THE SYNTHS THAT MADE DANCE MUSIC
How brave are we to try and pick just 10 synths that defined dance music from all the synths ever created, in both hardware or software? The fact is, though, that there have been some truly iconic synths released over the last 40 years of dance music that really have defined its history.
Some might simply have contributed to the success of certain genres, while others might have created genres but, whatever the impact, the following machines really have undoubtedly made dance history.
We’re dividing the 10 – actually 12, and we’ll come to that – up into five classic hardware machines and five (almost) classic software synths, some of the latter of which have already been with us for a decade or more and are still available. Also, this is very much the follow-up to our The 10 Synths That Made Synth Pop feature (which you can find at ) where we covered earlier classic analogues, including Moogs, ARPs, Korgs and Yamahas. You could, of course, argue that those synths influenced dance
