Behringer’s Mini Pops 7 copies the 1966 Korg rhythm box heard on Jarre’s Oxygène, adding a 16-step sequencer, nine outputs and a distortion circuit for £149.
Fewer than 70 Gleeman Pentaphonics were built in a California garage in the early 80s. Cherry Audio has rebuilt the rare synth as a $59 plugin.
Teenage Engineering founder Jesper Kouthoofd says the Stockholm firm will stop making synthesizers, OP-1 included. What he said, and what is still unclear.
A Yamaha CS-80 listed as Vangelis’s first, used on his 1977 album Spiral, sold on Reverb for £401,465, about $534,000. The seller offered no proof.
Korg’s Phase8 skips oscillators and strikes eight tuned steel resonators with electromagnets instead. Here is how the $1,149.99 “acoustic synthesizer” works.
The Roland Jupiter-8 cost $5,295 in 1981. By December 2024 a mint original listed on Reverb for $27,996 instead. Who played it and what made it special.
Roland’s TR-808 cost $1,195 in 1980, sold fewer than 12,000 units and was dropped in 1983. Then pawn-shop 808s became the sound of hip-hop.
The Yamaha DX7 cost $1,995 in 1983. By 1986 its E.PIANO 1 preset was on about 40% of US No. 1 singles. How one factory sound took over the ballad.
Finding a free synthesizer that balances high-quality sound with a focused, intuitive interface is always a win for the production community. NoiseRoom UIO has just delivered exactly that with the release of Andes JX, a completely free and open-source polyphonic subtractive synthesizer designed for Windows. Operating out of an independent audio lab in Quito, Ecuador, … Read more
Isolating vocals, pulling drum breaks, and extracting basslines used to require expensive software or risky third-party cloud services. For producers looking to create bootleg remixes or extract vintage samples, the landscape has been dominated by subscription models and online processing queues. Solo developer Thales Claro is changing that workflow entirely with the release of StemDeck, … Read more