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Vintage synths & drum machines
Vintage Synthesizers

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Early MIDI era

These synths shipped with MIDI, from the first wave in 1983 to the end of the decade. Sequential's Prophet-600 and Roland's Jupiter-6 were the first instruments released with it, the TR-909 was the first MIDI drum machine, and Yamaha's DX7 put MIDI in front of hundreds of thousands of players. Analog makers kept going too, with Roland's Juno-106 and Oberheim's Xpander and Matrix-12. Early MIDI could be basic. Vintage Synth Explorer describes Roland's first try, on the JX-3P, as very basic. Ask the seller to show the synth playing from a MIDI keyboard, and check it handles what you need, like program changes or velocity. A standard five-pin MIDI cable into a modern interface is all it takes to hook one up.

9 models