I originally purchased my JX10 from Jeffrey Koepper, an ambient synthesizer music artist from Baltimore, MD. I had no idea who he was at the time. When I got home and looked him up, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was not only producing awesome synthesizer music but he had been doing so for quite a long time. I immediately purchased all of his albums as inspiration. The JX10 is a massive polyphonic synthesizer, supposedly the last “flagship” analog poly synth Roland made. Read more...

My first true synthesizer, a virtual analog poly synth that I never really clicked with. The sound on the SH-201 always seemed quite thin and harsh to me, although to be fair was a quite novice sound designer at the time and probably didn’t give it a real workout. The SH-201 was OK at best, it tended to have some bad aliasing in higher pitches and just never sound very high quality to me. Read more...

The Roland MC-505 was my first piece of kit, and my entry point to a new hobby in electronic music production. I was quickly overwhelmed once I had a look at the manual, it was huge and I had no idea what any of the features were. I didn’t even know the first thing about music production or music theory for that matter. All I knew is that this chunky groovebox made some cool sounds and you could tweak them and combine them in all sorts of new ways! Read more...

My first “vintage” synthesizer. Purchased when I realized the sound quality on the SH-201 was really letting me down. I was instantly hooked on the lush chords and pads it produced when run through the built-in chorus. THIS is what Roland poly synths should sound like. Some argue that the DCO’s are not quite as flavorful as true analog VCO’s but I’ll be damned if the Juno doesn’t just sound great. Read more...