One of these Teddy Ruxpins lives in my house, it was my partner’s when they were a kid, I swear it is certainly a cursed object of some sort.
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Summer between sophomore and junior year I bussed tables a couple days a week until I could afford one of those cheap basses packaged with a practice amp, I think a yamaha. I’ve been told it is in the house of someone who is in a band with a former roommate of mine, but I haven’t seen it for myself.
Electronic music wise I started in Ableton, then picked up an SP555.
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No idea what year, but I practiced with a recorder in elementary school if that counts.
When I was around ten I started playing my dad’s acoustic guitar, and as a teenager my parents got me this wonderful electric guitar and amp that I wish I had here in Japan.
Had a knock-off Les Paul looking guitar here for a while but I definitely felt that I had plateaued since my teens.
Once I tried my first synth a couple of years ago at a music shop I kind of went crazy. I think I started with a Volca FM and have been trying many other cheapish hardware synths since.
I made a YouTube channel as my way of cataloging this experience and started it as a sort of video resume to share with other musicians I’d meet. Something I had no plans of before, but I guess I was justifying it to myself by actually recording using the hardware.
Synthesizers really reinvigorated my love of creating music. They’ve seriously changed how I think about the sounds I hear.
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RM1X, 2002/2003. This is it now, hasn’t been functional for at least 10 years, started cleaning it up recently but lost interest when I opened it up and realised its a lot more complicated inside than I thought it’d be. Will probably never get rid, a lot of sentimental attachment to it
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First….
Gifted gear, a Pearl drum set when I was 15.
First purchased gear was a trio of blue LP congas when I was 19. They were gorgeous.
Then first hardware synth purchase: Korg Volca Keys (age omitted for self preservation).
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OMG an RP1
My friend who I played in my first band with had one. I absolutely hated this thing.
Pretty sure it was more about his voices as opposed to the actual thing.
He probably got his in 93
An SP-303, Digitech Echo Plus pedal, and Sony TCM200 recorder were some of my first pieces of gear. I had no idea about music production or DAW’s at the time, so I would just bounce sounds that I made between these three devices, which would ultimately end up on cassette. It was a gritty and lo-fi process but I sometimes miss the simplicity of working this way.
I still have a lot of my old recordings, which I’ve thought of incorporating into my current music. It would be like I took 18 years to finish a song.
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My late father played the organ. We always had a double manual Technics or Yamaha in our living room and me and my brother would try to coax weird sounds out of it.
That’s probably why our father bought us a Yamaha DX100 synthesizer as a christmas gift in 1988. We spent most of our time trying to make it sound like a revving motorcycle or a machine gun, but it sparked something deep inside me. Ended up selling it 20 years later to my friend, producer Jori Hulkkonen, who had also had one as a teenager and was missing it.
My first ”real” piece of gear that I bought with my own money was a Yamaha RM1X and that lead to me buying the AN-200, the DX-200 and the QY-70. Those were my most prolific times, made probably hundreds of ”songs” with that small setup.
Then it got a bit out of hand and around 2008 my bedroom looked like this:
Nowadays I’m back to a very small, limited but well formed setup where all of my gear fits on and under one table.
(I wonder how I listened to all those synths in the pics. The only speakers I see in those pictures are those shitty Logitech computer speakers on the table. 10K worth of synths and 10€ speakers.)
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SH-101. Only gear I owned for 17 years. Then an MPC and finally onwards into the current carnival of debauchery.
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m-audio radium 61 (still have it)
m-audio delta 44 (still have it)
alesis monitors and amp
cubase sx
almost 30 years got first hardware synth, DN
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Roland MC909. Wow how time has flown.
A Korg MS10 from Honky Tonk Music Hadleigh back in '78. It won over an EDP Wasp (although I went on to own 2 Wasps later on).
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do you still have it?
Have been making music on the guitar and piano and playing in bands since 2000 but the first synth I got was an original Arturia Minibrute in April 2019. Still remember it felt like a lot of money to buy it for 220€. I knew fuck all about synthesis but I had fun playing it through a delay pedal into the humble looper in the Boss DD-7 pedal. I thought I was gonna take it slowly (famous last words) but six or seven months later my setup already included an Octatrack (first Elektron), Machinedrum, Monomachine, Dreadbox Nyx, OB-6 desktop, Analog Four, Cocoquantus, Sidrax, eurorack and some other stuff. 
Took some time until the GAS settled down a bit and I took the effort to actually learn some of the stuff. Only have the Elektrons left now from those days (different A4 tho). Writing down that list of 2019 acquisitions feels a bit embarrassing, and now that I think about it, there probably weren’t many times in my first year with synths that I didn’t go to my makeshift studio with a new purchase in hand. However, I also think I had to go through some of that gear to find out what best suits me (can tell you it’s not eurorack).
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I was relatively late to the game really, having pissed away my youth on booze and drugs I finally got an m-audio axiom and a copy of reason in 2008… that was the start for me, although I did have analogue gear when I was kid, if a recorder or ocarina counts.
Korg Z1 when I was around 14yo sold later to fund a Virus B.
Fun synth and somehow I feel I will get one again sometime in the future.
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