THE 40 GREATEST SYNTH SOUNDS OF ALL TIME

And how to recreate them for free!

The glorious sound of the synth – and by that we mean its circuits, the tone and timbre of the machine itself and not necessarily its attempts to emulate ‘real’ instruments – has now been filtering in and out of music genres for more than five decades. From its inception in the 60s through its progressive and experimental upbringing in the 70s, through 80s synth pop, 90s dance and 21st century anything-and-everything, the synth has provided the tearing leads, insistent melodies, atmospheric pads, searing percussion and rumbling basses behind many of the most iconic tunes ever produced.

There have been the classical leanings of Wendy Carlos, the genre-creating antics of

Kraftwerk, the Sheffield steelworks of Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League, the charttopping tracks from everyone from Depeche to Numan, OMD to Jarre; the experimental Eno ambience, the Vangelis soundtracks not to mention the cycling, pumping, 303-ing and basscone shattering productions of Underworld, Prodigy and Daft Punk. And whatever the style or decade, we are celebrating the very best of them in this very issue of Computer Music!

At the end of last year we put together a definitive list of the best synth tunes ever made, covering the last six decades of music production, and asked you to vote for your favourites. We then took the winning top 40 to examine them in more detail and – here’s the brilliant Computer Music twist – decided to show you how to recreate each and every one of them, using synths from the mighty Plugin Suite.

The results are in and in this very issue we count down from number 40 to number one, starting over the page. We give you some detail about the original sound, the song, the hardware synth(s) used and then show you, step-by-step and on video, how to recreate each sound in the chart using nothing more than the synths from our Plugin Suite that you can download right now, for free.

So strap your synths in and take a walk through the history of the best instrument ever invented and recreate the 40 most iconic sounds ever produced…