Synthesizer

The HapsBox portable music system has the look of a toy spaceship, but it's a powerful mobile music-making machine that's newbie-friendly while also being attractive to pros.

A couple of years ago, Playtime Engineering launched a colorful portable synthesizer on Indiegogo, and now the startup has reworked the hardware and software, and toned down the cuteness, for the Blipblox After Dark.

The Subharmonicon was inspired by a mathematical system for musical composition from the 1930s/40s and by two analog innovations. It's said to create "a rich harmonic kaleidoscope that divides into itself until everything that is up becomes down."

After a brief online teaser campaign, Poland's Polyend – the same firm responsible for the mesmerizing Perc percussion system from 2016 – has revealed a new music production machine called the Tracker.

He's transformed an old bike into a rolling synth, and turned a games console into a music machine. Now Sam Battle of Look Mum No Computer goes back in time to revisit one of his earliest builds – a Gibson Les Paul with built-in MIDI keyboard.

Following a leak earlier in the week, Moog has now confirmed its most compact keyboard synthesizer so far with the launch of the Subsequent 25 paraphonic analog synth.

He's previously made music mobile with a synth bike, and built a nightmarish noise-maker called the Furby Organ. Now Sam Battle has tapped into the sonic guts of a Sega Mega Drive and created a monster synth ready to get its music-making game on.

Artiphon first came to our attention in 2012/13 with a strange-looking digital instrument called the Instrument 1 that leveraged the processing power of a docked iPhone to create music. Now the ream is back with a handheld synthesizer called Orba.

Back in early 2018, Behringer launched what it called an homage to the Minimoog Model D, an almost exact copy of Moog's iconic monophonic analog synth. Now, after a short teaser campaign, the company has built a polyphonic version called the Poly D.

There's a new expressive keyboard synth in town, the result of a collaboration between France's Expressive E and Haken Audio out of Illinois. The stylish Osmose offers expression over three dimensions for every note on the raised keyboard.

Originally announced in January, and planned for release a month later, the Stylophone Gen R-8 touch analog synthesizer has now finally been released. But only 500 will be made.

Back in 2016, Tim Jacobs of mixtela managed to cram a MIDI synthesizer into a MIDI plug. He's now revisited that project, teamed up with H-Pi Instruments and created the much more capable Flash "mini-poly-MIDI-micro-synth."