In the days before computers took over, Roland saw a market demand for a synthesizer that would become the center of any beatmaker or dance music producer’s workflow. While the lack of keyboard undoubtedly keeps the price down on these hidden gems, they’ll work fine with a MIDI controller and even better when run off of Ableton Live over MIDI. So if you’ve bought your Korg Monologue and feel like you don’t need another fat analog monosynth with a great sequencer for the rest of your life, consider some dirt cheap, high–quality rack and tabletop synths. With that said, not everything on this list is digital, and a couple entries mark some of the best analog circuits ever produced. These synths tend to be total sleepers, thanks in part to unsexy naming schemas including combos of letters and numbers and to the fact that no one is nostalgic for esoteric digital sounds yet. The tabletop and rackmount synths from the ‘90s and ‘00s had exceptionally engineered sound engines, making for a trove of old studio equipment unmined by today’s home recording culture. Indeed, some of the best synth deals of today - according to sheer sound quality and power–per–dollar spent - are available to the intrepid who can live without knobs and keys. The ‘90s and ‘00s saw just about every company in the game developing its own proprietary form of synthesis and putting it into as many packages and price points as possible.
In fact, the strides made in digital synthesis were just as accessible to the masses as Korg’s rebooted ARP Odyssey is today.
But it’s not like we were living in the dark ages before those synths were in production. The current era - typified by designs boasting analog circuitry, knob–heavy interfaces, or both - likely kicked off in the mid–’00s with Moog launching the Little Phatty and Dave Smith Instruments rising by way of the Evolver and Mopho. It’s pretty common to hear synth buffs talk about how we’re living in a Renaissance period of synthesizers.Īnd there’s certainly a case to be made, what with all of the dirt cheap analog synths that Korg is currently producing, a thriving Eurorack scene making modular synthesis more accessible than ever, and opulent new polysynths coming from Dave Smith Instruments and Waldorf.
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