About Our Shop

We Love synths!

The pulsing, coursing sounds of synthesizers has revolutionised music of the last 50 years. From serious academic composition to the most acid of banging techno, synthesizers have been at the heart of this revolution. 

At Synth Evolution we're celebrating this by making products featuring illustrations of these wonderful machines.

We launched in 2017 with the range of mugs featuring individual illustrations of synths, but are proud to now offer the Synth Evolution poster - every production synth (and some prototypes) made between 1963 and 1995.

ANALOGUE FOR THE WIN, but also...

And it's not just analogue and modular synths -  all synthesis types are included: Additive, FM, Phase Distortion, Sample & Synthesis, Linear Arithmetic, and even 'Spectrum Dynamic Synthesis' (hello Casio HT-3000!)

The only rule is that they have to be a synthesizer - drum machines, samplers, electric pianos / organs, home keyboards and FX are not included in the collection. And very few rackmount equivalents too.

It's synths all the way, baby!

ALL THE SYNTHS, ALL THE TIME!

The story starts in 1963 with Robert Moog and Don Buchla's earliest machines - Bob favouring keyboard control and Don trying everything but.

Over the next forty years, the analogue circuits improved, got smaller and ended up on dedicated integrated circuits. Alongside this, many other types of sound generation become productionised - John Chowning's FM synthesis, patented in 1975, productionised in the 80's, additive synthesis (the addition of sine waves to create complex, evolving harmonics), and many other more esoteric methods.

The poster completes its story in 1995 with the introduction of the Yamaha CS-01 and the Korg Prophecy. These were the first of the new breed of 'digital modelling' synthesizers, which modelled analogue circuitry in software. After this, it became possible to both emulate existing analogue synths (the TB-303 being an early favourite) and to design ever more complex digital synthesizers, both in keyboard hardware format and totally realised in software as VSTs or standalone programs.

But starting with analogue and ending with the digital modelling of analogue, for us, has a pleasing circularity to it.

There have been many exciting, brilliant sounding synths since then, of course, but for many musicians and electronic music fans the period covered is the first golden age of electronic music enabled by these wonderful instruments.