Hey
I wrote an article on affordable first synths: Your First Synth
Mine was the Novation A-Station, which I still have and absolutely love! I bought a Darkstar XP2 after that which was…mehhh…not so great!
How about yours? What was it? Do you still have it?
midierror
My first synth was: MC-303, and second was Microkorg.
Still have them, but like all of my synths, don’t use them much.
Roland JP-8000 and I still have it, don’t think I ever used it in a song as I hated Cubase and the other few software that could do midi at the time
Mine was the MC-303 too! I think I got rid of it when I got Ableton on my laptop, but I spent countless hours programming beats, row by row, on those chicklet keys.
Yamaha CS1X in 1996, not in use since at least 20 years.
Yamaha SY85 bought in 1995… no longer with me, but I do still have an AKAI K5000w I got in '97! Still pull samples from it every now and again, too
Roland Juno 106. Simply a sweet synth with sounds that fix the 80’s to a “T” IMO. I’d still have it except some scumbag(s) broke into our storage unit, on Christmas Eve no less, and made off with it. Never recovered it.
Wow nice!! I love both those machines, but only recently discovered the Microkorg uses the MS2000 engine! So you technically have one of those too. Do you have any Emu / Ensoniq things?
Ah wow, I know it’s a great synth - it’s here in Tim Wrights Studio: https://twitter.com/CoLDSToRAGE/status/1446495998734372870/photo/1
If only there was a Guru patch for it! The Renoise sysex programmer
Yeah some solid sounds on there. I still have a folder of samples off it I must have got in the late 90s!
Synth_035 and Synth_036 sound AMAZING!
Ah, a great synth though! I saw a band called Dr Meaker at Glastonbury and i asked them after what the super dark synth was… it was a CS1X! Do you use the programmer software? it’s bloody amazing!
Oh I got told to buy an SY85 many years ago. Never seen the K5000W, whats it good at?
Ah man!! Sorry to hear that. They must have been carrying some pretty bad karma since then.
I sold my Juno 6 a few years ago - no regrets but I am still trying to find the final recording session I did with it!!
It was a Quasimidi Raven Max followed up by a MAM B33-II and a QM 307. I sold them 20 years ago.
Wow nice collection! Quasimidi made some excellent gear. The MAM is nice too, I once fixed one for someone by simple re-heating the sodler on it!
scuse me, but what is the “programmer software”? 
the time i was actively using the CS1X was between 96-00, where i was still using FT2 as my only “DAW” (lol) and CS1x served solely as a sample source.
It had the bread & butter sounds.
I’m afraid, it was just affordable and compared to else, the sounds were ugly, except from the MAM B33-II. But I didn`t know it better then. There was no wiki to look at. The QMs were definitely 22,5 kHz Samplers with lots of detuned sounds of the 90s with additional FX.
My first one was in early 90s, a Roland D-50 which i still have and i still use it a lot in my productions. Today i have several Roland hardware in my studio. D-50, XV-5080, Juno 106, JP-8000, SH-201, Gaia SH-01, System-8, TR-606/707808/909.
My first was a Korg T3, with built-in sequencer and a disk drive lol. Very similar to the better known M1. Sold it when I was 16 to buy a drumkit instead, but started to miss it when I grew older, so 20 years later I bought it back 