moogbadger

Such a big, natural clean sound for a transistor amp...the reverb is ok and the tremolo is great too.

This is my current amp as I've lent my Pathfinder 15 to a friend. To be perfectly honest, that little Vox solid-state amp sounds a lot better, and is less of a faff to use than this one is. The inclusion of real tubes doesn't make it sound like a valve amp, I don't really like the way it resets to digitally-stored defaults each time you change amp settings, and it sounds a bit muddy and ropey if you turn it up too high. It's ok - I mean, for practice, after a bit of fiddling, you can get it to sound good, and the AC30 model is quite nice - but I really wish Vox would make more of their 'natural' amps and fewer of these modelling ones. The effects are ok, but synthetic-sounding compared to pedals, and the fuzzes and overdrives aren't much to write home about either, and they seem to make using stompboxes even more difficult. I think I might get a really basic Orange amp next time. I just need something simple with a clean channel and a dirty one, that sounds good quiet and loud, and one 'volume' knob!

I suppose I could complain about this electro-acoustic. I could say that it's got just a hint of the boxiness and hard-to-define 'plasticness' that marks out a 'one step beyond beginner' acoustic guitar. I could talk about the fact that it's not got that aged, rich, woody tone that every true acoustic guitar connoisseur looks for in an instrument. I could talk about how the guitar doesn't really respond, lovingly, to your every caress, and fall lovingly and rapturously under your fretting fingers. Yes, I could say all that. I could also say; imagine you're an average-to-reasonable acoustic guitarist who can play some chords and a bit of fingerpicking, and you've worked out that you'll never be Bert Jansch or even Nick Drake. Let's say that remortgaging your house and selling your relatives into the slave trade to buy a 1930s Gibson or Martin is probably a bad idea as you're not actually a good enough player to merit such extravagance. Well, you could do worse than buy this guitar. If you can bear the fact that it says 'Made In Indonesia' on the back of the headstock and 'Epiphone' instead of 'Gibson' on the other side, you'll be rewarded with a simple, comfortable playing experience, a good action, good intonation, a reasonable amount of volume, clarity and definition, and a guitar that won't make you sound worse than you are. Plugged in it sounds...well, like they all do, pretty much....! The thing is, this perfectly reasonable guitar cost me £175. Ok, so that was before the madness of the English Referendum vote and the devaluation of Her Maj's pound sterling. Now they're £230. Yes, I've tried a few high-end Gibson acoustics. Yes, they all sound better than this. But they don't sound TEN TIMES better, which is what you'll pay for them. You simply can't dismiss this as a 'piece of garbage', because it isn't. It's a perfectly reasonable, nice sounding little guitar with a solid spruce top. It's far, far better than the actual junk acoustics I struggled with in my teens; the 'no name' guitars sold by piano shops with actions an inch off the fretboard at the 12th fret and no truss rod. I would have loved to have an instrument this good to learn on in 1985. And I think I'm lucky to have one now, too.

The amazing thing about this Mexican reissue is that the intonation has stayed spot-on for ten whole years, and it's left the house plenty of times. I just feel this that is a well-constructed guitar which has served me very well indeed. It feels really easy to play and rarely gives me any headaches. The fretboard is lovely, and you can get a wide range of tones out of it due to the humbuckers. I think of the sound as being a cross between a Les Paul and a Strat; due to the PUPs, we're not really in classic shrill Telecaster territory here. The toggle switch is probably the weakest part of the whole ensemble.

A lovely acoustic from the lower end of the high end of Takamines. I can see why David Gilmour went through a stage of favouring Takamines for live use. I'm not an acoustic snob (I've got a cheap Epiphone that sounds just fine to me), but I must admit that I can hear a difference with a sub-£1000 guitar; it just sounds...richer, woodier, deeper. More like an acoustic guitar, if you know what I mean? This one is all solid wood with a Cedar top, and it sounds great.

Yes, behold, the British invasion guitar, the one that the Beatles made cool and that Mods everywhere use. Preferably through a Vox AC30. With lots of compression. It's clanky, it's kind of workmanlike, it jangles, it's not subtle. But if it was good enough for John Lennon, it's good enough for me. Who needs one of those Paul Reed Smith guitars? They're only for people who can actually play the guitar properly anyway! If you're at the level of clanking out chords in a ham-fisted way (see: all early Beatles, all Oasis, me), then this is the guitar for me. Sorry, I mean, you.

Pros: looks good, surprisingly well-made, Filtertron pickups sound chunky and clear Cons: Factory set up is well-intonated, but the strings feel really ‘tight’ and the guitar goes out of tune very easily, will require work at the luthier’s to get it to play comfortably, access to higher frets is impeded by the design of the guitar. The Bigsby copy bridge is also not too good for tuning stability.

The humble acoustic guitar is actually quite a complex beast - so many factors influence the way each and every guitar sounds, from the bracing inside the body, to the material that the nut/saddle/bridge is made from, to the types of wood used for the top. However, one thing that acoustic players do definitely seem to be unanimous on is this: if you’re in any way serious about the tone of your acoustic guitar, you should look for a guitar that is made entirely from solid wood. Cheaper budget acoustics have improved enormously since the 1970s/80s, and most these days will have at least a solid top (usually Sitka spruce). In terms of how the guitar projects, the top material is the most important component, and a laminated top acoustic, especially a young one, will almost always have that tell-tale ‘cardboard box’ tone: thin, lacking bass and projection, and lacking in harmonic texture. However, if only the back and sides are laminated, this too reduces the richness of the sound quite considerably. The difference can be quite subtle, especially in older guitars, which tend to mellow as they age, but even newer players will be able to tell the difference between an all-solid and part-laminated acoustic when played side by side. The solid guitar will have a depth, richness, and a sort of ‘three dimensional’ quality, it will speak more clearly, and it will, in short, sound more like an acoustic guitar. The problem: solid body acoustics are expensive. Everything seems more expensive these days, but to be honest, you’ll be hard pressed to find an all-solid wood acoustic for less than about £800 at least. Most of the major manufacturers (Martin, Taylor) don’t start offering all-solid acoustics until you hit the £1000 mark, or nearby. That’s why this no-frills dreadnought from Eastman is such a revelation. What we have here is an extremely well-built, all-solid wood guitar for under £600. Given that it also has a bone nut and saddle, excellent ‘gear’ tuners, a clean ebony fretboard, and selected sitka and sapele tonewoods - features you’d expect to see on a guitar at three, four times the price - this is astonishing value for money. And it sounds wonderful; it compares favourably to almost any Martin or Taylor. The instrument is very plainly, but tastefully finished; it’s an open-pore satin, so you won’t find any shiny lacquer here. This also seems to help the guitar ‘breathe’ naturally. It’s dynamically responsive, and can go from delicate fingerpicking to huge piano-like chords - an impressive range. It’s just a lovely-sounding guitar. The intonation is spot on and the neck is quite comfortable. The factory action is slightly higher than I’d like, but I think this is easily adjusted by a luthier (and going from 12s to 10s will make the guitar less fatiguing to play too). Martin and Taylor dominate the market. There’s little doubt that their legendary, high-end guitars sound marvellous, and they’re famous for a reason. But consider this: for the price of the Eastman E1D, all Martin can offer you at this point is a guitar with High Pressure Laminate sides; a guitar on which they’ve actually tried to disguise the plywood back and sides by scanning a real wood texture and laser-printing this on to the guitar. That’s what £600 from Martin will buy you. I’d love a Martin D-35, as that’s what Gilmour used on ‘Wish You Were Here’. The problem is, I don’t have £3,400 to spend on a basic acoustic six-string dreadnought. Many are put off by the fact that Eastman are a Chinese manufacturer, based in Beijing. When you look into the company, you realise that it’s a family business with many years of experience of building mandolins. The staff are skilled handcraftsmen and women who take pride in their work, and they seem to be well-treated. Buying Chinese doesn’t have to mean buying unethically. I cannot recommend this guitar highly enough. Essentially, the Martin or Taylor tone is within reach for mere mortals here, leaving you £2,800 better-off than you would have been. Ok, so the E1D doesn’t quite sound as nice as a Martin D-35. But it’s very much in the same general sonic space! That’s incredible value for money, especially when you consider that the tone of the instrument will also improve with age and playing. For context, the E1D sounds nicer even than my Takamine TAN15c, a custom workshop Japanese acoustic. My budget Epiphone doesn’t even really sound like a guitar compared to this, the difference in sound quality, volume and ‘voice’ is huge.

I have version 2 of this synth. It's lovely! Programmer Jack Resweber was inspired to create this synth on the back of childhood memories of those 'introduction' idents you used to get on VHS cassettes, which often featured strange abstract electronic pads over the company logo. He says (in 'Computer Music' magazine, March 2018), 'these video logos were often accompanied by really weird sounds from some kind of obscure electronic instrument. The audio was slightly warped by the worn-out VHS tape, which added an eerie quality to it. That's what Phonec is all about.' And I think he's succeeded; it's a great synth for creating such textures. The basic synth is pretty straightforward, with 2 oscillators, noise and filters - so far, so subtractive - but what sets it apart is a complex modulation system which allows you to create pseudo 'snags' and dropouts to the signal, mimicking old VHS tape. It's great for that Boards of Canada or Hauntology vibe; it's got real character. Paired up with a tape hiss simulator, I think this synth will do a convincing impression of 'that' sound, and it also works extremely well with Psychic Modulation's 'EchoMelt' delay plug in too. Recommended.

This was one of XILS Lab's first virtual analogue synths. They never specifically said, 'this is a tribute to the EMS VCS3', but just looking at it, it's pretty obvious what it's supposed to be.... The matrix will take you some time to get used to, but it's well worth it, as the sound is quite close.

Surreal Machines are a relatively new company who started out making Ableton Live effects. Now they've branched out into AUs and VSTs, and the results are pretty excellent. 'Modnetic' is an attempt to capture the quality of old tape echo units, like the Roland Space Echo, whilst giving the user plenty of opportunities to tweak the parameters in a 21st Century way. The results are authentic and innovative at the same time, particularly as you can choose the routing of the modulation effects (chorus, flanger and phaser), their 'age', and so on. Delay times can be specified in beat divisions or Ms for maximum flexiblity, and changing these parameters 'on the fly' will result in authentic 'speeding up or slowing down' delay swirls. You're also given a wealth of convolution reverbs to choose from. The results sound so good that this CPU-light plug-in easily gives more expensive tools like Soundtoys Echoboy a run for its money.

I can't say a bad word about this. It sounds better than a lot of commercial synths, and it's totally free. What's not to like?

A lot of VST synths are trying to recreate and preserve the past. This made a lot of sense until the big analogue synth revival started about eight years or so ago. Now, in 2018, we're practically tripping over new, affordable analogue synths from Korg, Arturia, the modular manufacturers and so on. Part of me has always thought that really, computers should be used to do things that are still impossible in the physical domain. Razor is such a synth. Because it uses hundreds of partials to craft its whole sound - from the oscillators to the filters to the reverbs - it's a synth that simply couldn't have existed in the 80s or 90s. What does it sound like? Brutal, crystalline, precise, clean, robotic, powerful. I like it. When it came out it seemed to be marketed as a 'dubstep' synth, which is a shame, as dubstep isn't the 'latest thing' any more. However, this synth can do glacial pads, futuristic leads and tinkling bells with ease, too. I sometimes use the vocoder function, and because the carrier signal is so mathematically 'pure', consisting of stacks and stacks of sine waves, it sounds really special.

Synplant is created by Magnus Lidström, the man behind Sonic Charge, who also came to prominence with the Malstrom synthesizer included free with Propellerhead's Reason. Under the hood, Synplant is actually a fairy conventional (FM? I dunno?) synth, but what makes it stand out from the crowd of synth plug-ins is its innovative user interface. The idea basically is that the user simply pushes and pulls at graphics until they get a sound they want! The core sound is represented by a 'seed' at the centre of the interface. Each seed grows 'branches' (nicely animated wavy fern things). As the branch is pulled, it changes loads of synth parameters FOR THAT NOTE on THAT KEY only. So, in other words, it's possible to create a synth patch where every sound on every key is different, which is a departure in itself! If one particular sound takes your fancy, you can 'replant' the seed so that all the keys now share that sound. The process can be repeated endlessly until you've reached a sound you like. If you get a sound that's almost right apart from one thing, you can dive into the synth's 'DNA editor' window, which gives you finer control over things like envelopes, filter cutoffs, amplitude modulation levels and so on, like a 'normal' synth would. The global controls on the front panel control broader things like FX wet/dry level, atonality, tuning and so on. The modulation wheel often offers up surprises, and the whole plant can be spun with automation to give evolving sounds too... I love Synplant mainly for its sound; it's sort of cold, digital, but somehow organic and quirky at the same time. It also sounds very 'modern' in the sense that it's not trying to slavishly recreate a MiniMoog or whatever; it sounds like something that could only really exist in the 21st Century. It's almost impossible to predict how tweaking the branches will affect the timbres, and it's very liberating to just use simple tactile controls and your ears to create new sounds. Sometimes it's worth just hitting the 'create new random seed' button and seeing what it can come up with! It can be a bit quiet and weedy sounding, which I usually fix with compression. Still, this makes a change to a lot of modern soft synths which immediately blow out your channel strip (yes, looking at you, Arturia!) and you have to instantly turn them down...

It sounds NOTHING like a real Jupiter 8. But it sounds very good in its own way. Using too many instances of it in the same track is not recommended as one layer of it tends to obscure another.

MicroTonic is about ten years old now, but that doesn't stop it from remaining one of the cheaper and best little drum-synth plug-ins you can get. There are no samples here; that's not the idea. Synthesis is the name of the game here, and each of the eight instruments have exactly the same flexible architectural starting point from which you can make an array of different percussion sounds. In simple terms, each individual percussion sound consists of a mix balance between an oscillator and a noise source. So, for example, if you were creating a kick drum, you'd probably mostly favour an oscillator-heavy mix, and if you were creating a hi-hat, you'd favour the noise source more. The oscillator can be pitched over a very wide range (and, crucially, accurately too, so that the fundamental is an actual diatonic note) with a choice of three waveforms, and it can be pitch-modulated; you can also EQ it, distort it, change its attack and release and so on. The noise source has fine envelope control, and can be filtered in low, band and hi-pass modes. The 16-step sequencer is simple but works well, and the step length can be changed, which should keep all you awkward Autechre fans happy! Over the years, a number of improvements have been made, such as a feature that lets you morph between two states, and the ability to copy MIDI to track in your DAW. Teenage Engineering have also made a pocket operator which uses Microtonic as its sound creation brain - the PO 32, which is an innovative way of liberating the sounds from the software domain. https://www.teenageengineering.com/products/po-32 But by and large it's remained the same for many years, perhaps because Magnus pretty much got it right the first time around. You can think of it as being a sort of simpler version of what the Elektron Machinedrum is, in software form (although the two sound nothing like each other). MicroTonic sounds a little like the drum sounds that Cabaret Voltaire or the early Human League used to use - think early Mute records releases too. It sounds like an early analogue drum machine. It can't do big 'rock' drums, for example; you'll need the real thing or samplers if that's what you're aiming for. It's a niche plug-in, but what it does, it does effectively and distinctively.

So, here's the deal. You get three sound-making tools: a loop slicer which automatically slices ANY piece of audio into tempo-matched chunks with envelope shaping; a TB-303-esque bass synth with a choice of filters which can do slides and legato; and a basic XoX-style drum sequencer with a choice of pre-made 'kits' like 'modular synth', 'vintage' and so on. There are lots of cool features like he ability to randomise everything with a single click (like direction and pitch and order of loop slices). The drums can be mixed and matched within a single kit and pitched to taste. The bass synth sounds good although it's limited to square and sawtooth waves. Patterns can be chained together into song-length sequences. All three instruments can be put through a sort of 'mini effectrix' effects patch on which any one effect (reverb, delay, comb filter, sample reduction, delay, tape stop etc.) can be applied on a per-step basis. The beauty of this plug in is the sheer speed with which ideas can be put together. On its own it's a bit limited, but used as the basis of a track it's got real potential, and the interface is very user-friendly.

Combine this with the Streetly Expansion packs and you've got access to just about every sound the mighty mellotron ever made. Really well-crafted ROMpler; beautifully sampled.

So, why would you pay so much for an analogue monosynth with three oscillators and one filter and only a couple of LFOs? Well, because it sounds...like THAT. The Voyager can do FM too, taking it beyond the classic MiniMoog.

Yes, the SH-101 is known for bass primarily. But do some higher stuff, add a bit of the gorgeous PWM, put it through a tape delay and...bang! You've discovered the secret to the Boards of Canada sound, early Squarepusher and so on. It's a classic for a reason. Nothing else sounds quite like it - not even Arturia's Minibrute, which I think was an attempt to get close.

Good, modern bread-and-butter subtractive modelling synth with loads of waveforms, filters and modulation possibilities. Lots of performance controls for live use. Novation also supply sounds for the synth on their website, so you can turn it into a Supernova if you wish. The arpeggiator really brings it to life when you're tweaking. It sounds deep and good for bass. It does organs and electric pianos passably well, but its strength lies in evolving pads, chunky bass, sequenced bleeps and distinctive leads. Not many onboard FX, but lots of routing options. Integrates with your DAW like a plug-in for fast editing too.

Released in the early Noughties, this is one of the first analogue modelling synths. As such, it's getting old now, but where it scores over the MicroKorg (which this is, essentially) is in its sheer real-time tweakability - very little is hidden away from the user, it's pretty much one knob-per-function. Plus, apart from the flimsy knobs, it's built like a tank. It sounds pretty 'digital' though - don't expect it to sound like an MS 20.

A lot of people look at this synth and assume it's some sort of 'less successful' MicroKorg. I got it in 2007 or so when it came out, because just playing with a few presets tells you that actually, what we have here is a kind of budget Korg Radias, and it will make sounds that the MicroKorg could only dream of. It can sound superb, So WHY, oh WHY, Korg chose to put such a powerful synth inside a such a flimsy, cheap, crappy box, the sort of build quality that wouldn't pass muster as a kid's toy, is beyond me. I mean, how much would it have taken to make the casing decent and strong? Korg killed what should have been a killer synth here. I still use it occasionally, if I can get the power cable to connect to the input jack without slipping out!

So - the eternal question: are you after: a) world superstardom, the invention of whole genres, groundbreaking electronic music pioneering, musical chameleonism, acting, mime artistry, art connoisseuerdom, video artist hobnobbing, internet pioneer, musical maverickdom, sex symboldom, massive critical respect and commercial success OR Painting the odd Royal; presenting a programme about sick animals; doing the odd cartoon; playing the didge on the wackier Kate Bush records; being a registered sex offender? You see, as everyone knows, both David Bowie and Rolf Harris made extensive use of the Dubreq Stylophone. So, with this tool in your hands, it really is up to you. It's what you make of it, ladies and gentlemen. Here's a tip though; DI it, whack it through some ghostly reverb, and you've got a sort of uniquely characterful 'space surf' theremin for about £20. 'What's that? A vintage synth of some sort?' people ask me. If only they knew.

Following the massive success of Korg's reissue of its own MS20, they paired up with original ARP Odyssey designer David Friend to try to recreate the 'other' must-have monosynth from the early 1970s, the ARP Odyssey. The ARP experience is very different to the MiniMoog experience. The MiniMoog feels smooth and luxurious and silky. The ARP feels more 'punk', and bit less user-friendly! The sliders are less predictable, the modulation routings can sometimes leave you doing some head-scratching, and you'll experience the 'it's not working! It's broken!' phenomenon a bit more with an ARP Odyssey. But get beyond that, and what you have here is a very versatile synth which, on paper at least, makes the MiniMoog seem a bit limited. It's all here if you're into R2 D2 noises. Two independently tuneable oscillators with a choice of square and sawtooth waveforms, recreations of all three of the low-pass filter types that graced various incarnations of the Odyssey, FM, oscillator sync, sample and hold, two types of envelope generators for the amplitude envelope, ring modulation, two types of noise sources (white and pink), a comprehensive LFO with square and triangle waveshapes, a high-pass filter, and an overdrive circuit for the low-pass filter too. There are downsides to this reissue. Some people have complained that they keys are a bit too narrow compared to the original to play fluent solos (this is an 86% scale model of the original Odyssey), and KORG have faithfully recreated the awful pressure-sensitive pitch bend button (when, to be honest, I wish they hadn't! Wheels are so much easier to use, and you have to have the biceps of Mike Tyson to push down hard enough on the pitch button to get vibrato; and when you do, you overcompensate and it's too much vibrato)... But it's an ARP ODYSSEY! With MIDI! Get yer sequencers out for some old-school Berlin electronica fun...Tangerine Dream used ARPs on 'Rubycon', and with some tweaking, you can get close to those sounds with this beast. So I'm not complaining...

This little keyboard has really impressed me. It's part of the Yamaha Reface line of single-purpose keyboards released in 2015, along with the DX, the YC and the CS. This one - the CP - exclusively models the old electromechanical keyboards so familiar from countless records by Floyd, Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Supertramp, etc etc. You get a Fender Rhodes Mark 1 and 11 emulation, a Wurlitzer EP-200, a Hohner clavinet, a toy piano, and Yamaha's own CP electromechanical piano. I got it mainly for the Mark 1 Rhodes emulation, and it doesn't disappoint. It obviously doesn't quite have the mojo of a real Rhodes, but it sounds quite authentic. The Rhodes mark II is for you Chicago fans out there - I've never liked it, but it's there if you want it...The Wurli is pretty good if a bit polite, but you can sort that by bringing in a bit of grunge via the dedicated overdrive knob. The Clavi is less good - it sounds a bit plastic and honky, but it might pass in a mix. The toy piano might be useful if you're into sound design, and the CP piano emulation is great for capturing those early 80s Peter Gabriel tones. Where it really wins though are the included effects, each with a dedicated knob. You get dirt (overdrive), tremolo/pan (depending on which model you've selected), a very authentic-sounding 4-stage phaser, a chorus (which works particular magic on the CP model - with a fast rate and high depth, you're into 'Ashes to Ashes' territory), digital and analog delay (the latter sounding more like a decent tape delay, which can self-oscillate. The digital delay can repeat indefinitely too at the highest feedback levels, creating a little sound-on-sound effect), an auto-wah (needs tweaking to find the sweet spot, as they all do) and a surprisingly cool and clean reverb to bring all the sounds to life and give them a sense of space. All the controls are laid out in a WYSIWYG sort of way, so it's incredibly immediate, great for sketching out ideas. There's a couple of downsides. The tiny keys are touch-sensitive (you can make the Rhodes and Wurli 'bark' in a satisfying way), but they're a bugger to hit accurately. They feel ok - quite good actually - but there's no denying that you'd be better off plugging a bigger controller keyboard into this to get the most out of it. Which brings me to the second point, which is that there's only a MIDI breakout cable rather than dedicated MIDI in and outs, which means you have to look after the breakout cable or you're stuffed. You'll also have to buy your own sustain pedal, as it's not included (and you will need it to get a really authentic Rhodes experience). But these are fairly minor quibbles. This thing is ace, and it's a joy to get access to these old sounds in such a straightforward way. Recommended. Oh yes; nearly forgot! There's a hidden acoustic piano. It's not the best, but it's useable, You can find it by turning the model knob selector in between any two models before powering on. You lose it again as soon as you go to one of the official models however, and the only way to get it back iis to power down and repeat the trick. I think this must be some sort of OS bug that a Yamaha employee 'accidentally' left in, perhaps because he/she felt that the toy piano was a bit of a useless preset (which it is, to be frank) and wanted to compensate us...

In 2015, Yamaha created the Reface range of pint-sized keyboards. There were four, and each one tried to capture the essence of classic instruments in a diminutive form. The CP covered electromechanical pianos, the DX covered FM and the DX7, the CS covered virtual analogue synthesis, and this, the YC, is an attempt to shrink those classic tonewheel and reed organs down to size. It's very simple - you get a Hammond, a Vox Continental, a Farfisa, an Ace Tone (i.e. Roland before they were Roland) organ, and a shot at Yamaha's own YC-10, which had a striking red tolex livery (it's still used today by psych bands such as Bitchin' Bajas). Perhaps in a nod to that, the tough plastic casing of the YC is also finished in a striking 'Racy Red', making it arguably the most striking and attractive in the range. The control panels are basic, accessible and immediate. You get master volume, octave switch (5 switches over 37 keys, so, pretty wide), model select, vibrato/chorus with depth control, two types of percussion - not drum sounds, more like short pitched notes on a synth with the sustain turned all the way down and a fast decay and release - there is a 'length' control to determine release), and two effects - distortion and reverb. There's also a rotary speaker emulation that can be applied to all models, and this offers four states - off, stop, slow and fast, with a toggle switch. Tonal shaping is, thrillingly, driven by no less than nine mini-drawbars for some primitive added synthesis fun! So - it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you combine all these possibilities together - the models, the drawbars, the effects and the rotary cabinet - hundreds of permutations are actually possible. The models themselves are pretty sonically accurate. You can get some great 'Dark Side of The Moon' organ tones using the Hammond. The Farfisa is great for early Pink Floyd (think Piper or Echoes). The Vox is a bit weaker - it's harder to dial in that truly trashy garage rock sound, even with the distortion added. The Ace Tone almost sounds like a synth, and the YC has the same vibe. Of course, in a small digital modelling synth, you're never going to get the mojo of the original instruments, but these sounds are authentic enough to sit in a mix, and certainly good enough for gigging. Here are the downsides (IMHO): the keys are too small, the vibrato/chorus section is poor (there's basically no difference between the two), the distortion effect is good at low settings but begins to sound pretty grim when it's fully cranked, and the MIDI output socket is weird, needing a breakout cable which you might easily lose. I would have also liked a sort of 'hold' function, but I suppose that would have detracted from the spirit of recreating the original instruments. The rotary effect sounds excellent! Really nice, but it would have been even better if you had more control over the ramping times, or maybe a way of controlling this with an expression pedal. It's also a bit fiddly to change it when you're playing big chords with two hands, which is where a hold section would have come in handy. The reverb is lovely, and really brings the tones to life. The percussion section is also a great feature once you work out that it can be used make the sounds of say, the ethereal plinky organ parts on the Doors 'Waiting For The Sun'. There's no delay effect - if they could have built a Binson Echorec emulation in, that would have been fantastic for 'Piper' -era tones, but I suppose that's what pedals are for, right? So overall, if you're wanting a Stereolab / Doors / Velvet Underground / Early Floyd vibe, and you don't want to hulk a 300lb behemoth to gigs, you could do a lot worse than this.

Aside from the more famous Rainbow Machine, this is Earthquaker's weirdest pedal. It's a pitch arpeggiator capable of tracking chords. It takes whatever note you play into it and transforms it into an adjustable ascending or descending scale. That's right; you play a single 'C', and if you're in Mode 1, it will play a C major scale from -1 octave to the note you've played. If you're in Mode 6, it will play a C minor scale from the note you've played to one octave above. There are wet-dry controls, a rate knob for adjusting the speed through which the scale plays, a step knob for adjusting how many 'steps' of the scale are played, from 'one' to all of them, and a toggle switch for adjusting whether the scale plays up, down, or does a palindrome. Now, this is all very well and it's totally amazing! The pitch tracking and the smoothness of the scale interpolations are very good indeed. But... Well, to be honest, this is a pedal for those of us who are really shit-hot at music theory. The sort of people who know which Phyrigian or Locrian mode goes with which diminished 19th or whatever. Most of us will want to play chords on our guitars, and things are pretty involved playing just one single note on this thing. Things get even more complex throwing in a fifth. Add a third and you'd better be pretty sure whether that's a minor or major third you've got there! And then...your song changes key...argghh.... So, I'm not saying this is a bad pedal. It isn't. It's extremely clever and it sounds good. But to get the most out of it, don't expect instant gratification. It's one for really just sitting down and experimenting with, and you might find that it only fits with one passage of one verse or whatever. It's similar to a frequency shifter in that respect; you could spend years trying to master this pedal! One thing which could be better: I wish it had MIDI or CV inputs, or even just a tap tempo, so that you could lock the speed of the arp to a beat. So far, I've found that it gives a pleasing effect when the number of steps of the arp are low (say, 2), and the rate of stepping through fairly high. Used like this, the pedal can give you a really quirky and unusual sort of 'pitched tremolo' effect, especially when used with a delay to smear the pitch changes a bit. Also, when there's only one step, it becomes a good-quality octave pedal or simple pitch-shifter. Andy from Pro Shop guitars makes it sound amazing in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-N_Ar3xfak But he knows what he's doing, of course!

One of BOSS's more experimental stompboxes. It's hard to know what it 'is' - it seems to be a delay and filter-sweeper which responds to the dynamics of your playing. It can add a subtle wash, or it can just sound a bit over-the-top when it turns everything you do into a sort of 'laser gun' sound! It's good, but I suspect that it's more of a novelty effect for when you want something a bit off the wall; if you just want a basic delay there are plenty of those. I wouldn't recommend this as a 'main' delay pedal effect, it's too unpredictable.

BOSS's RV-6 is the latest incarnation of their stompbox digital reverb series, which started with the RV-2 way back in the late 1980s. This one is pretty good! This time round we get Hall, Plate and Spring, a delay/reverb setting, the gorgeous modulated delay setting has been improved in richness from the RV-5, and we also get BOSS's attempts at the now-ubiquitous 'shimmer' reverb. Which, alas, isn't the best; it's a bit harsh to be honest. But, helpfully, there is a dedicated TONE knob, and, with a bit of tweaking, that harshness can be tamed a little. Strymon and Neunaber are still the kings of shimmer, but they're expensive! This is a good compromise for the more budget-conscious. Good old BOSS, eh? Yes. Their pedals are workmanlike, a bit generic, and, dare I say it, just a wee bit ...boring? But, you know what? They get the job done. And sometimes that's what you want.

It only does one thing! It does it well though. It uses granular synthesis to freeze the spectral bins of whatever you've just played, and then it plays it back to you forever in latch mode. Initially I thought, 'that's nice...but how can I actually make use of it?'. The answer for me was to get some sort of looper. Then, using the Freeze pedal, it becomes possible to build up huge layers of synth guitar, note-by-note. I think EHX actually want you to do this; they probably envisioned that players would couple this with all sorts of other effects like modulations, delays and reverbs so that we could all do Brian Eno impersonations in our bedrooms. Which, it seems, is exactly what we're doing! Of course, it works just as well with synths etc.

Lovely boutique pedal which can either be a straight reverb or, alternatively, a harmonically-sympathetic 'shimmer' effect (produced using pitchshifting and delays) can be added for that instant 'shoegaze' vibe. The tail of the reverb can be set to 'infinity'. It does tend to dominate in a mix, but this is a gorgeous-sounding pedal, almost as good as the Strymon Big/Blue Sky sound.

The Univibe effect ('what's that?' you say. Come on , you know this...it's Hendrix's 'Star Spangled Banner', it's Gilmour's clean guitar sound on Floyd's 'Breathe') is one of the hardest to simulate digitally. I don't know why, but Roger Meyer explains it very well in a book I've got (this one: https://wordery.com/guitar-effects-pedals-dave-hunter-9781617131011?currency=GBP&gtrck=c1NKRVpPM3ZrdHRUb0xZWE1SUlFSblJsaXVqRnc4NjE2Tkc1bnU0bWZnMXNocS9XOXZWZkM0RkN4QkU0R3VCeHdUbUVENFFMeDA5WjhUSXU5aEJpQ3c9PQ&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxKzKou-51QIVQr7tCh22ww2vEAQYASABEgK1SfD_BwE). The original Univibe was based on four photoelectric cells. It was a very analogue effect. The waveforms used were always changing smoothly and interacting with each other in a complicated way, which is why it's hard to replicate using the jagged bits. Something like that, anyway! I've never had the pleasure of playing through an analogue one, as the original Roger Meyer ones and the Japanese Shin-e ones are really expensive (think £500 +). So, I'm no expert. However, to my amateur ears, it sounds as though the DSP boffins at TC have got pretty close. You can hear the classic Gilmourish sound on the 'chorale' mode, and the more subtle vibrato mode sounds ok too. This is a toneprint pedal too, meaning that if you have access to a shiny Apple tablet device you can design your own Univibe sounds on the TC software and download it into the pedal. To be honest, the supplied toneprint sound is nice enough... I've no doubt that if I had the dosh to spend on a real optical analogue Univibe, it would sound better than this. But I don't. And even the bloke who writes and edits the 'Gilmourish' site seems to think it's an acceptable affordable way to get reasonably close to the classic Univibe sound. http://www.gilmourish.com/?page_id=4537

If you want that 'tape echo' sound without the hassle of actually carrying around a real Roland Space Echo/Maestro Echoplex etc., there are now several small compact digital devices on the market that will approximate the sounds for you for under £200. This is one of the better ones! You get fairly nice approximations of the mighty Binson Echorec (Floyd's magnetic 'Piper'-era echo of choice), the Maestro, the Space Echo, the EHX Deluxe Memory Man, the Watkins Copicat and so on. There's also a really nice David Lynchy Oil Can delay, the Tel Ray! Of course, purists would say that none of the simulations sound as good as the real things. They probably don't. But who wants to cart a Watkins Copicat onto a stage wet with beer and vomit, in front of 6 people, in 2017?. All I know is that the delay tails on this thing degrade and 'ghost out' nicely, losing their fidelity with each repeat very well, and the feedback can be driven into self-oscillation for all manner of psychedelic and dubby weirdness. It's a Toneprint pedal as well, so in theory you could design your own delays for it. I don't bother... Oh, AND it's a looper...it gives you about 20 seconds of infinite overdubbing fun! Recommended. The cord on the supplied wall-wart adaptor broke recently. But that's probably because I treat my pedals like shit and carry them around in a plastic bag on the train...

A very wide, warm and rich flange/chorus sound which can do anything from Robert Smith to the Smiths to Siouxsie to... It can go really fast and warbly, or it can be subtle and shimmery. Below a certain 'rate', you can manipulate its comb filter for manual jet flanging, old-school goth style. Cool. A word of warning though; this sounds very different to the deluxe Electric Mistress, which is a pure Flanger/matrix thing. A lot of people do prefer that one, and if you're after, say, the Gilmour sound circa 'Animals', that's the one to get, not this one. This is more of a dual-purpose chorus and flanger for all-round modulation duties. It's not the best chorus or flanger sound in isolation, but combined they're lovely.

Lovely warm analogue phase pedal that offers a nice cheap alternative to the MXR Phase 90 pedals. It's THAT sound - you know, 'Breathe' by Pink Floyd. Perhaps not quite as rich as the MXR Script reissue, but it will get you close. There's two settings, one quite subtle, one less so (more pronounced 'notch' filtering. I prefer the subtle one.

I have the reissue one from about 2008. I know everyone says that to get the 'Cobain' sound you must have the Depth switch to 'full', but on mine that seems to produce an unusable detuned warble! I keep it on the 'normal' depth and turn the rate up, and that seems to me to be closer. Yes, it's a classic chorus pedal, unmistakeably 'analogue' in character. It doesn't sound as good as the Way Huge Blue Hippo or the Walrus Audio Julia though; those are sweet. On the other hand, it doesn't cost as much! It's as hissy as anything, too. Go for a BOSS chorus if this bothers you; what you sacrifice in richness you gain in cleanness.

This is the most recent BOSS stompbox digital delay, introduced in about 2009 or so. I think BOSS are due an update at some point in the near future, as it will be ten years in the catalogue next year. I expect they'll take some newer features from their flagship DD-500 and shrink them down next time. Yes...there's not all that much to say about this one. It does what it does well enough. I think my favourite setting is the modulated delay; I'm not all that keen on the reverse setting on this pedal. It will do totally clean digital delays with long report times with ease. The 'analogue' mode is supposed to simulate the warmth of the analogue BOSS DM-2, but it doesn't, really; the 'analogue' repeats just sound like they've been treated with a simple low-pass filter, and they don't 'warble' enough to convince as analogue-style repeats. It's good enough, but it's just a bit...boring? Sterile? The DD-3 actually sounds more 'musical', in a way. Maybe I've been spoiled with other, more exciting offerings from TC Electronics, EHX and Earthquaker Devices, but it would be nice to see BOSS being a little more adventurous with their stompbox delays in future. The tap tempo function is admittedly very useful in a band context though!

Nice simple trem unit from BOSS, which gives you a good 'retro' amplifier trem sound in a box, with the waveshape adjustable from a gently undulating triangle to a choppy square. However, it does cause a volume drop, and without a tap tempo or MIDI it can be hard to sync it up for performance duties.

I was lucky enough to borrow an original 1974 Phase 90 from a friend in the late 90s when I was doing my first experiments with analogue synths, trying to sound like Stereolab. This reissue doesn't sound quite as nice as that one did, but it's pretty close. I think the Script reissue is supposed to be even closer. The MXR phase sound is inherently richer and deeper than the EHX Small and Bad Stones, and I think it's useful to have both options. As some people have said, the MXR seems to add a tiny bit of overdrive to the guitar signal, whereas the EHX pedals sound a lot lighter and more translucent by comparison (whilst still sounding authentically 1970s). The MXR clobbers you round the head with very rich, chewy, unsubtle phasing. But if you want that 'Have A Cigar' sound, the MXRs are the only way to get it.

EQD are becoming very well-known for handcrafting boutique pedals which offer familiar effects with a unique twist that takes them a bit beyond what you'd expect from a typical BOSS pedal. This one's a digital delay that sounds anything BUT 'digital'! If you want super-pristine delay, look elsewhere. It's based on a lo-fi karaoke chip and is capable of up to 600 ms of delay. Its ace card is a rate and depth-adjustable modulation with triangle and square waves available. A wide range of delay effects are possible, from rotary speaker type sounds, to seasick chorus, to slapback, to full-on dub delay with self-oscillating feedback for shoegazers, to Floyd Echorec tones. With Mod depth set to full and speed set slow, you will be totally out of tune! But maybe that's what you want. For me, I love the feedback control, which can produced some very trippy - and yes, spiralling - effects. Think Slowdive's 'Souvlaki Space Station' and you'll get the idea. If you want stupidly long delays or total clarity, look elsewhere - this is a uniquely-voiced delay that you'll either love or hate.

The EQD Transmisser is a very unusual reverb capable of totally unsubtle and extreme reverb effects. Even with the reverb length set to minimum, it's still pretty long. The tone is governed by a peaky low-pass filter with a sharp Q value, which means it always seems to add some kind of dirt to the signal. It's easy to totally swamp your signal with this one, so you get more reverb than signal very quickly! If you have an expression pedal you can do dynamic filter sweeps with it. The modulation adds slow warbly weirdness or fast warbly weirdness, and at the heart of it all is an unpredictable 'Warp' control which seems to change all the parameters in one fell swoop, including the pitch. I would say it's definitely suited to psych or shoegaze type music; if you want a really clean and hi-fi reverb, look elsewhere. If you want to explore the murky depths of space, get this...

This is a surprisingly good-sounding digital multieffects unit offering a range of sounds; not just the 'chorus/reverb/delay' mentioned, but other things too, like pitch-shifting, filtered delays, vinyl crackle, tremolo and triggered machine-gun delays. Effects can be strung together - up to six in theory, but more like 2 or three in practice. Where possible the DSP boffins at Zoom have attempted to recreate and model pedals from other manufacturers, so there's attempts at the BOSS CE-1, the EHX Small Clone, and some of the wackier spatial effects available on the Eventide pedals. My first impressions are that this is a very useful pedal to have around. Ok - let's be clear. It doesn't sound as good as the dedicated standalone effects boxes it's trying to replicate. But it's not so far off as to be unusable either, and some of the effects - like the amazing 'particle reverb', with its gorgeous swelling atmosphere - are worth the asking price alone. It's a very quiet pedal, and if you pair it up with some more expensive boutique effects (I've been feeding it into pedals by Earthquaker devices and Neunaber), it can help to expand your sound considerably. A word of warning about the 'shimmer' effect; it's horrid and metallic! Look elsewhere for that. On the plus side, some of the modulation effects are surprisingly warm for a digital effects box. There's also lots of control parameters within the individual effects; it's great for tweaking stuff. Once again; don't buy this thinking it's a miracle box that can replace your Strymon Blue Sky. It can't compete with that. But with prices starting at just £75 in some places, this is astonishingly good value for money.

Ridiculously expensive, but it will make 12 bit percussion sounds like nothing else. It sounds unique - really distinctive.

Ah, Max. Or Max/MSP. Or Max/MSP/Jitter. Where to start? Well, Max (we're on version 7 now, with 8 no doubt not too far away) will terrify you at least twice. It will terrify you once, right at the start, when you open it up and realise that there's nothing there. A blank slate. A total tabula rasa. And then, when you've learned a little bit about what it's for and what it can do, it will terrify you again, as the sheer number of possibilities begin to open up in front of you. How deep does the rabbit hole go? You want to build a sequencer with just white noise for the sound source and ADSR-controlled steps with a separate filter cutoff value for each step? Sure. You want to build an xOx drum machine where the computer decides which steps will sound at any given time with the statistics controlled by a Markov table? Yep. You want to speed up an audio sample by a factor of 50 or even 500? Yep. You want to build a synth where you can draw the pitches on an LCD screen? Yep. You want to build an avant garde noise generator with 64 independently tuneable FM oscillators? Yep. You want to build a synth which combines Buchla-style wavefolding and West Coast style subtractive filters on one half of the screen and Karplus-Strong plucks on the other half? Yep. You want to run some oscillators through seven filters and six delays? Yep... Max is an object-orientated visual programming language. It has its DNA in the MUSIC and GROOVE programs created by Max Mathews of Bell Labs in the 1960s (he who made the computer sing 'Daisy Bell'). In the 1980s it was developed by Miller Puckette and others at IRCAM at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Initially, it was entirely information-only. MIDI and messages. Then, in about 1997, David Zicarelli added real-time DSP to the basic system of information flow, and Max/MSP was born. A bit later, video processing was possible with the arrival of Jitter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software) Basically, Max works like this; there are objects which can be connected together, modular-synth style, with virtual patch cords. There are audio objects - denoted by the presence of the tilde ~ - and information generating and processing objects, such as the metro object, which outputs a pulse when you give it an 'argument' in milliseconds, for example. There are message boxes and number boxes for controlling the way that other objects behave over time. Initially, it's totally baffling. Then, as more is learned, it all become clear. Or clearer. Many of the objects exist as GUIs to make them more user-friendly, such as the function object, which is a breakpoint object to help you visualise the shapes of envelopes, or the gain~ object, which when created takes on the shape of a slider on a mixing desk. Colours and shapes can all be changed. UI objects can be customised, or you can try building them from scratch in javascript or by creating them in Photoshop. I'd start by creating some rect~ objects. Simple bandwidth limited squarewave oscillators. Then add a floating point number box to give the oscillator a frequency in Hz. Then add a gain~ object and an EZDAC so you can hear the wave. Then add another number box to control the pulse width of the wave. Good luck... Some good books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice-x/dp/8890548401 These are beautiful. They explain it all far better than I ever could.

I'd like to be able to write a proper, informed review of this. But I can't, and I suspect it's because I'm not intelligent enough to understand West Coast synthesis. You turn a knob and it adds harmonics to the simple triangle wave...ok, got that bit....but now...if you plug this into here...it...why is it doing that? What's a low pass gate? Argh....now it's making Saul Bass Phase IV noises...like a bathtub full of ants... I'll do a proper review in due course when I've learned what it all means. It's fun, anyway, and it's given me a newfound increased respect for Suzanne Ciani. Incidentally, despite the low cost, that's what this sounds like: like some of the stuff I've heard of Suzanne's from the early 1970s. Good stuff, Korg.

Sometimes it astonishes me how some developers produce lovely synths for free or donation. This is a fairly 'authentic' and vibey sounding emulation of the Korg Delta, a key instrument on the Human League's 'Dare' album. I'll investigate more Full Bucket stuff now. I can't believe it's free.