and resonance set to 50%. Be sure to listen and audition your sound, and don't overly indulge the resonance.

If you have drive or distortion available within the filter circuit, you could certainly apply this at this stage, although it’s not essential, as we will add distortion to our signal chain at the end of the process.

Step 4: Ideally, we want to use two envelope generators, with one applied to amplitude/volume, and the other applied to filter cutoff. If you only have one available, you can use the same envelope for both elements.

Beginning with the amplitude envelope, engineer a small amount of sustain, preceded by a quick attack and snappy decay. If you have a second envelope, for filter cutoff modulation, apply settings for a quick attack and decay with zero sustain.

Step 5: Returning to our note editor, we now need to implement two different levels of velocity value.

If we refer to the original track, this begins with the on-beats being a higher velocity than the off-beats, although there is nothing to stop you altering this to suit your own track. The velocity value pattern in the original also changes, once it reaches the second bar.

We are going to start by changing some notes to a velocity of 100, leaving the opposite notes set to the previous velocity of 70. The differences in velocity value will allow us to control the degree of filter modulation, which we’ll route in the next step.

Step 6: Using your synth’s mod matrix or modulation routings, assign velocity to both filter section’s cutoff controls. Once you have a assigned the source and target, you may need to experiment with the amount of modulation. In our case, we have assigned a modulation value of around 25-27% but again, this will differ from one synth to another. You may also note that there is an indication of modulation, within the filter section, as seen in our example by the appearance of an ‘orange curve’ above the cutoff control.

When you now audition your 2-bar loop, the changes in velocity value should instigate a change in the cutoff of each filter, replicating a similar sound to the original track.

Step 7: To further enhance this effect, try applying a small degree of filter cutoff modulation, using the filter envelope as a modulation source. A small amount of modulation should enhance the effect even further.

Step 8: If the synth or sampler that you are using allows the application of distortion within the filter section, you may already have convincing results. However, the application of overdrive or distortion on the backend of the signal chain, will likely add another useful element.

If you listen very carefully to the original, you can hear a slight grainy-ness in the original sound. This may be down to the original sampling process, and a reduced sample rate, or merely noise from distortion. Either way, try experimenting with a bitcrusher, as this will allow the introduction of a similar texture.

Alternatively, add a healthy dose of distortion; something aggressive, such as Soundtoys' Decapitator would be ideal for this and can be cranked quite hard, to achieve impressive results.

As with the programming of any synth sound in a contemporary DAW, there are a number of ways of approaching sound design in order to achieve similar results.

If working with a conventional subtractive-style synth, armed with more usual waveforms, experiment with different combinations. A sync tone, or reedy PWM pulse would be ideal starting points for this sound. Many modern synths provide metallic or glassy sources, which may prove to be worthy fodder in this context.

You can also experiment with different filter types. While high-pass and band-pass filters are the ideal option, you can also explore formant filters, which can provide wonderful colours.

Be aware that each filter and synth will require its own specific set of values. You can also use heavy EQ curves, to limit the sonic bandwidth, much like a band-pass filter.

One issue that may present itself, particularly with less capable soft-synths, is the lack of ability to route velocity to the cutoff control of the filter. Another method for achieving the same result, would be to automate the cutoff within your DAW. But be sure to create steps for each note, rather than a slope between values, as the cutoff changes.

Learning how to create impressive sounds from the past masters is a valuable route to understanding how to get the most out of your synthesis. However, it is also a superb springboard for individual creativity, and while it can be highly rewarding to try and recreate an existing track, try to take your sound exploration in a new direction which will be entirely unique to you. Then you can release your track without stepping on any copyright-toes.

Take a deep breath… now get creative!

“Maximum crunch, constant panic” is how Brian Clevinger, Absynth’s creator and founder of Rhizomatic described the final pre-release push.

Speaking to MusicRadar mere days before the launch of Absynth 6 - and prior of course, to the recent news that Native Instruments would be acquired by InMusic - Clevinger seemed keenly aware of the high expectations he and the development team were expected to meet.

You see, Absynth isn’t just any soft synth. Its sea-green colour scheme and idiosyncratic architecture is something that a generation of sound designers and synthesists have grown up with.

This relaunch wasn't just a new version: it’s a full-blown resurrection.

Arriving two years after the product was discontinued by Native Instruments, and 16 long, long years since the release of Absynth 5.

Now sporting MPE capabilities, newly designed filters, a slickly upgraded UI, a trippy new spatial method of navigating presets, and all the sonic firepower long-time fans could ask for, this 2025 iteration of Absynth was, thankfully, worth the wait.

Back in the year 2000, when Clevinger released version 1 as ‘shareware’ (what we might now describe as a freebie) he had no idea how large the impact would be.

“I didn't think anybody would be into it,” he admits. “But I was just inundated with responses. People were really excited about it, it was kind of an instant hit.”

Looking back, it’s easy to see why. VSTs were still toddlers, having only been invented four years previously. The very premise that you could work with computer-generated sound, rather than triggered audio samples, was still fresh, and the available instruments were mostly rudimentary emulations of pianos and Minimoogs.

“The whole concept of a software synth hadn't sunk in yet,” Clevinger says of that time. “The idea that you play a note on your keyboard and the sound comes out of your computer was a weird idea for most people.”

In that context, Absynth, much like the potent beverage from which it takes its name, was a mind-melting experience. Its three-channel lanes and swappable modules could combine multiple types of synthesis and audio processing simultaneously.

Equipped with a waveform editor, it allowed users to draw custom shapes before applying additional algorithmic transformations, including the now-iconic ‘Fractalize’ function which added new harmonics by recursively pushing a waveform back into itself.

Its approach to modulation, which put user-defined, multi-stage envelopes front and centre, was, and still is, a remarkable contrast to the dominant paradigm of LFOs.

Perhaps most importantly of all, it took all of those powerful sound–shaping tools and made them comparatively easy to experiment and play with. It’s little wonder that Absynth was snapped up by Native Instruments a year later, becoming one of the company’s flagship products from 2001 all the way up to 2023.

All that innovation is made even more impressive by the fact that Clevinger’s skills as a software developer were entirely self-taught. Rather than a formal study of computer science, his pathway to Absynth was guided by a life-long fascination with the inner workings of audio.

“I was just always really interested in sound,” he recalls. “With certain sounds, it was kind of an emotional thing. When I was a little kid there was this big drain pipe with three smaller pipes at the back, we'd go in there, clap our hands, and it would make this just incredible comb-filter kind of sound. I wish I could hear it today.”

That ear for the unusual eventually led Clevinger to study music composition at university, where he first got his hands on classic hardware like the ARP 2500.

“This was in the early ‘80s,” he recalls. “It was just before MIDI and I was still working on analogue systems, but, at the same time, I was hearing examples of the computer-generated music that was happening at IRCAM. They were doing stuff I really wanted to do myself, but it was just completely inaccessible.”

Early musical programming environments like Max/MSP and Supercollider offered Clevinger the experimental sonics he was interested in, but lacked the intuitive accessibility of a musical instrument.

That tension stayed with him and, as computer power increased and real-time digital synthesis became possible in the mid-90’s, he began teaching himself DSP programming with aspirations to bridge the divide.

“The soft synths that were available were pretty limited,” he says. “It was either really simplistic things that didn't sound great or super complex modular environments. So I thought Absynth could be a sweet spot in-between.”

While he knew where he was aiming, Clevinger makes clear that Absynth was definitely not the result of some master plan.

What began as 'crappy little oscillators and really crappy little low-pass filters' were steadily refined and linked together, eventually coalescing into the foundations of Absynth’s first version.

“It just came out of whatever experiments I was doing at the time,” Clevinger says simply. “I mean the whole setup with three channels happened pretty early and I was originally thinking of it as a temporary solution till I figured out how to make it more modular, but after working with it I really liked it. Things just evolved until they got to the point where it felt right.”

Absynth broke new ground upon its release, and continued to do so over the following years: V2 introduced sample playback and granular synthesis; Absynth 3 added surround sound output, even though, as Clevinger laughingly admits, almost no one had multi-channel setups at the time; the fourth iteration brought vastly improved preset browsing and assignable macros, and the fifth instalment introduced Mutation.

It’s worth pausing to appreciate the genius of Absynth’s Mutation feature. Using tags for instrument type, articulation, genre, and more, users could define a narrow list of presets before hitting the Mutate button. This would then pull random parameters from those presets and combine them with whatever sound you were currently working on.

Not only that, but you could define how much randomisation should occur, how far from the original sound you wanted to deviate, and even lock down specific modules to exclude them from the mutation process.

A dedicated Mutation History window would save each new variation, allowing you to build up a library of related sounds at lightning-fast speed. It’s a feature that is still impressive all these years later, but at the time of its release in 2009, it was inspired.

“People kept asking for a randomiser,” Clevinger says of Mutation’s origin. “But if you just start randomising the parameters it gets very complicated because each preset can have a completely different set of modules. I wanted to do it in a meaningful way, where the musician could guide that random process somehow.

“I was looking at the preset list,” he continues. “And thinking about how you can select just bass sounds, and it'll only show you bass. I thought if you could pick one of those related presets, grab little bits from it, insert it into the preset you're working on, and then add some randomisation, that would be the key. I wanted it to be like going on a journey, instead of just jumping around between random sounds.”

Version 5 was a triumph, but it was also the point at which Absynth began to languish. Development slowed, and after growing increasingly long in the tooth the instrument was eventually discontinued in 2023, much to the dismay of longtime users.

For just about any other soft synth, that would have been the end of the story. But the remarkable longevity of this instrument, its sheer uniqueness and its undeniable musical prowess ensured that, even once it was gone, it was not forgotten.

“I had no idea that so many people were still using it, to tell you the truth,” admits Clevinger when asked about the community response to news of Absynth’s demise. “But I just got tons, and tons, and tons of messages from people begging me to bring it back somehow.”

Those pleas have now been answered. Working closely with the Native Instruments' team, a process that Clevinger unreservedly describes as 'fantastic', Absynth is back for a sixth outing and is looking better than ever.

“We have really been focusing on the user interface,” emphasises Clevinger. “Because nobody's ever been happy with Absynth's UI. It’s a super complex thing to get right, and involves endless discussions to try and work out the problems, but I'm really thrilled with what we've got now; it's so much better than what we had before and the design team's been great.”

For Clevinger, the top priorities during the development process were ensuring backward compatibility with legacy presets (presets from versions 4 and 5 are compatible with Absynth 6) and that the original audio engine was retained - a section of code that Clevinger says he touches 'as little as possible.'

But it wasn't all about preservation: significant improvements were made to Absynth's granular synthesis chops.

“All of that stuff is much denser than it was previously,” Clevinger told us. “We added a high density mode, and the Aetherizer and the Cloud filters sound much closer to what I originally wanted.”

One of the most striking new UI elements is the Preset Explorer that greets you when you first load up Absynth 6. A dizzying array of presets, dating back over two decades, are rendered as a multi-coloured point-cloud that you can click through and navigate as you might a geographical map.

Native Instruments tasked a number of artists with designing custom presets for Absynth 6, including none other than synthesis pioneer Brian Eno himself.

Working with Eno was something of a full-circle moment for Clevinger, who was inspired by Eno’s looping techniques when designing the envelopes for the original Absynth plugin.

That’s not all. Using deep learning techniques, Native Instruments’ Applied AI team trained a model on Absynth’s entire back catalogue of presets, allowing them to be spatially grouped by sonic characteristics. The goal is to help users break past the preset-paralysis that so often arises when scrolling through endless walls of text.

“I don't think there's anything musical about a list of presets,” says Andy Sarroff, head of Applied AI at Native Instruments, and himself a former mix and mastering engineer. “There’s something inherently uninspiring about staring down thousands of names and tags when you're trying to create. So, how do we solve that problem? There's never gonna be any perfect solution, but being able to visualise and explore this huge universe of sounds in a spatial way will hopefully either help you find what you want quickly, or be inspired by adjacent sounds.”

Of course, Absynth still has a more traditional preset browser system that you can switch to if you prefer, and Sarroff makes clear that accommodating different working styles is a top priority. “It's always a balancing act for us,” he points out. “We’re trying to figure out how to do this in a way that helps people feel like they're having fun, and not that they're being talked down to in any kind of way.”

Alongside all of that there was alos the inclusion of MPE and polyphonic aftertouch, enabling those performers who want to feel the maximum amount of nuance and expression from the instrument the ability to go deeper.

However, for Clevinger, it wasn’t this that caught his finely-tuned ear; his favourite new addition was the humble ladder notch filter.

“I really like the new ladder notch filter,” he says, confiding that he unconsciously drew some inspiration from one the first synths he ever used, the ARP 2500, during its design.

“My favourite thing on the ARP 2500 was this multi-mode filter that had a notch mode - and I certainly did not try to emulate it or anything, but that was the sound I had in my head. The notch filter mode, that's my favourite.”

It’s an attitude that seems emblematic of Absynth’s quarter-century run: bedrock features and idiosyncratic innovation, a workhorse and a dream machine, the essentials and the esoteric, all blended together to serve up a truly intoxicating sonic concoction.

As fans look ahead to the next 25 years, they can feel assured that Absynth has lost none of its potency, or its relevance, least of all to Clevinger himself.

“It's been a real emotional thing bringing this back,” he reflects. “This is the best project I've ever worked on.”

Mastering the Mix has built a reputation for plugins that focus on helping anyone making music on computer, to engineer smarter mixing decisions, rather than just constantly adding processing.

In the latest part of their mix-chain, it turns its attention to one of the most difficult elements to control, relating to stereo width and panorama.

Stereovault is a plugin which is available as a single purchase, although it will be easily integrated with other Mastering the Mix plugins.

If there is one company which wears its branding on its sleeve, it has to be Mastering the Mix, although it's important to note that, as this is a single plugin, it can be used in channel, sub-mix (bus) or master fader situations, as well as forming part of the final mastering process.

Performance

Upon loading Stereovault for the first time, its visual guise makes it incredibly easy to see exactly what's going on. The display adopts an X/Y format, with frequency response being displayed from bottom to top. Lower frequencies unsurprisingly populate the lower portion of the display, so you can guess where the upper frequencies reside - up top.

The frequency plot is then divided into four sections, which can also be altered to suit your frequency band preferences. Within each band, you simply adjust the width parameters by clicking and dragging to hear the immediate effect of the broadening or narrowing of each particular band. It's a surprisingly simple process, with even more surprising results.

Don’t overcook it!

As is the case for any new plugin, we quickly found ourselves pushing things to an extreme, to establish the overall effect, and whilst there are considerable benefits to be had, it is also possible to completely undermine a mix.

A case in point: overextending the bottom-end of a mix too broadly can completely destabilise the foundation of a track, but adopting a similar technique with upper frequencies can really make a track shine.

If you feel that you need a little bit of help in this regard, Stereovault is on hand. Thanks to its included analytical tools, Stereovault can listen to your track and make some sensible suggestions. The plugin does ask for some input along the way, such as whether or not Stereovault is being used on specific instrumentation or a wider mix, and also suggestions for the style of music.

At this stage, it does present a minor challenge, as there are only five styles of music presented initially. Some of the tracks that we used as audition mixes could be described as jazz or cinematic, neither of which is represented in this situation, leaving us to make a best guess. It's not a huge problem, as you can select the next best genre and tweak-as-you-go, but it underlines the need to listen at all stages, because it is conceivably very easy to click a few buttons and find your mix in a state of flux.

Talking of flux, the Creative section pushes things further into sound-design territory. The included modes can dramatically reshape material, adding movement and cinematic depth to otherwise static sounds. Used subtly, they provide excellent dimensional enhancement.

Level matching

One familiar problem relates to monitoring levels, and the temptation to increase your listening volume while working. This will almost always result in your ears telling your brain that your mix sounds much better than it is. As any mix engineer will tell you, it's very much a false economy.

Stereovault provides a level-matching setting, meaning that once you have applied any processing, there is no discernible change in volume. Perfect!

Verdict

Stereovault really does have something for everyone. You can engineer a considerable degree of control, or take advice from the plugin. Either way, listening is fairly essential, but it is also packed with some useful presets, which can offer some good starting points.

It is also capable of taking mono signals and making them sound mightily wide and impressive, which can be particularly useful for clean guitar or monosynth signals.

Stereovault could easily become an indispensable plugin, although our view is that it will feel more at home on the backend of most signal chains, which isn't entirely surprising, given its position in Mastering the Mix’s portfolio.

Hands-on demos

Mastering The mix

Alternatives

Specifications

Californian emulation specialist Cherry Audio has released its latest plugin, a digital recreation of the Ensoniq ESQ-1, one of the most influential and popular polysynths of the 1980s.

The original ESQ-1 launched in 1986 and blended analogue elements with early digital synthesis technology. Its sound engine featured a trio of digital oscillators for each of its eight voices, each of which made use of sampled single-cycle waveforms capable of producing both traditional analogue-style waveshapes and tones sampled from real world sources such as pianos, voices or woodwinds.

The synth combined these oscillators with analogue multimode filters, complimented by multiple LFOs and envelope generators, and an eight-track sequencer.

Released to mark the original’s 40th anniversary, Cherry Audio’s Ensoniq ESQ-1 is launched in official collaboration with current Ensoniq owner Creative Technology.

According to the developer: “Through official licensing, Cherry Audio built the instrument around the original 32 ESQ-1 waveforms, faithfully reproducing the complex, evolving, and richly textured sounds that defined the hardware.”

That reproduction has involved modelling the Curtis CEM3379 analogue filter chips, along with the four DCAs, four multistage envelopes, three LFOs, amplitude modulation, and oscillator sync.

Because the plugin faithfully recreates the architecture of the original synth, it allows for drag-and-drop import of patches and banks from original ESQ-1 as SysEx files or directly from the hardware via MIDI. SysEx patches can also be exported for use with the original instrument.

Whereas the original synth was notoriously fiddly to program, with edits made numerically via its display screen, Cherry Audio’s version opens up the full sound engine with each parameter accessible across five UI screens.

As with the original synth, Cherry Audio’s ESQ-1 is equipped with a multitrack sequencer. This is one of several elements upgraded from the original design though. Here, the sequencer is a 16x4 polyphonic design that is capable of controlling both notes and modulation. It’s also equipped with tools for humanising patterns.

Other expansions on the original design include additional polyphony – up to 32 voices – along with an expanded modulation system, plus the ability to control the synth with aftertouch and MPE messages. Cherry Audio’s version also adds an effects section with 20 different processing modules.

"Partnering with Cherry Audio to revive the original sound of the ESQ-1 has been a truly rewarding collaboration," said Koh Zi Kai, Head of Licensing at Creative Technology Ltd. "Ensoniq represents a significant chapter in Creative Technology's history, and we are proud to see the authentic sound of the ESQ-1 preserved and made accessible to a new generation of musicians on the 40th anniversary of its release. Creative Technology stands behind its mission of bringing audio technology and people together, helping them to elevate their audio experience and connect on a deeper level with their music."

"The ESQ-1 is an important part of synthesizer history, and we aimed to honour that legacy with the depth and accuracy it deserves," said Dan Goldstein, CTO at Cherry Audio. "From the original waveforms to the precise modelling of the filter, we have carefully crafted every detail to capture what made the hardware iconic, while also providing today's musicians with the modern tools and expressiveness they expect."

Cherry Audio ESQ-1 comes with over 400 presets, including the sound banks from the original. The plugin is out now priced at $69. Head to the Cherry Audio site for more information.

The Hollywood-worthy incident took place in Sydney, Australia on Saturday at the ICC’s Darling Harbour theatre. The first half of the show had proceeded without incident, but as the scheduled interval stretched out to 40 minutes, audience members started to wonder what was going on.

It was at this point that Justin Hurwitz, the La La Land score composer who was conducting on the night, stepped out onto the stage and asked if there happened to be a pianist in the audience who was also a top-notch sight-reader. It turns out that no one else in the orchestra was capable of filling in, and attempts to recruit a replacement player who could get to the theatre quick enough had failed.

“I figured nobody’s as close as they say they are … so I just thought, well, we have 2,500 people in here,” Hurwitz told Guardian Australia. “Yes, it was a gamble.”

Enter the suitably heroically named Sterling Nasa, a 21-year-old politics and international studies student at the University of Sydney, who was attending the show with his friend.

Knowing his skills on the piano and organ – and indeed the bagpipes, it turns out – she encouraged Nasa to boldly go where no audience member had gone before and put his hand up.

After Hurwitz had asked a few follow-up questions – “Are you sure? Can you really sight-read? Can you play key signatures you’ve never played before?” – Nasa took his place on the stage. However, having seen La La Land before, he must have known that he was soon to be faced with one of the toughest challenges in the score – the synth solo that Ryan Gosling’s character plays (on a ROLI Seaboard, funnily enough) when he’s on stage with John Legend during the song Start A Fire.

“The synth solo is really technical, and I thought, even a really high-level professional sight-reader would probably not be able to do it,” says Hurwitz. “As it was coming up, I was thinking, ‘Oh no, how’s he going to be able to handle the solo?’”

Nasa was equally concerned – “I saw it on the score and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sight-read that in one go,’” – so decided to do what most musicians have done from time to time during a performance: wing it.

“I took a little bit of a creative liberty and just decided to improvise, which I think ended up being a good choice,” said Nasa.

Hurwitz agrees: “To be able to play a really cool solo in the right key, in the right scale, on the fly with no rehearsal – it was remarkable,” he said.

Cue Nasa’s 15 minutes of well-deserved fame – he’s been doing the media rounds since his performance. However, having lived his La La Land dream, he will now return to his university studies.

To quote Mia, Emma Stone’s character from the film, though: "Here's to the fools who dream, crazy as they may seem."

“I just like that sound,” he says. “The beauty for me of using a lot of the analogue stuff is the fact that it's very hands-on, it's very kind of tactile. You're not just using a mouse, and I really get a lot of pleasure out of that whole process. The best bit of making music is the process, absolutely. It's not listening to the record afterwards, it's actually the craft of building something from nothing.”

When it comes down to it, though, what would be Vince’s favourite synth of all time.

“The [Sequential] Pro 1,” he replies quickly. “I bought one in 1984 – I'm looking at it now, still the same one. I mean, it's been, you know, in lots of different cities around the world, and I plugged it in in my little setup the other day, bracing myself, and the bloody thing was in tune! I couldn't believe it. Amazing! I mean, it's nothing like as complex as modern synthesizers, but it's got knobs, you know? And I can actually carry it, as opposed to the [Roland] JP-4.”

Asked whether he’s kept all of his favourite synths, Clarke says that he still has “the stuff I use,” but has got rid of some things.

“I've got a bit of that collector's mindset, but then I realised it would be much better in the hands of someone who used it, as opposed to someone that just showed off and said, 'well, I've got an ARP 2600,'” he reckons.

And finally, Eurorack, does he have a million modules? No, it turns out.

“Martin [Gore, Depeche Mode] did say something actually, when we were talking about it [Eurorack] like, 'you know it's addictive', but at the end of the day I didn't find that,” he explains. “I mean, he's got like 17 million modules or something crazy, you know. I've got maybe 30 or 40 and that's enough!”

Look out for MusicRadar’s full Doublespeak interview soon. Their eponymous debut album is out on 29 May.

Released in 1982, the Memorymoog had six voices, each with the same three-VCO architecture as its mono predecessor the Minimoog. It also packed a 24db low-pass ladder filter per-voice.

As well as generating poly patches, the Memorymoog could operate in mono mode too, where its 18 oscillators could be used to create huge-sounding unison effects.

Arturia’s plugin recreation replicates this original architecture in full, while introducing some modern touches and updated features. Memory V can expand the polyphony from six to 12 voices, also adding modernised modulation, effects and arp sections.

According to Arturia: “Memory V resurrects the analogue majesty of the Memorymoog with breathtaking authenticity. Build towering brass, dense basses, evolving leads, and cinematic pads with the living instability and triple-oscillator depth of a polyphonic classic, augmented for modern production.”

While the Memorymoog boasted an undeniably powerful sound engine, it was not a synth without flaws. The instrument was the last to be released during Moog’s original incarnation before the company fell into bankruptcy. As a result, its MIDI implementation was left somewhat unfinished. The tuning was notoriously unstable too, and the machine is known for being difficult to maintain.

Arturia has included some of these imperfections in its recreation. The plugin includes a ‘vintage dispersion’ parameter, for dialling in what Arturia refers to as “subtle, breathing detuning that sounds alive, not perfect.”

The virtual analogue filters can also be overdriven in a characteristic manner using the per-voice Drive control. According to Arturia: “At low settings it adds subtle harmonic richness; past halfway it introduces the raw, crunchy analogue grit the Memorymoog was notorious for. Combine with a slow filter opening and you have a signature ‘angry Moog’ moment that cuts through any dense mix.”

As with other plugins in Arturia’s V Collection, Memory V’s main UI closely mimics the look and layout of its inspiration, but an assortment of modern extras can be found within the interface’s drop down Advanced tab.

Here, users can access a four-track arpeggiator that allows for multi-layered patterns to be honed and routed to different octaves of the synth keyboard. There’s also a flexible drag-and-drop modulation setup with multiple envelopes, LFOs, randomisation tools and a step-sequenced Voice Modulator.

Memory V also has a three-slot effect engine that can be loaded with a variety of vintage and modern-style processors drawn from Arturia’s existing software suite.

As with other V Collection plugins, the synth also makes use of a top-level Macro system that allows users to modulate and control multiple parameters at once using four editable controls.

Memory V is MPE compatible, and comes loaded with over 300 presets covering basses, pads, leads and a variety of more esoteric sounds.

The synth is available now priced at €/$149. Owners of existing Arturia products can unlock introductory discounts by logging into their accounts.

Head to the Arturia site for more information.

The ever-observant gearheads on the Behringer subreddit spotted the leak last week while the company’s website was undergoing a redesign, when listings for forthcoming products briefly appeared before being taken down.

Screenshots were swiftly taken, of course, and from these we’ve learned that several previously unannounced products are in the pipeline, and some upcoming instruments we already knew about may be closer to an official release than many of us expected.

Behringer’s leak revealed that the company is preparing to release a drum machine and sampler inspired by the E-mu SP-1200, a much-loved 1987 instrument that heavily influenced the sound of early hip-hop. Listed under the product name SP-1200, the listing featured no image and only a short description that confirmed the instrument will offer both modern 24-bit and classic 12-bit sampling – the latter imitating the original SP-1200’s famously gritty lo-fi character – and feature an analogue filter.

Considering that Behringer has released instruments based on the LinnDrum and Oberheim DMX in recent years, it’s no surprise that an SP-1200 remake is in the works, adding to a stable of clones that’s getting close to encompassing almost every notable classic drum machine in music tech history.

Another unreleased drum machine that surfaced in Behringer’s leak is the RD-765, but details are even scarcer on this one: described as a “classic hybrid sampling drum machine” with a 64-step sequencer and sample recording capabilities, the description details “XX drum sounds”, suggesting that product copy had yet to be finalised before the listing was unintentionally published.

One imaginative Redditor speculated that the RD-765 could be a hybrid of a trio of Roland instruments that Behringer has yet to imitate (the TR-707, TR-626 and TR-505) but at this point, it’s anyone’s guess.

The leak included three more as-yet-unannounced products. AQ64 is described as a USB/MIDI controller and clip launcher that looks like it could be based on a similar concept to Akai’s Ableton-focused APC40. QT32 is a 32-key, eight-pad MIDI controller keyboard with shades of the Akai MPK Mini, and JAM is another MIDI keyboard that drops the pads and adds 64-step polyphonic sequencing capabilities.

The JAM looks like it could be a successor to the Swing, a controversial controller Behringer released in 2021 that shared an uncanny resemblance with the Arturia KeyStep, before backlash prompted a cosmetic rework.

That’s all the gear we hadn’t yet heard about, but the leak also featured several products that have already been teased by Behringer, stoking flames of anticipation among fans eager to get their hands on the company’s affordable clones of iconic instruments like the Roland Jupiter-8 and Yamaha CS-80.

It’s Behringer’s take on the latter that’s likely to have stirred up the most excitement, but the screenshots taken provide frustratingly little detail – with no image or description visible, all we have is a product name: VS-80. What this does suggest, though, is that Behringer’s long-awaited CS-80 clone (which was originally named DS-80) could be much closer to an official release than previously expected.

Another noteworthy instrument spied in the leak is the VCX 3, Behringer's clone of the EMS VCS 3, a product first teased in 2019 before entering beta testing in 2023, then seeming to vanish completely. (We even speculated that development of the sought-after remake had been discontinued completely after several customers reported that preorders made via gear retailer Sweetwater were cancelled in October last year.)

Well, it seems that Behringer’s clone of the historic synth is close to an official release: leaked screenshots show a product listing detailing a “legendary analogue synthesizer with 3 VCOs, VCF, routing matrix, ring modulator” and more.

There are many more notable mentions in the Behringer leak, including the BCR32, a MIDI controller and desktop sequencer that’s a redesign of the popular BCR2000, an original Behringer design released 20 years prior.

Also visible in the screenshots is the Mini Pops 7, a modernized take on Korg’s ‘60s analogue drum machine favoured by artists like Aphex Twin and Jean-Michel Jarre, and Polykeys PK61, a 61-key MIDI keyboard controller with polyphonic aftertouch and a ribbon controller.

While Behringer’s JT-16 – a souped-up 16-voice clone of the Roland Jupiter-8 that’s become one of the most keenly-awaited products in its ever-expanding list of upcoming releases – didn’t appear in the leak, Behringer has since published a product page for JT-16 VST, a plugin version of that synth.

The company promises that JT-16 VST authentically captures the Jupiter-8’s sound via the “meticulous recreation of all the original oscillators, filters, and envelopes” and features all the original factory patches and presets.

Was Behringer’s leak truly accidental or simply a shrewd marketing stunt? We’ll never know, but whether or not the big reveal was an honest mistake – and whether or not these products will actually make it to shelves in the near future – it’s certainly given music-makers plenty to talk about. All we can do now is wait, and as ever with Behringer, that may be for quite some time.

It’s fair to say, then, that without the CR-78, In The Air Tonight might never have existed, but in a new interview with Eddie Trunk’s Trunk Nation podcast, Collins says that, when he first brought his unit home from Japan, he thought he wouldn’t need it and so gave it away.

“We'd come back from Japan with Genesis with these drum machines, and being a drummer and thinking like a drummer I didn't think I needed a drum machine, so I gave mine to one of the road crew,” Collins confirms. He says that he realised that he’d make a mistake when he got back to his home studio and started making music on his own.

“I asked the road manager if I could get my drum machine back and he said ‘sure,’” Collins remembers. “So I got it back and I started to learn how to use it, how to program it. I mean, it was nothing like what you get today if you buy a drum machine – it was very basic. It was really a cocktail drum machine, you know, for people that play piano in bars, and I wrote this nice pattern which was kind of moody.”

Said pattern was a slowed-down, adapted version of the CR-78’s Disco 2 preset, and provided the perfect bed for Collins’ synth pad chords, which he played on a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5.

“I had a keyboard which had a couple of really nice sounds on it, and one of them was number 36, which was the In The Air sound,” says Collins. “That became the pad sound if you like, for the song. I went for some chords and the chords sounded great with the drum machine pattern. And then that was it, you know? I mean, it just went round and round.”

There was a little more to it than that, of course. The haunted vocal, for example… but even that was recorded spontaneously.

“I set up a microphone and I sang improvised lyrics,” says Collins. “That first verse is all improvised. It just came to me – I sang it and then I wrote it down. I didn't write it then sing it, you know? It was the other way round. So I felt something was going on, but I didn't really know what to do with it.”

Collins says that his attempts to get a good sound for the live drum overdubs at home were unsuccessful, so in the end, his demo multitracks were copied over to the 24-track system in the Townhouse studio in London.

It was here that Collins worked with producer Hugh Padgham to record that famous gated reverbed drum fill, but once again, this was something that just happened in the moment. “That was the fill I played on that particular take on that particular day,” Collins confirms.

In The Air Tonight may never have got to that point, though, if it hadn’t been for Collins re-acquiring and tinkering with that CR-78, a creative moment that kickstarted several others and resulted in a career-defining debut single.

“It wasn't thought out or choreographed, you know?” Collins insists. “Everything fell into place gradually, and it became the record that people think of when they think of me.”

There was so much modular action, in fact, that it’s hard to cover it in any way that even comes close to being comprehensive. So in lieu of a definitive list, here is a loose collection of our modular highlights – a few of the new releases that turned our heads and had our patch cables twitching on the Superbooth show floor…

Befaco / Tesseract ARK

Modular systems are a great environment for experimenting with chance-based sequencing and generative systems. This new 16-track instrument looks like an excellent tool for precisely those kinds of sonic adventures.

Created by Befaco in collaboration with Tesseract Modular, ARK is described as “a compositional system where algorithms, chance, and signal share the same space.”

Each of ARK’s tracks can make use of deterministic, stochastic & Euclidean sequencing tools, with 16 internal modulation sources for adding movement.

ARK can be used as a fairly self-contained instrument, with per-track internal sound engines and samplers. It also looks handy for driving other sound sources though. ARK can output CV and audio as well as MIDI. It also features internal harmonic tools based around scales and chord progressions.

Oh, and there are onboard effects too. Basically, it looks like an all-in-one experimental powerhouse.

More info>>

4ms / Valley Audio Mesa

4ms’s new reverb module began life in the digital realm. Mesa is based on Valley Audio’s Plateau, a popular third-party add-on for the virtual Eurorack environment VCV Rack, itself based on a renowned plate reverb algorithm developed in the ‘90s by Jon Dattorro.

According to 4ms: “Mesa brings the Plateau sound into hardware with no compromises on quality. Running at 96 kHz with 64-bit double-precision processing, Mesa is among the finest-sounding reverbs available at any price point.”

Aside from the reverb algorithm itself, Mesa is equipped with four LFOs for modulation, a pre-delay buffer, a freeze function and dual filters.

More info>>

Make Noise / Soundhack Plexiphon

We can always rely on Make Noise to turn up to Superbooth with something interesting to show, and this year saw the debut of Plexiphon, a creative spatial effect that once again sees the US brand teaming up with developer Tom Erbe of Soundhack.

Described as a “spatial texturizer”, Plexiphon’s big selling point is the fact it is ‘modeless’, allowing for continuous morphing between different forms of spatial effect. This means to can seamlessly go from, say, washed out reverb to multi-tap delay lines,

This is controlled by a combination of the Plexus parameter, which alters the algorithm’s the routing and entanglement of the feedback loops, and the Size control, which changes the temporal relationship between the feedback paths, acting like a delay time or room size control. Both parameters can be controlled by both front panel knobs or an associated CV input.

More info>>

Befaco / Mylar Melodies Random8

Another Befaco collaboration, this time with musician/podcaster/YouTuber and all-round modular fiend Mylar Melodies.

Befitting of its name, Random8 features eight random voltage generators packed into just 8HP of space. Each generator has a trigger input, per-track loop button and attenuator.

According to Mylar Melodies: “Random8 is designed to provide a huge level of animation for its size, yet remain interactive and jammable, by tapping dedicated buttons to loop or 'evolve'. Using stepped randomness, it makes every step of your sequence sound different, alive and interesting – so you can play live more easily and for longer.

“It also has scale quantisation built in so it can drive VCOs, making it a pitch sequencer (where you let chance determine the steps) too - In fact, it's eight! And it has slide, making stepped looping voltages into complex looping LFOs.”

More info>>

WMD Cosmic Debris

Launched just ahead of this year’s show, Cosmic Debris is a stereo delay and reverb processor with 16 interacting delay lines. What makes Cosmic Debris interesting is that it’s designed specifically as a live performance effect, meaning that it’s particularly well-suited to manipulating sounds on the fly.

The module has three modes of operation, designed to create tight rhythmically synced delays, washes of ambience or pitch-shifted shimmer.

A Slew function allows users to create slowly morphing effect sweeps with a single turn of a control, while the Snapshot function can save and recall parameter configurations.

WMD Cosmic Debris>>

Doepfer 1U modules

Dieter Doepfer is the developer that first introduced the Eurorack format, so it's always interesting to see what Doepfer is up to.

New for this year’s Superbooth is a range of modules in horizontal 1U format (ie, arranged to be long, rather than tall) with a new 1U-compatible case to fit them in.

There are six 1U modules in this first batch, with more adaptations to follow. The initial run includes a dual VCA, dual LFO, AD/LFO, 6-in-2 mixer, MIDI-to-CV converter and Doepfer’s Miniature Ratcheting Sequencer.

The new P7 case, meanwhile, takes the same form as Doepfer’s existing P6 powered case, with an additional 1U row along the centre, giving a total of three module rows of 84HP.

More info>>

Knobula Drum Farm

Knobula has made some of our favourite modules of recent years, including the Poly Cinematic and Monumatic synth voices, which bring a welcome touch of polyphony to your modular rig.

Drum Farm is said to be “inspired by Knobula Technical Director Jason Mayo’s background in computer animation, where vast ‘render farms’ generated thousands of realistic images with minimal human input.”

That has resulted in a 16-sound percussion generator that combines elements of virtual analogue and physical modelling synthesis, sampling and real-time effects. These elements are designed to interact with one another, so that users can shape drum sounds in synthesis, process them with effects and then resample the results for further manipulation and layering.

Designed to be fast and intuitive, Drum Farm is said to be capable of quickly generating adventurous drum sounds through experimentation or generative programming. From the demos we’ve seen it looks like a whole lot of fun.

More info>>

Ferry Island Modular Undertow

Ferry Island is a relatively new brand from Helsinki. Following the release of its debut Four Seas oscillator last year, the company came to Superbooth with a pair of new modules, a VCA/LPG named Beacon and Undertow, a powerful-looking wavetable VCO-come-LFO.

Undertow is described as a ‘two dimensional’ wavetable generator. According to Ferry Island: “instead of one VCO/LFO waveform, it gives you fifteen simultaneous outputs, each a unique position between two wavetable LFOs.”

Users can morph the output across two axes, with the horizontal axis altering the wave and frequency and the vertical axis shifting from clean to turbulent modulation.

According to Ferry Island “there's no such thing as too much modulation” – which is a statement we’re happy to endorse.

More info>>

But this sleek aluminium-housed box is more than just a simple 10-band filterbank, you can also use it as both an unconventional multimode filter or as an instrument in its own right, particularly when you play with the box's various resonance controls.

It can become a standalone instrument via configurable feedback loops. “[It can be used] even as an experimental sound generator for no-input mixer-like setups,” state Erica Synths.

You can use the Filterbank's Clocked Modulation Mode to program specific band positions in a set sequence and build oscillating stereo effects. This is done via 20 independent LFOs and envelope followers which can be assigned to any control parameter. It also features a spectral analyser and a dynamic EQ, making it a lot deeper than you might think upon initial inspection.

The small display screen gives detailed visual feedback as to what’s happening, with a helpful Macro view that can guide you when setting the sliders to access and control specific features and, orienting the machine to be used as a performance instrument.

Its user snapshot preset memory has 128 slots which you’re also able to morph between on the fly.

In terms of ins/outs, there’s 6.3mm balanced stereo inputs and outputs, a customisable footswitch input, and five-pin DIN MIDI in and USB for firmware updates and patch loading. There’s an analogue Gain Stage which boosts incoming signals up to +24dB.

Going back to the surface level filtering abilities, and its frequency range stretches across: 29 Hz, 61 Hz, 115 Hz, 218 Hz, 411 Hz, 777Hz, 1.5 kHz, 2.8 kHz, 5.2 kHz and 11 kHz.

So, however you use it - whether it's applied to drum machines, synths, modular setups or even guitars, Resonant Filterbank sounds like it will expand the sonic scope and then some.

Resonant Filterbank is available to preorder for €660 at Erica Synths website, the product ships on May 18

It's now a full decade since the first dedicated Superbooth show took place in Berlin, but the origins of the event date back further than that.

Founded by the team behind Berlin instrument store SchneidersLaden, Superbooth grew out of the now-defunct Musikmesse show in Frankfurt. Since 2017, Superbooth has taken place on a regular basis in the tranquil, wooded grounds of the FEZ centre south of Berlin city centre.

Part industry trade show, part synth nerd jam session, the three day event plays host to many of the biggest brands in music technology, but also numerous smaller, newer and often innovative outfits.

More so than the NAMM Show – which takes place in California each January – Superbooth has become the de facto event for music tech brands to announce and showcase new gear.

And, it's live...

May 7, 2026 – 9:00 AM

The MusicRadar team has touched down on the Superbooth show floor. Stay tuned for demos and opinions as we get hands-on.

To operate, Kalimba relies on tiny microphones, touch sensors and an accelerometer to yield all manner of expressive sounds. All of which are housed within a physical design that is inspired by the traditional kalimba, tines and all.

There seems to be a theme emerging at this year’s show, of prioritised expression and more traditional-instrument based-routes into exploring sound, and the handheld Kalimba is no exception. “Treat it like an acoustic instrument, it will answer like one” Bastl say.

Playing the tines at varying intensities excite the internal physical modelling and FM engines, thanks to the instrument’s internal microphones. The internal accelerometer acts as both an exciter for the physical modelling engine and also filters the left and right channels of the FM engine, as the device is physically rotated.

Six knobs sit atop the front panel, which adjust rates of timbre, excite, blend, detune, body and decay respectively.

Beyond that, the Kalimba also has a slew of further options on its front panel, with function-based touch points (for, as Bastl say, creating pads, pitch slides and timbral modulation) as well as 2 function-assignable ones on the back of the device.

There’s a heap of control options, with an arpeggiator, an internal layering looper, octave shifting, tempo/metronome and a palette of built-in effects (reverb, delay, bit-crush, overdrive, filtering, modulation).

Bastl states that the Kalimba’s three-year creation has been one of the most ‘challenging development projects’ that the company has ever undertook. “We have spent more than three years developing this instrument, exploring different casing shapes, tine lengths, materials, internal designs, features, and visual directions. We couldn’t be more grateful and proud of the entire Bastl team for what they have accomplished and how much heart they’ve put into this project.”

Artists such as Oliver Torr and Never Sol were also on-hand to stress and road-test Kalimba.

Bastl will be launching Kalimba on Kickstarter first (to help fund wider production) and is available from today until till 6th of June.

The ‘super early bird’ price starts at €389 which goes up to €500 Eur without tax and shipping. There’s also a range of backer awards and extra goodies (including a custom strap, a shirt and USB-C wrist strap amongst other trinkets) so check out the company’s Kickstarter page for more info.

Post-Kickstarter, the Kalimba is expected to ship in December 2026. If demand exceeds 1,500, Bastl plan to ship a second batch in early 2027.

Developed in collaboration with the world-renowned Axel Hartmann Design team, the 4.5kg minimalist steel and polycarbonate-enclosed Element One’s ultra-reactive USP is spotlighted by expressive aftertouch and a versatile 4-axis joystick.

Then, there’s 17 direct-access control knobs for instantaneous sound shaping. It looks like the perfect antidote to tedious menu-scrolling…

The Element One is being posited as more of a responsive instrument, then - an instrument that attendees of this year’s Superbooth can test out with their own hands over at Modal’s booth (H101).

"Element One is for musicians and producers who want more sound and more expression without turning into full-time programmers," says the Modal team. "It doesn’t ask you to learn the rules; it dares you to play."

But that simplicity belies the fact that, under the hood, the Element One sports some impressive specs: 64 high-resolution oscillators (up to 8 per voice) can provide textured warmth right through to more modern-leaning sounds. Then there’s 30 resonant filter types including morphable and static options.

Then, there’s what Modal describes as ‘studio-grade FX’ - consisting of three independent stereo engines which can conjure reverb, delay, chorus and much more - arrangeable in any order you see fit.

But, if you’d rather leave all the exploring and just dive straight into some staple sonics, Modal has kindly provided 300 factory presets (categorised by character) will undoubtedly serve you right. There’s also the option to import thousands of additional patches for the company’s Cobalt8 synth.

Modal states that the Element One has been designed to fit into any musical ecosystem, spanning a guitarist’s pedalboard to a DJ’s live rig, or the standard DAW-based producer’s home setup.

In terms of ins and outs, the Element One sports USB-C MIDI, MIDI In/Out, Sync I/O, and a stereo audio input that allows external sources to be processed through its internal FX engines. For deeper editing, Modal provide a free app - aka, the ‘MODALapp’ which provides a visual interface (available for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android).

Element One is available through authorised retailers for MSRP 649 €/ or MAP $599 . For more information, visit the MODAL Electronics website. We'll hopefully be getting hands-on with the Element One at the show - so watch this space!

SUPERBOOTH 2026: Japanese synth brand Sonicware has announced Deconstruct Minimal, a new hardware groovebox said to be “built on the rhythmic and pitch drift of legendary drum machines”.

Sonicware is perhaps best known for its Liven series, a range of compact digital synths that specialise in lo-fi sounds and ambient textures. According to the company, Minimal marks the first entry in a new range designed to sit alongside the Liven instruments.

“While the Liven series focuses on sound itself — making it easy to create music tailored to each sound engine — the deconstruct series focuses on musical structure, analyzing and reconstructing it to enable deeper musical expression.”

Described as being ‘designed to create hypnotic minimal grooves’, Deconstruct Minimal is a 10-track groovebox featuring a drum machine accompanied by a virtual analogue bass synth and sampler capabilities.

The sequencer tracks are designed for creative drum programming, equipped with per-track accents, sub-steps, randomised velocity, swing and phrase rotation. Rather than channeling the sound of vintage drum machines, Minimal instead aims to recapture the ‘groove DNA’ of classic hardware by replicating the grooves of vintage machines, along with their subtle drifts in rhythm and pitch drift.

The drum sounds themselves are mostly sample-based, but Minimal uses synthesis for its BD1 and SD tracks. The instrument comes stocked with 16 drum kits, divided into 10 banks, totalling 130 sounds.

Alongside the drum tracks Minimal also features a ‘Sonic Expansion Sampler’, which is described as a ‘drum machine–integrated 4-track sampler with a 4-bar loop track’.

Tracks 7-9 are one-shot sampler tracks that can load 2 or 4 second mono samples (48kHz/16-bit) with repitch to tempo functionality. Track 10 is a dedicated loop sampler, supporting stereo samples of up-to 8 seconds (48kHz/16-bit) with added time stretching.

Minimal’s Elastic Bass Synth is a newly-developed analogue-modelled engine with front panel controls for filter cutoff, resonance, envelope and decay – giving it a distinctly 303-style flavour.

According to Sonicware, the bass synth also offers “extensive sound shaping possibilities” via additional waveforms, a sub-bass and dedicated overdrive, plus real-time control over glide time and curve, decay curve, and gate time.

The groovebox also packs in a range of effects including a sweepable filter, phaser, distortion, reverb and more.

Minimal has a built-in speaker and can be powered by batteries or a 9v power supply, although the latter needs to be purchased separately.

Minimal is available to order now, priced at £359/$399/€399. The first 1000 units are available for a specially discounted price of £269/$299/€299.

Head to the Sonicware site to find out more.

The announcement of Telepathic Instruments Orchid heralded a flurry of chat that one might associate with a boutique fashion or limited-run IPA drop. This was in no small part due to the involvement of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker.

According to TI, the Orchid is a “chord-generating digital synthesizer built on a revolutionary chord logic algorithm and industry-leading, voice-leading technology.”

While the concept of a chord-focused synth isn't entirely new – having its roots in the Omnichord and auto-accompaniment capabilities of ’80s era ‘home-keyboards’ – the Orchid attempts to drag that accessibility into the modern production era.

At its core, it is a 16-voice polyphonic synthesizer and keyboard that promises to translate musical intuition into immediate sonic results, with the intention of bypassing the learning curve of traditional music theory, subverting a user's hard-wired ‘chord memory’, or just as fun a bit of kit for finding new ideas. The idea being that rather than hunting for a major 9th on a standard keyboard, you simply hold a root note and tap a button, and all in a portable, battery-powered ‘ideas machine’ format.

In the flesh, apart from the small OLED screen, it looks like a child’s toy from the ’70s. In use, it perhaps feels like one as well, but more on that shortly.

Performance

The primary draw of the Orchid is its workflow, which, despite some initial cynicism on our part, is fun and genuinely transformative, offering an engaging way to escape a creative rut.

The standout feature is undoubtedly the Voicing Dial. This allows you to cycle through inversions and octave spreads with a simple flick of the wrist, creating harmonic shifts and variations that would usually require greater keyboard and chord proficiency to achieve. If actually deciding on a chord type is too much for you, then it’s easy to select a specific major or minor key and allow the Orchid to choose chords for you by mapping different, but appropriate ones, to each key of the keyboard.

It’s easy to be sniffy about some of this, especially if you are of the more judgmental ‘muso’ persuasion, but we really enjoyed this mode, and there’s nothing stopping you from tweaking chord types as you go.

You can also use the unit as a song-drafting tool to sketch out sophisticated harmonic progressions, and then split the chord, bass, and 'performance' data onto separate MIDI channels to trigger different hardware (or software) instruments. The aforementioned performance elements reflect the Orchid’s ability to turn block chords into something more engaging by allowing it to play them in different ways, with variations that take in ‘strumming’, arpeggiation, harp glissandi and 11 different trigger patterns.

The synth engine features 16-note polyphony and uses Virtual Analogue, FM, and Reed Piano models. The sounds themselves are good, with a solid array of presets, but editing is limited to overall filtering and effects. However, given that this is not intended as a standalone in-depth synth system, the lack of options here allows you to focus on other things and not be distracted by an endless menu of synth-engine parameters.

However, if you do wish to delve further, TI has released Pistil, a synth plugin featuring the Orchid synth engine, with full access to all its under-the-hood parameters – and it allows you to save patches to the hardware. Currently, Mac-only and in Beta, but a promising development, nonetheless.

It’s good to see that there have been some significant firmware updates over the course of Orchid’s development, which expand its features and flexibility. This includes the provision of additional time signatures and more expansive beat and looping options. The loop recorder included here is simple and effective but is only really intended as a notepad for generating one-off ideas. You won’t be creating complex multi-section music pieces here, and there’s no way to access or save anything other than what is in the loop recorder at that moment. Again, the focus clearly is on working in the moment.

Despite its boutique branding, it is disappointing to report that the physical chassis feels surprisingly lightweight and plastic, lacking the structural integrity of some other pro gear. The keyboard feels cheap and lightweight, and the encoders feel a little flimsy.

It is also worth pointing out that we have experienced some occasional glitches in use, and there have been some reported hardware issues on early units – though Telepathic Instruments itself does seem responsive in terms of support on this front.

Verdict

The Telepathic Instruments Orchid is a fun and fascinating, if occasionally charmingly flawed, attempt to rethink the interface between the composer/producer and the synth or computer. It prioritises fun and workflow over 'menu diving', making it the ideal choice for those who want to explore harmony without returning to music school. But it can also act as an ideas generator, or simply a way to find more interesting chord progressions for tracks you might already have started. Even just adjusting the Chord Voicing knob to create different inversions can be very helpful when considering different approaches to enhancing a track.

Compared with something like the Roland Aira J-6, the Orchid is much more interesting from a harmonic perspective and ultimately more useful across a wider range of genres.

Those looking for a controller that includes chord generation functionality could consider the Arturia KeyStep range, but although these excel in other areas, they don’t offer the charm, enjoyment, or inspiration we found in the Orchid, even with its premium price.

Let’s face it, the Orchid is not cheap, and to some, it looks like a toy. That being said, we really like ours. We bought it at full price, and don’t yet regret it. It has proven to be both fun and useful.

Hands-on demos

Telepathic Instruments

Alternatives

Specifications

Just in time for Superbooth, Cyma Forma has returned with its second instrument, another three-letter marvel that takes an even more innovative approach to sound design: RND (pronounced “Random”).

Undoubtedly the most minimalist synth we’ve ever come across, RND is a compact box with an interface made up of a single button. That’s it. No keys, no knobs, no faders, and no display, just one button that generates a randomized musical idea with every press.

Hit the button and all of RND's parameters across every feature are assigned weighted random values. Once you’ve hit it a second time, you erase the current idea and create a new one, and those sounds are gone forever. According to Cyma Forma, the synth is designed to provide an “infinite source of sounds”, trading “control for inspiration” with an ethos based on a single fundamental idea: “stop playing, start listening”.

Designed in collaboration with French producer and DJ Bambounou and Nick Donaldson of Infrasonic Audio, RND is a digital synth equipped with eight distinct sound engines, covering a variety of synthesis types, including subtractive, FM, additive, noise, karplus-strong, supersaw, speech and “acid” (presumably a TB-303 emulation) along with five styles of filter and a reverb effect.

Each randomly generated idea is made up of four instrument tracks populated with a unique patch, and each track gets its own sequence. Sequences are also randomly generated using Euclidean rhythms and a randomly selected scale and time signature, but you can also sequence RND’s synth engines via 4-channel MIDI over USB.

RND’s USB-C connection can also handle MIDI out, MIDI clock in/out, and multi-channel audio output, so you’re able to integrate with a broader set-up and record RND’s four tracks individually to mix elsewhere. You also get 3.5mm jacks for analogue sync in/out and a stereo mix output.

RND is a radical concept, and one that’s sure to divide audiences with its extreme simplicity – but we’ve got one-knob plugins, so why not a one-button synth?

Though most electronic musicians relish the sound design process and value the ability to tweak patches to their heart’s content, there’s certainly a case to be made that limitations can breed creativity, and RND seems to be pushing this idea as far as it can possibly go, offering an instant bolt of inspiration for the spontaneous music-maker that wants fresh ideas served up fast.

"RND is an inspiration machine," reads a statement from Cyma Forma. "There are 4.29 billion random seeds, meaning 4.29 billion different musical ideas. If you want to make music but don't know where to start, or if you're stuck in the middle of a track of yours, or if you just want to space out, just press the button. You'll definitely find something interesting."

If you’re as intrigued as we are, we’ll be checking out RND at Superbooth later this week, so stay tuned for more.

Priced at €125, RND is available for pre-order now, with first units shipping towards the end of June. Find out more on Cyma Forma’s website.

Marking ten years since the company put out its very first synth, the Lyra-8 (and 4) back in 2016, Soma’s Enigma is continuing the company's innovative ethos, and is sonically manipulated by the position and movement of metallic objects upon its surface. It harks back to the pioneering sound design-based experiments of the foundational synth progenitors, when the rules were, well, still being written.

Soma will demonstrate Enigma at Superbooth at its booth (0015 - Main Building) with the company’s founder Vlad Kreimer on-hand to officially introduce it to the world.

Enigma’s bespoke responsive surface - replete with a geometric web to slide your metallic trinkets around - takes the physical dimensions and characteristics of whatever objects are placed on it, and transforms them into deep sounds, with movement causing nuanced modulation.

“Through a unique interface developed by Soma, every metal object placed on the surface is transformed into sound. The shape, size, and type of object are entirely up to you,” Soma states on its website.

“Coins, screws, fragments, gears, tools, and any other metallic artefacts will work. The interface sensitivity is extremely high - even a fractional millimeter shift of an object can alter the sound.”

It certainly sounds - and looks - pretty fascinating judging by an enthralling YouTube demo, uploaded this morning. The viewers agree…

“When choosing your synths, arrange your coins wisely! Says commenter VJFranzK while another comments on the tactile physicality of the unit - “Stuff like this is how we will survive the AI era,” states user, drangusgrangus.

Also at the show, Soma is going to be presenting live demos of the Pulsar-23 1984 - a special limited edition version the Pulsar-23 drum machine that features a visual redesign and an entirely new bass drum architecture, designed by engineer Noah Jolly. This brings a fresh new sound to the table, with a filter shaping the bass section that was inspired by the circuit from the Polivoks.

Beyond this, Soma is also running a community contest with prizes that include a Pulsar-24 1984, a Lyra-8, the Pipe and the Ether. The contest, also timed to celebrate Soma’s tenth anniversary, will run until May 11th.

“To enter, contestants need to record a 15 to 60 second video of themselves playing any SOMA instrument and finish the following phrase in the caption in your own words: ‘SOMA changed my approach to music because…’’” the company states.

“Entries need to be posted by tagging #mysomastory on Facebook or Instagram -following SOMA Laboratory, and then registering through the link."

Buchla gear is also known for being expensive – often almost prohibitively so. The company’s iconic, suitcase-housed Easel synths retail for around £/$5000, while its full Skylab modular system is priced at an eye-watering $15,000. So the arrival of a new, self-contained Buchla synth with a retail price (just) below £/$1000 is something worth getting seriously excited about.

Ziggy is a desktop monosynth that brings the look and character of classic Buchla synths to a self-contained and relatively accessible instrument.

At the heart of its sound engine is a complex oscillator, a sine wave generator that can be shaped via audio-rate modulation of either its amplitude or frequency. This is paired with a second modulation oscillator with a wide frequency range that allows it to function like both an LFO and audio source.

The oscillator section also includes a wavefolder for further shaping the output – a feature typical of Buchla synth designs.

The oscillators are shaped using a low-pass gate, another classic feature of West Coast synth design, which is based around a Sallen-Key filter and combines the functionality of both an amp envelope and low-pass filter.

Ziggy also has a modulation generator labelled Cycler. This can function in a variety of ways, from producing punchy percussive envelopes to cycling like a classic LFO, and can also be triggered for single-cycle modulation via MIDI or CV. It also has an ‘uncertainty’ parameter, for creating randomised modulation variations. A further XLFO provides an additional triangle wave modulation source.

READ MORE: East Coast vs West Coast synthesis: what's the difference?

One of the most notable aspects of Ziggy’s design is that, unlike the vast majority of Buchla gear, it’s not a modular instrument, meaning there’s no need to physically patch one element to another in order to produce sound. Instead the instrument is equipped with a flexible modulation system that allows users to route one element to another by adjusting the front panel dials or sliders.

Ziggy’s design combines elements of both analogue and digital. Its complex oscillator, modulation sources and low-pass gate are all analogue, but are digitally controlled, allowing the synth to save and recall patches. The sound engine is also complimented by a digital effects module, capable of applying processes including reverb, delay and distortion.

According to Buchla, “Ziggy incorporates many of the Buchla innovations that have long been taken for granted: digital control over the analogue audio, additive synthesis, unique and musical interactions, and the focus on making an ‘instrument’ rather than a ‘synthesizer.’”

Although Ziggy isn’t a modular synth, it does include CV inputs for gate, pitch and modulation, allowing it to be integrated into Eurorack setups. As well as these analogue control inputs, the instrument also has both MIDI and USB connections, along with an auxiliary audio input. Ziggy has a stereo pair of main outputs, joined by a 3.5mm headphone output port.

Ziggy is available to preorder now priced at $999/£915. The first units are estimated to start shipping in August or September of this year.

Ziggy is also designed to pair with Buchla’s own LEM218 touch keyboard, and can be ordered as a bundle for $1,999.

Head to the official Buchla site for more information, where you can also hear audio examples of it in action.

After last year’s rather surprising revelation that he’d never previously owned a Prophet-5 - relax, he’s got one now - a recent video uploaded to his YouTube channel has him revisiting an instrument that he’s definitely familiar with: a Roland Jupiter-8 that he’s owned since 1983.

HoJo refers to this as the “king of synths,” adding that it “always will be my favourite.” He says that he paid around £8,000 for his Jupiter-8 (“I didn’t have that kind of money, but I had to have one of these”) though the original retail price in 1981 was actually closer to £4,000. That’s almost £20,000 in today’s money, though, so we take the point that it was expensive.

Describing the Jupiter-8 as a “proper analogue synth,” Jones says that it has 18 miles of cabling inside it (we can’t be sure if this is true) and praises its biting sound. “The way it spits out those notes is incredible,” he says. “The attack… I just miss that on modern keyboards.”

Later on, Jones describes what he believes is another unique aspect of this classic Roland synth: “The Jupiter-8’s got a sound like no other - it’s sort of incredibly ‘stereo’. I don’t even know how they do it but software can’t get there quite yet.”

Despite having lengthy experience with the Jupiter-8 (and synths in general), it seems that Jones still doesn’t consider himself to be a sound design expert. Near the beginning of the video, we cut to archive footage of him being interviewed by Dick Clark on American Bandstand and hear him say that “I've always sort of thought of myself as a player really. I don't know what half those knobs do up there, but you know, I just fiddle with them until they make the right sounds.”

We’re with you there, Howard.

If you are making music within a DAW, you will doubtless have many plugin synths to call upon, whether they form part of your DAW package, purchased as third-party propositions, or are sampled/modelled to sound like hardware. These days, as with the inner workings of the computers that run them, the quality bar is set very high.

So if software synths today are so good, why is original vintage hardware so incredibly expensive?

Well, there are many factors at play here, and a large part of it may have to do with your own age.

Much like classic guitars, the original synth-head generation have the fondest affection for the classics. Operating the OG hardware with their own hands is, to some people, the only way to synthesize.

From Minimoogs and ARPs, to Junos and Jupiters, the purists will tell you that there is nothing like the real thing.

But is there something in their claims that the vintage originals are unsurpassed, or is their aging circuitry and the need for constant servicing actually a drawback that gives software the edge?

With a DAW, loading a soft-synth onto a track is often an instantaneous route to creativity. Controlling vintage hardware, however, is nowhere near as easy, and while many levels of control are possible, it's often not quite as fluid as firing up a plugin within a project.

Hence, software aficionados quite understandably prefer the faff-free approach.

Yet the hardware allure remains.

There have also been many examples of companies trying to blend software with hardware control, and in some instances, it has worked fairly successfully.

Roland’s System-8 is a great example of a flexible controller, with sounds emanating from software, either on-board or as plugins within a DAW.

Roland even produced Jupiter and Juno look-alike products too, which were both amazing in their own right, but were met by cries from the aforementioned purists that they ‘Just wanted the original analogs!’

But beyond all the advertising hyperbole, and the passion-led angles of both sides of the hardware/software debate, the question remains; On a sonic level - does software really outperform hardware in 2026?

To answer it, we are going to put it to a blind test, with three of our choice hardware synthesizers, and one or more of their software counterparts.

To illustrate our test, we have created audio examples from some of our own original hardware, and recreated exactly the same sounds in software, placing them side by side. Across multiple rounds.

Guessing whether hardware or software examples come first, second (or third) is part of the fun here, so keep a log of your assumptions as you go, and compare them with our answers at the end.

So, all you need to do is listen, and - well, make your mind up.

In each case, we have attempted to keep our sounds relatively simplistic, so that you can draw your own conclusions from the raw signals, recorded at 48k/24bit.

We haven't used any additional or onboard EQ, compression or effects, so the signals are all untreated. This allows us to take an educated listen and decide which we prefer.

1. Sequential Circuits Pro-One v u-he Repro-1

Our first synth in the shootout is the Sequential Circuits Pro-One, produced in the early 80s as a more affordable alternative to some of the expensive US designs.

Although only monophonic, it provided a two-VCO architecture, and packed the most extraordinary punch by way of its filter and snappy envelopes.

Encased in hard plastic (in order to keep costs down) it looked resplendent with its wooden end-cheeks, and provided an incredible amount of creative character, thanks in part to the modulation matrix.

Although it would be regarded as relatively basic by today's standards, the modulation matrix provided some incredible layers of sonic possibility, which made it quite unique.

Some people unfairly described the Pro-1 as an inferior single voice Prophet-5, but being a highly capable monosynth, it is easily one of the best-sounding and most fun to use.

The only downside to it really was its horrifically awful keyboard, which could become fairly unreliable with age.

To test out its sonic chops, we put an original Pro-One (albeit our snazzily refurbed one with new woodwork and updated keyboard) through its paces, and placed it up against the u-he Repro-1. Part of a double-sided package which also includes the Repro-5 (which emulates the Prophet-5), Repro-1 is a fine software tribute.

Vince Clarke often described the Pro-One as his favourite synth of all time - high praise from a man who has just about every analogue synth in existence!

Much of Clarke’s early Yazoo output demonstrated the flexibility of the Pro-One, with the classic Don’t Go famously being produced almost entirely with the Pro-One as a sound source.

Audio Test
ROUND 1: Single VCO (Saw) - Open filter synth riff

ROUND 2: Dual VCO (Saw) - Classic oscillator sync riff

ROUND 3: Dual VCO (Saw/pulse) - Punch octave bass riff

ROUND 4: Single VCO (Saw) - Resonant filter ‘wah’ lead riff

2. Oberheim Two Voice Pro Synthesizer v GForce Software Oberheim TVS Pro

Oberheim’s reputation and inventory of extraordinary synthesizers includes some of the most characterful and highly prized machines available on the secondhand market.

The unique Oberheim SEM (Synthesizer Expander Module) was available as a standalone, cased unit which offered two VCOs in a monophonic voice, coupled with one of the most legendary filters in existence.

The 12dB 2-pole filter design offered a variable state, shifting from low-pass to band and high-pass states through the continuous rotation of a pot.

Oberheim placed these unique SEMs in a number of configurations, which include included the enormous 4 and 8-voice models, both of which could be difficult to control, given the complexity of individual voices.

The more manageable concept of the Two Voice (TVS) provided two individual SEMs, along with a fantastic on-board sequencer.

This unique hardware instrument was reissued by Oberheim in 2016, and we luckily have one of these reissues in our studio, which we put up against the (fully endorsed by Tom Oberheim) GForce Oberheim TVS Pro.

The TVS Pro cements GForce's extraordinary reputation for exacting models of the classics, while adding additional elements, such as macros and comprehensive modulation routing.

Audio Test

ROUND 1: Two VCOs in octaves (single SEM) - Low-pass filter sweep, with resonance.

ROUND 2: Two VCOs - Pulse/modulated pulse (single SEM) - Classic OB Pulse lead

ROUND 3: Four VCOs (Both SEMS) - Bright and punchy pitched major chord

ROUND 4: Four VCOs (Both SEMS) - Filter swell minor chord

3. Roland Jupiter-8 v Cherry Audio Mercury-8 v Roland Jupiter-8 Software

For our final head-to-head, we have chosen one of the all-time vintage classic polys - the Roland Jupiter-8.

Described as one of the most beautiful synthesizers ever created from an aesthetic point of view, the sound of the Jupiter-8 pretty much defined the 80s and beyond.

Originally released with a retail price of £3999, the JP-8 remains a collector's piece, with exorbitant price tags extending into the many thousands.

Despite its age, the superb build quality of the originals means that there are still many hardware examples in fine working order.

We have owned our Jupiter-8 since 1985, with our example being the slightly revamped model which was described as the Jupiter-8a.

This revision added MIDI, via the Digital Communication Bus (DCB) which allowed connection to other equipment, particularly sequencers.

There was also a slight improvement in the DAC, which shifted from a 12-bit DAC to 14-bit, with the intention of improving stability.

Given the popularity of the instrument, Roland finally relented on building an official software emulation, creating its Roland Cloud-based software, which also resurrected some of its other hardware instruments. We’ll be using Roland’s official emulation in our test, along with another sublime take…

The Jupiter has been modelled by other companies too, most recently Cherry Audio. The company’s exquisite Mercury-8 - which we’re also throwing into our test here - includes a beautifully-designed GUI, all of the original presets, and a number of useful enhancements that make it a tempting proposition at a very affordable price.

Audio Test

ROUND 1: Single VCO (Saw) - Resonant filter sweep

ROUND 2: Dual VCO (Saw) - Filter swell pad

ROUND 3: Dual VCO (Pulse) - PWM brass/pad stabs

The Results

How did you get on with your blind listening test? Were you aware of any noticeable differences?

Well, we hope you’ve been logging which sounds you think are hardware and which are software, because, below, we’re going to breakdown which is which:

Sequential Circuits Pro-One v. u-he Repro-1
In each pair of examples, you heard the Repro-1 first, and the hardware Pro-One second.

Oberheim Two Voice Pro Synthesizer v. GForce Software Oberheim TVS Pro
In each pair of examples, you heard the GForce software TVS first and the Oberheim TVS hardware second.

Roland Jupiter-8 v. Cherry Audio Mercury-8 v. Roland Jupiter-8
In each trio of examples, you heard the Roland Jupiter-8 Software first, the Cherry Audio Mercury-8 software 2nd, and the original Roland Jupiter-8 hardware third.

Any surprises?

In our view, not only did the software perform exceptionally well in all cases, but there is an incredibly small amount between our listening examples. It's therefore very difficult for the hardware purists to make the claim that hardware obviously trumps soft on a sonic level.

Which you prefer to use is likely to be dependent upon the way you work, and how you approach your creativity.

There really is nothing quite like the feeling of standing in front of a full-sized synthesizer and conjuring a sound. With a panel of pots and faders stretching out in front of you, tempting you to tinker.

There is an immediacy with hardware that is difficult to replicate in software, particularly as we tend to control parameters with a mouse, one element at a time.

If you have a control surface, or have programmed MIDI controls to mirror the parameters that you use the most, you can certainly get around this problem, and some products do offer a bespoke solution, such as the Roland System-1 or 8.

However, in our tests we found that the software could often be more refined and controllable than those vintage pots or faders - satisfying though they are.

As our friends at u-he told us (in preparation for our testing), “We used to have two or three (hardware) Pro-One units in the office when we created Repro-1, and even between two pieces of hardware, it could take 'forever' to create the exact same sound on all instruments.”

Would you really notice these subtle differences - unless you were working with two products side-by-side? Probably not, but we also cannot overstate the usefulness of having full control of our sounds within the DAW, and that's where software wins the argument, hands down!

Whichever route you take will likely be dictated by what approach inspires you to be most creative.

However, when software can sound as good as hardware, why wouldn't you adopt a combined approach? If you can afford to, that is!

One of the most often recounted moments could be described as ground zero for Gary Numan.

So the story goes, he walked into a studio with his band, Tubeway Army, with the intention of making a punk album. Unfortunately for punk, there was a Minimoog sitting in the corner of the studio, set up with a patch that literally made the room shake - and the rest (as they say) is history!

In 1979, Numan released The Pleasure Principle, the first album under his own name and away from his band. While there were clearly band-driven elements scattered throughout the album, its reliance on synthesizers was groundbreaking in pop culture - with no track exemplifying this more clearly than its lead single, the (UK) chart-topping Cars.

Surprisingly, according to Numan, the iconic riff of Cars was actually first written on bass guitar.

“I just wanted to do pop music, and thought Cars was here today, gone tomorrow,” Numan told Chaos Control. “I don’t know what happened with that, the fact that it’s done so well over the years - I never quite figured it out, really. It was the quickest song I ever wrote. I wrote it on bass guitar, I didn’t even write it on the keyboard, and it took about 10 minutes, the tune and the lyrics. The keyboard part came later, I mean the main melody and arrangement of the song and lyrics. It was about 10 minutes, beginning to end.

It’s the distinctive sound of that iconic main riff that we’re digging into today, which also forms part of the melody for Numan’s vocal.

When we focus on this element of the song, it's actually quite difficult to hear exactly what's going on because, despite the overall simplicity, it's tricky to filter out the additional elements, such as the bass and drums, but we can certainly derive some useful detail.

First of all, the main riff has been recorded twice, once for the left channel and once for the right. The two sounds used for this riff are both generated by the Minimoog (a Polymoog with the ‘Vox Humana’ patch, was deployed to create the additional swirling lead sounds which enter the mix later).

The twin-Minimoog-driven main riff provides a solid musical foundation, whilst also providing a feeling of movement in the sound. Both sounds are quite ‘reedy’ in harmonic makeup, suggesting that they are predominantly formed from a pulse wave.

The Cars riff patch is a sound that could be recreated using any synth that offers subtractive synthesis, armed with two or three oscillators. For this exploration, we are going to create a soundalike patch using Cherry Audio’s cost-effective Miniverse plugin, which is a hugely exacting software emulation.

One of the unique features of the original Minimoog is that it did not offer pulse width modulation (PWM).

There were post-market customisations available to add this, but Moog’s answer to the issue was to provide three different pulse wave shapes, within each oscillator section. It is these wave shapes that are fully exploited for the sound of Cars, with a slight variance between the left and right channel.

If you would like to re-create the sound in your own DAW, then you must start by creating the patch for the left channel. It's important to note that you should load your plugin synth in a mono instance, rather than stereo, as this will allow you to pan the synth fully to your left channel.

How to replicate the Cars main riff sound

Using Oscillators 1 and 2, set these to a middle frequency range, such as 16’.

As a starting point, select the first and second pulse waves respectively, making sure that the volumes are set roughly the same. If your chosen synth offers PWM, alter the pulse width settings so that the two oscillators differ slightly in tone.

Depending on the synth you are using, it will be worthwhile creating a small amount of de-tuning. In the case of a Minimoog-in-software, this will mean changing the tuning of Oscillator 2, as the tuning of Oscillator 1 is fixed.

The other related elements to the sound are fairly simplistic, but will once again be open to variation, according to your chosen synth. The filter Cutoff Frequency should be set very close to fully open. In our experience, software versions of the Minimoog often include a cutoff frequency that opens wider than the original hardware, so you may need to reduce the brightness by a small degree. There is no resonance (aka emphasis) applied to this sound.

The filter envelope doesn't play a part here either, but the Loudness Contour (aka Amplitude Envelope) certainly does.

The patch fully sustains, and adopts a very fast attack time, and a rapid decay/release time. If you haven't done so already, switch your synth to monophonic mode or single voice, which will also limit any release phase time to the end of phrases.

That’s pretty much it for the left channel, but the patch for the right channel adopts very similar sensibilities, in fact, it would be worthwhile copying the L/H patch over to the R/H channel, for ease and speed of setup.

The subtle variation between patches takes place within the oscillator section again, where you need to select different pulse waves, providing a sort of ‘ying-yang’ effect between the two channels.

There is also a thought that a triangle wave is used in the R/H patch, which is something worth trying and applying. If you have a third oscillator available, use this and subtly apply a triangle to the existing sound. Much like our first patch, you will probably need to apply a little detuning, to avoid unwanted beating, caused by precise pitch accuracy.

All the other settings, relating to filter and envelope remain the same, although you could subtly tweak these, to create a slightly different tone and envelope tail.

If you haven’t done so already, pan the first patch hard-left, and the second patch hard-right. This will create a gloriously thick and complex texture.

Bussed for Phaser

Having created the two patches, you can record the riff on one part, and copy it to the other part. However, if you would like to adopt the purist’s approach, play and record the riff for each channel, without using quantize. The subtle timing discrepancies between parts will add to the overall flavour, getting closer to the original.

Like many synthesizers from this era, Minimoogs were very reliant upon external effects, and no other effect was more exploited on this album than a phaser.

As most DAW’s offer phasers in one guise or another, bus both of your synth patches to a single bus channel, and apply phaser to the bus. This is certainly an area for experimentation, as you could try various forms of stereo phaser, with variance of setting to get the perfect effect.

Other Elements

While Gary Numan’s music from this era was intrinsically linked to synths, he still made considerable use of conventional instrumentation.

The drums are provided by an acoustic drum kit, and the bass is provided by a bass guitar, however there would be no issue with using a further Minimoog-style patch, to provide a bass one octave below the riff we have been discussing here.

In fact, in the spirit of experimentation, you could use a third oscillator tuned an octave lower, to provide a thicker texture, all sounding simultaneously.

“I think to this day that Cars remains the most poppy song I’ve ever written” Numan reflected on his unlikely hit in an interview with Billboard, “I do not think I have a talent for pop music. It’s too light for me, for my taste in music. It’s too…happy. I’m just not very good at it! I’m much better if I slow it down a bit, make it a bit menacing, add a hint of mystery or oppression, I’m in my element at that point!”

Founded by the team behind Berlin instrument store SchneidersLaden, Superbooth grew out of the now-defunct Musikmesse show in Frankfurt. Since 2017, Superbooth has taken place on a regular basis in the tranquil, wooded grounds of the FEZ centre south of Berlin city centre.

Part industry trade show, part synth nerd jam session, the three day event plays host to many of the biggest brands in music technology, but also numerous smaller, newer and often innovative outfits.

More so than the NAMM Show – which takes place in California each January – Superbooth has become the de facto event for music tech brands to announce and showcase new gear.

This year's show is happening between 7-9 May. We'll be on the ground to bring you all the most exciting news.

What to expect?

Superbooth is always packed with new music tech announcements, including synths, drum machines, controllers, software and a whole load of weird and wonderful innovations.

Although there are often a handful of reveals from the 'big name' brands – the likes of Moog, Korg and Novation have used Superbooth to launch new gear in the past – much of Superbooth's most exciting action often comes from smaller, independent developers and new technology brands.

Modular and Eurorack gear is a big deal at Superbooth too. It’s safe to say that you can expect a lot of new module announcements over the course of the next week.

In previous years, Superbooth has been where we’ve got our first look at interesting new products or technological ideas from brand-new startups and fledgling developers – often long before they're ready to hit the market.

Who'll be there?

The full list of exhibitors can be found at the main Superbooth site, which includes hundreds of brands.

Notable names at this year's show include Elektron, Arturia, Teenage Engineering, Korg (and Korg Berlin), Polyend, Novation, Sequential and Roland. Berlin is a major hub for music tech brands and local outfits such as Bitwig, U-He and Native Instruments will be at the show too.

On the modular front, notable names such as Make Noise, Buchla, Tiptop Audio, Intellijel and countless others will have their latest releases on display.

Unlike other 'trade shows', Superbooth also pulls in an interesting lineup of live performances scheduled across its stages.

Highlights this year include Monolake (aka Ableton co-creator Robert Henke), multifaceted DJ/producer Polygonia and techno figureheads Lady Starlight and Rødhåd performing together as part of the latter's WSNWG project.

There's also a solid line-up of workshops and talks. Find the full listings on the Superbooth site.

Can I get a Superbooth ticket?

Yes! Unlike some more industry-focused events Superbooth is open to the public, and there’s a lot to appeal to both pro and amateur musicians.

Naturally, the event is a great place to get hands on with new gear, but also offers the opportunity to speak directly to designers, developers and experts who can offer advice and answer questions.

Head to the Superbooth site to buy tickets, which start at €41 for individual days. 3-day tickets are also available, as are discounted rate tickets, as well as tickets for individual workshops and DIY sessions.

For those that can’t make it to Berlin, you can keep up with all the latest news, gear demos and oddities in our rolling live blog.

What happened at Superbooth 2025?

To get an idea of the general vibe of Superbooth, revisit our 2025 show report.

One of the central figures in that shift was Dave Smith, who founded Sequential Circuits in 1974.

"I figured out how synths worked, and bought a Teac 3340, the first 4 track consumer recorder. At one point I decided I needed a sequencer, but the Moogs were too expensive. So I designed an analog sequencer, and in 1974 started a company called Sequential Circuits," Dave told Synth History.

By 1978, Smith had launched the Prophet-5, the world’s first fully programmable polyphonic synth and a landmark moment in music tech history. Over the next decade, Sequential released a series of influential instruments that helped to shape the sound of modern music.

Sequential Circuits closed its doors in 1987 with Yamaha acquiring the brand name. Smith went on to work in various R&D roles across the industry before launching a new company, Dave Smith Instruments, in 2002.

As a gesture of goodwill, Yamaha returned the Sequential name to Smith in 2015, but six years later, the company – now rebranded as Sequential – was acquired by audio giants Focusrite, a year before Smith sadly passed away.

Dave Smith may no longer be with us, but Sequential lives on. The company’s latest release, Fourm, is a compact four-voice analogue polysynth that makes the unmistakable Sequential sound available at a more affordable price point than ever before.

To mark Synth Week 2026, we’re telling the story of Sequential through ten synths, sequencers and drum machines that have inspired generations of musicians.

1. Model 600/800 Sequencers - 1974/1975

You could be forgiven for wondering how Sequential Circuits Inc. got its name, particularly when we associate the brand so heavily with synthesizers.

Two of Dave Smith’s very first products were sequencers; the Model 600 was an analogue design, released in 1974, closely followed by the digitally controlled Model 800, during the following year.

Dave Smith was originally a computer software and electrical engineer, and it was his sideways view on producing music with machines that gave rise to some of his earlier and less obvious products.

2. Model 700 Programmer - 1977

In another example of this sideways glance at tech, the Model 700 Programmer was a product that provided a tremendous solution to a problem understood by many live musicians looking to employ synthesizers in their live work.

The most desirable synths of the era, the Minimoog and ARP Odyssey, did not offer patch recall. This was a problem that Dave and his associate (John Bowen) found a solution to, through an ingenious concept; offer a duplicate set of knobs on a separate unit, but employ an onboard microprocessor to scan the knob positions. These settings or positions could then be sent to the host synth, as voltages, and voila! Patch memories, hosted by an outboard unit.

The Model 700 Programmer was a very in-demand unit, despite its exorbitant price of $995, but it was pivotally important to SCI, as it provided them with a technology that they could take forward, along with a huge injection of cash, both of which resulted in the development, release and ultimate influence of their next product. And what a product it was...

3. Prophet-5 - 1978

The Prophet-5 is undoubtedly one of the most iconic and influential synthesizers ever designed and built. Next to the Minimoog, its legacy is extraordinary and its allure hasn’t faltered in nearly 50 years.

"Out of the first 10 Prophets sold, one went to Rick Wakeman, one to David Bowie, and one to Joe Zawinul," Smith told Synth History. "It took off from there. That has always been the best part of designing musical instruments: hearing them on recordings, in live performance, sound tracks, etc.

The release of the original Prophet-5 was far from smooth, though. It was released in tandem with the ill-fated first incarnation of the Prophet-10. Early Rev.1 models shipped with a degree of oscillator instability, but despite its troublesome start, it quickly became a ‘must-have’ synth. Drawing inspiration from the Model 700 that preceded it, the Prophet-5 offered patch memory in a polyphonic synth, coupled with the tremendous Poly-mod section, which quickly caught the imagination of programmers, with its ability to create incredible metallic and bell-like tones from a mere analogue machine.

During the late 70s and early 80s, various revisions (or Revs) brought more functionality and stability to the machine, with one of the biggest turning points coming in 1980, when SCI finally ditched the SSM chips that had been originally used, for the far more reliable and cooler-running Curtis chips, requiring a redesign of the internals to accommodate.

The final Rev.3.31 also offered a newfangled connection-type called MIDI. But regardless, the fascia and appearance largely remained unchanged throughout its tenure. History has not always been very kind to the reliability of the original Prophets, with component failure and unreliability being a part of vintage ownership. That was before the long-awaited reissue of the Prophet-5 Rev.4 in 2020. The public had been crying-out for years, and finally it arrived; a Prophet-5 (or 10) with contemporary reliability and modern features, such as velocity control, aftertouch and a full MIDI specification, and those issues with reliability? So far, so good!

It remains one of the most used synthesizers in existence, which was also thought to have provided inspiration for another analogue poly behemoth; the Roland Jupiter 8.

4. Prophet-10 - 1978

The original Prophet-10 was hoped to be the same as a Prophet-5, but with an increased voice capacity, as suggested by the name.

In reality, the chips ran too hot, leading to oscillator instability at best, or complete system failure at worst. The case work was not big enough to support heat sinks or fans, so an inevitable recall resulted in Prophet-10s having half their voice chips removed, reverting to the status of the Prophet-5.

This led to the Rev.2 versions of the Prophet-10, which switched to a double-manual configuration, but even so, their use of SSM chips caused problems, resulting in the Rev.2 barely getting past the prototype stage.

By the time the Rev.3 came along, it was 1980, and while the double-keyboard was finally starting to display reliable tendencies, in no small part thanks to the use of Curtis chips, demand for the P-10 was dwindling. The huge keyboard rigs of the late 70s were starting to look a little grandiose and obscene, and with a street price at around £5600, it was far from cheap, particularly when facing competition from the newer Japanese polys.

Even so, the Prophet-10 has become the stuff of legend, and while the Rev.4 2020 re-release pays homage to the original single-manual concept, there is still something incredibly alluring about the enormous 2-manual P-10 beast. What’s better than one Prophet-5? Two in one case… obviously!

5. Pro-One - 1981

If we were being unfair, we could describe the Pro-One as a single-voice, mono version of the Prophet-5, but as any P-1 user will tell you, it’s much more than that.

Internally, it shares much with the Rev.3 Prophet-5, but being monophonic introduces a degree of character which is fairly unique. The depth of tone is astounding, meaning it’s perfect for thundering basses, while the envelopes are incredibly snappy, making light work of any requirements for percussive sounds.

Meanwhile, the left of the instrument panel provides a modulation matrix, which is firmly analogue in routing and styling, and truly unique to the Pro-One. When it was first produced, it shipped for £470, which was at the upper end of the cheapening mono-market, but it didn’t stop approximately 10000 units being made and sold.

In terms of build, the plastic chassis with wooden end-cheeks, wasn’t quite up to the mark of other SCI products, but it was sturdy enough, except for the keyboard, which was fairly unreliable and pretty horrible to play. Mind you, you could always use the onboard sequencer, which hosted 28 notes in sequence. No, we don’t know why ’28’ notes either!

The Pro-One remains a favourite with many synth-based musicians, most notably Vince Clarke, who cites the Pro-One as his favourite synth of all time. Just listen to his early work as part of Yazoo; tracks such as Don’t Go are almost entirely created using his Pro-One.

The Pro-One also provided Dave Smith with the inspiration for one of his new instruments, under the branding DSI (Dave Smith Instruments). The Mopho (2009), was a monophonic synth from the tradition of the Pro-One, with contemporary technology and increased sonic capabilities, including a sub-oscillator.

6. DrumTraks - 1984

The SCI DrumTraks is one of those drum machines that also garners classic status, albeit a little way down the lineup that also features 808s, 909s and Linn Drums.

In many respects, it was far more capable than the Roland machines. With 13 onboard sounds, and 12-voice polyphony, all with tuning and volume control. It adopted the usual pattern/song programming architecture, with extensive editing capabilities, such as copy and paste. Well, extensive for 1984 anyway! The sounds were punchy and deep, with the ability to connect to other devices via MIDI.

7. Prophet VS - 1986

Continuing the adoption of the Prophet branding, the VS was a unique and another ingenious design from the Sequential stable. Inspired by the growing popularity of digital synthesis, the VS provided four oscillators, in a configuration that allowed blending and movement across the four timbral sources, in a form of synthesis that was described as Vector Synthesis.

Available in both keyboard and rack mounted formats, the four oscillators offered a choice from 127 waveforms, which was a large increase over the few subtractive originals, found on SCIs analogue machines. The onboard joystick provided an accessible way of morphing between waves, 32 of which were user assignable. SCI also employed analogue filters alongside the digital oscillators, in a classic example of hybrid technologies.

This 8-voice unit was way ahead of its time, but with failing finances, it wasn’t long before Sequential Circuits was snapped up by Yamaha in 1987. The team behind the VS went on to work on the Yamaha SY22/TG33, both of which employed Vector Synthesis technology, before the same team went over to Korg, to produce the incredibly popular Wavestation series.

8. Prophet ’08 - 2007

After several years away, Dave returned to the world of hardware synths in 2002 with his new brand, Dave Smith Instruments (DSI).

The Prophet ’08 was seen as a rebirth of the Prophet series, in an 8-voice synthesiser, which offered two oscillators per voice, but now in a DCO format. It was deemed as the return of an analogue giant, albeit under the DSI branding, as Yamaha still owned the Sequential trademark.

The Prophet ’08 captured an awful lot of attention, but die-hard SCI fans complained that it wasn’t quite the Prophet-5 that they had hoped for, particularly as it only provided a 4-octave keybed, lacking the 5th octave provided by the original Prophet-5. It did, however, prove to be popular, providing good memory capacity and tonal stability, making it ideal for both live and studio work.

9. Take 5 - 2021

With a squaring of the circle, DSI reverted to the Sequential name in 2015, after Yamaha agreed to return the brand to Dave Smith, as a gesture of good will.

This led to the release of the Prophet-6, which was another homage and tribute to the Prophet-5, finally back under the Sequential branding. However, it was the re-release of the Prophet-5 Rev.4 in 2020 that really cemented the deal, as Sequential gave the public the machine that they had been crying out for, albeit at a price point which was not affordable to all. The response was overwhelmingly joyous, but Sequential then distilled all of the P-5 goodness into a new, smaller and far more compact poly; the Take 5.

Armed with two VCOs per voice, alongside a sub-oscillator, the Take 5 includes the classic 4-pole analogue filter, in a unit which is both portable and affordable, at least if compared to the larger siblings. Of course, it also scores high in the reliability department, being armed with plenty of patch memory and an onboard 64-step polyphonic sequencer.

10. Fourm - 2025

Continuing its progression towards smaller, simpler and more affordable instruments, the latest chapter in Sequential's history is Fourm, a compact analogue poly that distils the Prophet lineage into its most accessible package yet.

With only four voices, no onboard effects and a 37-note slim-key keyboard, Fourm isn't going to deliver enough firepower for every synthesist, but at $999/£799, you wouldn't expect it to. What the Fourm does deliver is a solid design and build, an unmistakably 'Sequential' sound and tons of value for a sub-$1000 synthesizer.

With its (almost) knob-per-function layout and top-panel modulation matrix, Fourm echoes the immediacy of the original Pro-One, remaining firmly in the Sequential tradition with a 'Prophet-lineage' 4-pole low-pass filter. It's not all looking backwards, though, as the Fourm is the first Sequential instrument to have native polyphonic aftertouch, thanks to its newly-designed 'Tactive' keybed.

Some feared that Focusrite's acquisition of Sequential might dilute the company's innovation, but Fourm proves otherwise: it's a democratizing release that places the hallmark Sequential sound within reach of a new generation, building on the company's historic foundations to create an instrument that's far more capable than its price suggests.

Honorable mentions

It’s difficult to encapsulate the illustrious career of Dave Smith and the story of Sequential in only 10 products, and there are plenty of fantastic products that just got nudged out of our timeline. The DSI Poly Evolver, and Sequential’s association with Tom Oberheim, which resulted in the OB-6, to name just a couple.

But there is one aspect of Sequential that we have to treat as an honorary mention, despite the fact that it’s not a synth in itself. Dave Smith was an integral part of the team that designed and initiated the protocol known as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). There were many interactions between Ikutaro Kakehachu of Roland, Tom Oberheim, Bob Moog and Dave, alongside other companies, over a period of approximately two years, where the protocol was designed and formatted, before its first successful demonstration, at Winter NAMM in January 1983.

Dave connected a SCI Prophet-600 to a Roland Jupiter 6, in what was a semi-impromptu demonstration which to everyone’s relief, worked superbly! MIDI has been a staple of electronic instrument design for over 40 years; alongside so many other accolades and industry highlights, that’s quite a legacy!

Perhaps someday we’ll all decide that the Minimoog is the ultimate expression of the instrument, the Stradivarius of synths, and leave it at that, but until then we’ll have to keep coming up with new ways to wrangle sound.

Sometimes novel synthesis models do make the jump into synth-consciousness at large, like Wolfgang Palm’s wavetable synthesis, which exploded in the 2000s thanks to soft synths like Massive.

But for every East Coast subtractive analogue and FM type, there are those that never break out of their original instruments - that is, until they’re rediscovered by a boutique Eurorack developer looking for an oddball architecture to fill out their release list.

To mark MusicRadar’s Synth Week 2026, then, let’s celebrate those synthesizer dead ends; the synthesis types that never made it past their original machines.

And we should stress that these are in no way bad; for whatever reason, they just weren’t cool enough to get past the bouncer that is the synth-buying public and into the big time.

1. Vector Synthesis

The 1980s were a wild time in synthesizer history. Yamaha blew everyone’s mind with the DX7 in 1983, a digital synth that upended all of the analogue work that companies like Moog, Korg, and Roland had been doing.

Thus started a mad scramble to find the next new thing. No one knew what it was going to be, but everyone knew it had to involve ‘digital’. As Yamaha had FM protected by stringent copyrights, other manufacturers went back to the drawing board to see what they could come up with.

Rather than completely reinvent the (mod)wheel, American outfit Sequential Circuits took a hybrid approach. The result was the Prophet VS, a synth with digital oscillators and analog filters. Those digital oscillators - four of them, in fact - were capable of playing back 12-bit single-cycle waveforms.

Rather than just layering the quartet of oscillators like a traditional analogue synth, Dave Smith and the Sequential team came up with the idea of using a vector to crossfade between them. This was accomplished via a joystick that you could waggle around the oscillator ‘vectors’ or park it dead center for full foursome playback. Position could also be modulated via the internal Mixer Envelope.

Although a gorgeous instrument, the Prophet VS wasn’t a big enough hit to keep the bankers at bay and Sequential soon found itself in dire financial straits.

Yamaha swooped in and bought the assets, bringing much of the team over to its new R&D facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Smith’s Vector Synthesis ended up on the Yamaha SY22, where it mixed between two sample-based oscillators and two FM sources. Korg then took over the R&D department, with the same team’s joystick next gracing the Wavestation, perhaps the biggest hit to feature Vector Synthesis (although Kawai’s unrelated K1 also offered Vector and moved quite a few units of its own).

2. Wave Sequencing

The Korg Wavestation didn’t only offer Vector Synthesis. It had another unique trick up its digital sleeve: Wave Sequencing. This feature was brain-melting enough to make it one of the hottest synthesizers of the early 1990s - and esoteric and (dare we say?) gimmicky enough to be mostly forgotten a few years later.

Instead of just playing a single waveform, Wave Sequencing let you do what it says on the tin: sequence them. Press down on a key and a parade of waveforms, laid out one after the other, would burst forth. Sort of like a step sequencer except for PCM samples, you could assign different waveforms to each step in the sequence.

Additionally, each sample could have its own length, pitch, fine tuning, level and crossfade amount. Much like any other sequencer, you could sync it, this one to the Wavestation’s internal clock or to MIDI.

While technically interesting, most players didn’t find it all that musically useful. When are you going to want to unleash a torrent of samples? That first ‘SkiJam’ preset sure did sell a lot of units though.

Korg eventually revived Wave Sequencing with 2020’s Wavestate but the synthesis feature remains a curiosity.

3. Neuronal Synthesis

In 2003, musical instrument industrial designer Axel Hartmann debuted the Hartmann Neuron, an extremely forward-thinking hardware synthesizer that relied on artificial neural networks for its sound generation.

Even in 2026, neural networks are cutting edge stuff and tend to get used within software to recreate amp and effects pedals rather than for full-on re-synthesis, but that’s exactly what the Neuron and its Neuronal synthesis did.

Start with a sample. Load it into the synth and let Neuron analyze it and create a wireframe model of it. You can then manipulate this re-synthesized version of the original sound according to Scape and Sphere properties (something like the excitation and resonant sections of physical modelling) via the two Resynators, or oscillators. It was heady and futuristic, and found favour with sound designers for film, with Hans Zimmer being an avid user. With a $5000 price tag, however, few outside the upper echelons of music and film composition could afford one.

With the world coming around to neural networks and artificial intelligence, perhaps the time is right for a return to Neuronal Synthesis. Certainly the VST version is ripe for an upgrade.

4. Additive Synthesis

Additive synthesis is admittedly not all that unusual. It forms the basis for the sound generation of electro-mechanical organs and modern software like Native Instruments’ Razor. And yet, when it comes to hardware synthesizers, while you may find some additive elements tucked away inside, pure additive synths tend to be few and far between.

In the late 1980s, piano manufacturer Kawai released a series of synths appended with model numbers that all started with the letter K.

The K3 explored Prophet VS-style hybrid synthesis, while the K1 and K4 took forays into the sample synthesis territory already staked out by Korg and its M1. (K1, M1 - that must have been a coincidence.) But it was the additive-based K5 and later K5000 that pushed digital synthesis to the limits of what people were willing to work with.

Digital synthesis has a reputation for being cold. While this doesn’t have to be true, when it comes to additive - and particularly the type featured in the K5 - it very much is. We’re talking icicles and snow drifts. If you thought the DX7 could get glassy, you haven’t heard anything yet. That’s because additive synthesis is based on combining sine wave partials.

According to Fourier theory, with enough partials you can create any sound possible. Provide the requisite processing power and this approaches something like the truth (have a play with Razor to experience additive in full flight), but the processing capabilities of hardware in the 1980s meant a limit of 126 harmonic levels for the K5. Icy, to say the least.

Kawai tried again in 1997 with the K5000 models, adding PCM waveforms to fill out the sound, and while it received positive reviews at the time (as did the K5), it didn’t translate into robust enough sales to keep the synthesizer department going, and Kawai soon went back to doing what it did best: pianos.

5. Formant Shaping Synthesis

By the late 1980s, the world had moved on from FM synthesis. That didn’t stop Yamaha, FM’s chief caretaker, to give it one more go.

That ill-advised (from a business point of view, anyway) instrument was the FS1R, a rack unit synth that really extended what FM could do, with a lot of the advancements developed for it eventually finding their way into modern Montage and MODX units. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

One element of the FS1R that has stayed forever locked in its 1U case is Formant Shaping Synthesis, an eerily realistic speech synthesis model within the larger frequency modulation architecture.

Using both voiced and unvoiced formant waveforms for vowels and consonants, plus formant sequencing to create full words and not just choirs and random syllables, it’s a real marvel. These formants can also be used to mimic resonances and add realism to acoustic instrument patches.

The FS1R remains a high-water mark for Yamaha synthesizers, and a real unicorn for fans of speech synthesis.

6. Vocal Synthesis

Casio may be best known for its home keyboards, but it also has a history of periodically surprising with unusual synthesis models - that were then abandoned.

FM-like phase distortion helped make the CZ-101 a runaway success in the early 1980s, followed by Spectrum Dynamic synthesis in the latter half of the decade (decidedly less successful, unfortunately). But the Japanese company’s most head-scratchingly unusual has to be Vocal Synthesis. This was, ostensibly, a non-AI method of making your keyboard sing like a human.

Debuting in 2022’s CT-S1000V, Vocal Synthesis lets you type out lyrics on an iPad app and play them back via the keyboard, either as phrases as per note.

It’s the kind of thing that AI does exceedingly well now, but Casio was in there a few years early. Of course, it doesn’t sound nearly as convincing as AI, but therein lies the charm. It’s part of a long lineage of delightfully uncanny speech synthesis that starts with the Vocoder and runs through Kraftwerk, old-school video games and other vintage technology.

With AI now available to anyone and everyone, and the CT-S1000V probably not a hit, Casio likely doesn’t have reason to issue another instrument with Vocal Synthesis. Don’t worry, though, wait a few more years and Casio will likely surprise with another bizarre instrument.

7. Air Synthesis

The turn of the millennium was a wild time for music instrument technology, full of experimentation and questionable industrial design choices - often in the same device! Case in point: Alesis’ Air Synth, a flat orange box with a dome on top that employed infrared sensors to generate sounds. Imagine Tom Cruise in Minority Report waving his hands around but instead of crime prevention, you’re engaged in entertainment prevention.

Following on the heels of Roland’s D-Beam controller, Alesis released its first Air-branded device, the Air FX, in 2001. Aimed at DJs and home hobbyists, it offered RCA jacks rather than quarter-inch ones and answered the question, “What would happen if you put a Korg Kaoss Pad in the air?” After going out of business and then coming back, the company duly released the sequel, Air Synth, to a non-plussed public in 2003 before moving squarely into less novel (and decidedly non-synthesizer) music gear territory.

Both Air models worked by broadcasting a beam of invisible infrared light out of the top of the dome, and then reading the reflections bounced back by your ever-increasingly tired hand. Sensors are positioned in three axis, left to right, front to back, and up and down, hence the name, AXYZ Controller.

There was also a Hold button to freeze effects. More than just a way to let your aching arm rest, the Hold was meant to be used while programming sequencer presets - yes, you could even sequence patterns of notes and rhythms. Most of the factory presets, however, were of the special effect variety. Think risers, downers and other transitions. Yes, kids, in the days before laptops and DAWs, we had to make our own transitions by hand.

Of course, nowadays you’d have to put down your phone for the Air Synth to work. And let’s face it, that’s not going to happen.