My first synth! This classic is one of the things that lured me into electronic music. It was by far the coolest gadget you could have in school. I made many new friends that year.

The Argos Catalogue didn�t give me much information on this one, so my thirteen year old mind filled in the blanks. Rather optimistically I imagined it like a CASIO VL-1 with bigger keys. So it was quite a shock to discover this wasn�t a synth... this was an air organ. And the squeaky accordion-like sound was hellish in every way.

Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, I did my research and struck gold with this keyboard. Good sounds, a few effects and even some genuine synthesis. But best of all was its party trick where you hit a note and it plays the whole tune for you.

Sometime in the late 80s I decided that my keyboard meddling should be accompanied by guitars and even the odd vocal. So I ventured into the murky world of multi-track tape recording. Lots of hard work and mushey sound quality. Oh the horror...

The humble Commodore Amiga computer was a bit of a legend when it came to music. Programs like SOUNDTRACKER suddenly made sequencing and sample manipulation easy. I loved it, but ultimately the limited sound quality forced me to continue my quest.

Definitely my first proper synth (with big keys and everything!) I liked the K4 a lot, mainly because the level of programmability was just right for my small brain. This was probably the last synth I truly mastered.

With the thumping rave-scene beats sweeping the nation, it was about time to beef up my drums. Little did I realize those rave beats were sampled from old hip-hop records, so I had little hope of recreating them with one of these.

Bit of a childhood dream this one, as in the 80s it was one of the coolest synths out there. Buying one second-hand in the 90s saved me thousands, but the sample-based technology was now showing its age. Good quality but painfully slow to use.

I really hoped that going professional with my sampler would solve all my problems. And while the sound quality was great, every tiny operation was sheer pain thanks to the two-line LCD display and the rubbish control wheel. Building a decent sample library on those 1.4MB floppy disks didn't bear thinking about.

This was the jewel in my keyboard crown. A thing of beauty to behold and to hear. But boy there was a lot to learn, and just not enough hours in the day. A great bit of kit though, and the only item that I was sad to sell.

This is me doing something profound in my studio. My studio happens to be a sort of sunroom whose acoustic value is non-existent. However that doesn't matter because I've got the best studio hardware I'll ever need. One MacBook Pro laptop, decent headphones and a decent midi keyboard. Bliss. Everything else is long gone.