THE 1980S: GETTING POPULAR

Launching into orbit… but then going digitalsynthy with the mighty Zebra CM | The 80s All analogue and chips | As the 80s dawned, the scene was set for a decade where synth technology would become available to all, and synthpop would rule the charts. But then things got very digital

After the incredible leaps in synthesiser technology that were made in the late 70s, 1980 could be regarded as the year that was the calm before the beautiful storm.

There weren’t many influential product releases in this year, the most notable being the Sequential Prophet-10. This instrument has an interesting history, as the original goal was to create a 10-note polyphonic Prophet. The problem was that there were various issues, particularly with the synth overheating, so the solution was to create another behemoth of a synthesiser, which was essentially two Prophet-5s stacked on top of each other! There was a little more to it than that, largely centred around additional controls, but it was pricey and early models had technical issues. This meant that it did not sell in vast numbers, making it a particularly collectible synthesiser.