What is your favorite synth from
the "old days" (60s/70s/80s)???

Mine is the Roland D-50.

I bought a Korg M1 new in the 90's. What amazing sound it had! My only regret was not playing it more! Life got in the way. It was in mint condition and I sold it a couple of years ago to a young fellow who wanted it for it's sounds. His girlfriend was blown away when she was trying it out. He told me he loved the sounds. It was meant for bands and built like a tank!

For me - this one ('Elektor Formant', 1978 demo tapes):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XnxSrlJhng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPeBJ5sAEIk

... because I built one of these myself, together with a high school friend, back in the 70's. Etching, soldering, tinkering, fiddling with the sounds, all of it. Was extremely hard to use in a performance context, though...

Edit: In many ways the total opposite of my nice little Electro with all its vintage samples today. You really had to *work* for it, and for getting sound out of it.

I think you can get an M1 VST...
going to check it out! Thanks!

Yes, you can, and coming from playing an M1 for years, I can say that the software is very authentic

JP-8 ...

Oberheim OB-X series.

Fortunately there are plenty of samples in Omnisphere.

How much does the M1 software cost? I wonder if it available as an iPad app?

My lovely, brick-like, indestructible Roland JV-1080!

Guess what.. I got it as a wedding gift (ah, that's what friends are for :D)

Paolo

I'm not sure what can You run on iPad from description below.

http://www.korg.com/legacy

One instrument for 49.99 USD or a Korg six-pack for 199.99 USD

Thanks for the info! Wow $49 for all the M1 sounds! If they ran on the iPad I'd buy in a flash. Still...for $49 I may get it anyway!

It's just not the same thing.
The hardware is missing. The components that made the sounds...
Well, what am I saying.... this a DP forum. So I guess a DP is just not the same as an AP. And will never be. Everything has its pros and cons.

My favorite (hardware) synth depended on when I got it. It was always the newer one. But looking back it must have been the Juno. Or was it the T2??? I don't know - they were all great. I couldn't even part with any of them.

MKS-20

I'm pretty partial to my XP-30, though its 1999 release probably doesn't qualify as vintage, since you specified 3+ decades prior.

Nor would the Little Phatty, but at this stage I'll sacrifce and trade vintage and authenticity for reliability and versatility.

Yamaha DX7-IID, the presets had some great sounds for some nice gospel tunes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIn-n2ebENo

Mine is Yamaha DX7-II. Such amazing emulations 100% synthed (no samples). I love the digital pianos, slap bass, harmonica, brass, mallets... Strings are not that good, although they are way better than on the original DX7. Even the acoustic piano patch is interesting while its really far from what it tries to emulate.

Just realized that's the one I meant to say. Even the video I linked to was DX7-II lol silly mistake.

PolyMoog or Jupiter 8, but I'll probably change my mind every time you ask that...there have been many great sounding synths, that's why we are still(!) trying to emulate them, again and again and again...

The DX7 was quite an engineering achievement. Waveforms in the log domain so an add is a multiply, lots of tricks to get the FM algorithms to fit in those early crude ICs.

Can't remember where I read it, but IIRC someone was flown in to make the initial presets and only give some ridiculously short period of time to make them in, like a day or a week or something. Given how non-intuitively the FM parameters map to output timbre, that must have been a huge headache.

I owned a used FS1r for a couple of years and sold it on eBay for more than I bought it for. It had a typically cryptic Yamaha UI which made the front panel controls almost pointless. Format implementation seemed like an afterthought. Seems like they were just going through the motions in the design phase, which is too bad, it could have been a real monster.

Emulations generally are fairly disappointing ..... Which is why I have so many boards. I've never met a Polymoog VST I liked all that much. But the CS-80v sure beats screwing around with a real one. But I freely admit that when I want JP-8 sounds my first choice is to turn on a JP-8

Isn't it astonishing that, given the progress of consumer electronics and computers since the 80's, no decent classic synth seems to have emerged. The classics to my mind are the mini moog, ARP 2600, prophet 5, jp8, DX7, Fairlight CMI, OB8. Many lesser achievements such as the Korg MonoPoly also deserve praise.

The possibilities for additive and or subtractive synthesis, with advanced modelling options, are immense! Multiple oscillators, controlled by complex interactive banks of filters, for example. These things were simply impossible in the 80s and before, but now would be easy for a good programmer/designer team.

But we're stuck with phatty copies and software emulations of relics. V poor.