ARP 2600

"ARP 2600s are trading for silly prices these days. Units that were given away for pennies are selling for many thousands of dollars on the used market. [...] The earliest models are hard to repair, thanks to ARPs habit of encasing the circuits in epoxy."

"We've heard 2600s producing everything from pseudo sequences to full on drum beats, complete with swing."

"If the Minimoog was designed to simplify modular synthesis for mass consumption, then the ARP 2600 was created to haul the whole kit and caboodle into the hands of performing musicians."

"Rather than limit the options with a written-in-stone signal path as Moog did, the 2600 presented a fully patchable instrument in a fairly compact package. Offering three oscillators, noise, filter, ring mod and reverb, the 2600's fixed signal path could be defeated by patching cables into just about any point in the instrument's architecture. This meant that it was as complex as you needed it to be. Respectably complex patches could be created without plugging in a single cable, but once you chose to do so, the sky was the limit. We've heard 2600s producing everything from pseudo sequences to full on drum beats, complete with swing."

"In 1977, we caught the first glimpse of a film franchise which is still very much in progress today. Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope was the first of the franchise to make it to celluloid, thanks to director George Lucas. The actors were accompanied by two ‘droids’; C3PO was upright and humanistic, while R2D2 was short and had a voice that was a generated series of bleeps and slides from an ARP 2600."