Synthesizers

We meet the reviewer's dream — a powerful synth that's versatile, easy to use, easy to edit and even demonstrates its own patches for you!

Yamha scored a big success with their famously blue, knob-endowed CS1x Performance synth, and now they seek to build on this with the silver-grey CS2x — but does the 1-digit increment and change of colour scheme constitute revolution or evolution?

Ensoniq were as the forefront of workstation and sampling technology in the '80s, but their recent synth offerings have not kept up with the fashion for controller-festooned techno boxes. The Fizmo, however, updates their take on wavetable synthesis with extensive real-time control.

These days, a new synth without some form of DSP effects processing is almost unthinkable — but it wasn't always like that. Paul Wiffen traces the introduction of effects on synthesizers and looks at making the most of the early implementations.