The Best Budget Synthesizers Under $500

The Model 15 is a desktop take on a classic vintage Moog Modular synthesizer. That sound you hear in your head when someone mentions old analog synths is exactly what you’ll find here. It’s all about super fat basslines, punishing lead sounds and experimental bleeps and bubbles.

It’s laid out like a modular synth with each part of the synth given its own space. The first part is a playful arpeggiator and sequencer for getting things moving. Following that is a multi-waveform LFO that can animate your filter, pitch or pulse width. Then you have two classic oscillators generating a number of waveforms that are full of juicy detuning. You mix them through the warm embrace of a ladder filter before being shaped by the envelope and lost in the reverb. This thing is beautiful.

However, the huge patcbay on the right offers an adventure playground of re-routing, modulation and experimental happenings. Everything has a patch point so if you want to modulate the filter from the oscillator, or envelope the pitch, mix waveforms into FM tones or feed modulators into one another, you can.

There’s an amazing amount of versatility in this dual oscillator, analog, semi-modular synthesizer that’s ready to play without a single patch cable, and eager to go deeper when you need to.

Street Price: $279
Behringer.com

There are four Nanobox boxes, each in a similar format but very individual intentions. They are mini-synths with bags of technology behind the playful and colourful exterior. Tangerine is a Compact Streaming Sampler; Razzmatazz is a cool drum machine; Fireball is a polyphonic wavetable synth and Lemondrop makes the synth granular.

They are all brilliant with similar features but lets stick with the red hot synthesis of the Fireball. It can handle up to 8 voices of polyphony using 2 wavetables and an oscillator. The large display visualises the sound while offering touch-screen parameter editing in combination with the two encoders. You can load your own wavetables and shape the sounds using the touchscreen XY controls.

Common to all NanoBox synths are the two filters, two envelopes, two LFOs and a modulation sequencer. They have a bunch of effect including flanger, distortion, chorus, phaser, delay and reverb. They are brilliantly compact, sound superb and can drop into any setup.

Street Price: $399
1010Music.com

The 2600 from Behringer is based upon one of the most iconic synthesizers ever built; the ARP 2600. Through careful study and reverse engineering Behringer has captured the soul of this classic synthesizer and designed it down into an affordable format. While it’s more compact the original Behringer has managed to retain a lot of the beauty and accessibility of the impressive interface. It’s one legendary replication.

The Behringer 2600 is a three-oscillator monophonic or duophonic analogue synthesizer. VCO1 has sawtooth and pulse outputs, whereas VCO2 and VCO3 also have triangle and sine waves, pulse width modulation and oscillator sync. The original 2600 had different filters depending on the revision so Behringer decided to include both.

For modulation, you can repurpose the VCOs as LFOs, or you can dig into the Sample & Hold circuit, Ring Modulation, ADSR envelopes, AR generator or the dedicated LFO. The internal routing allows you to push all the usual signals to the right destinations, but the 93 patch points lets you subvert that and connect things to all the wrong places for maximum experimentation.

It’s a synthesizer that invites adventure. You’ll find no easy answers or presets here; you’ll have to climb on board and explore and experience it to unearth its beauty. It’s like an electronic work of art waiting to be manipulated.

Street Price: $419
Behringer.com

Roland were once the masters of analogue synthesizers but now they are masters of recreating former glories in emulated form. There’s a whole range of meticulously studied synthesizers in the Boutique Series covering classics such as the SH-101, TB-303, JX-8P and JD-800. All of them modelled in software and then injected into a compact hardware interface that captures the character of the original. While they are all delicious, for me it’s the JU-06A emulation of the Juno synths that takes the cake.

With the JU-06A you get a 4-voice polyphonic version of two legendary Juno synthesizers; the Juno-106 and Juno-60. It immediately has that sound, that playability, warmth and vibe of the originals and manages to look the part. The control panel is boiled down to the most important synthesizer attributes and makes it intuitive and joyful to play with.

It has the 106’s resonant highpass filter, it has the 60s envelope-controllable pulse width modulation and it has the legendary chorus that makes everything sound wonderfully chewy. It has a 16-step sequence that can capture notes and movements from the 17 dedicated sliders. And it has an arpeggiator for instant melodic satisfaction.

You’ll probably want to plug in a MIDI keyboard and you can use it as an audio interface to your computer. I would ignore the built-in speaker and just bask in the classic synthesizer sound that comes through your system. It’s an emotional synthesizer, with an epic sound in a compact and interactive form.

Street Price: $399
Roland.com

The Microfreak is a bit different. It’s a hybrid of a digital oscillator and an analog filter all wrapped up in a weirdly engaging touch-plate keyboard. It looks fascinating and is a lot of fun to play.

The Microfreak can handle up to 4 notes being played at once through the one filter, which can be everything from mellow to on fire. The digital oscillator gives you an expandable range of waveforms, styles and possibilities that are as zany as you want them to be. You’ll find your regular waveforms, of course, but also formants, robots, noise, wavetables, strings and bings. It’s extremely versatile and yet very simple to use, with just Timbre and Shape controls to craft your perfect waveform.

It has a couple of envelopes, one of which will loop as an LFO in addition to the dedicated one. You can route them into all sorts of places via the Modulation Matrix. The arpeggiator and sequencer are excellent and have lots of realtime performance features you can drop in for added variations. The keyboard registers both the placement of the fingers and the pressure, giving you more expressive aftertouch control.

You also get over 300 presets, CV/Gate and MIDI outputs and a whole load of fun.

Street Price: $349
Arturia.com

This is one of the longest running and biggest selling synthesizers ever made. It’s somehow manages to stay in that sweetspot of sounding fantastic while being easy to use and full of surprises – that’s the MicroKORG.

MicroKORG is virtual analog, so it’s DSP-based modelling of sounds rather than actual analog, but the sounds come from the huge MS2000 synthesizer and are simply awesome. There are 128 sounds, dozens of waveforms, using 2 oscillators for each of the 4 voices. There are 2 envelopes, 2 LFOs and 4 virtual patch points to get surprisingly deep into sound design. Although what tends to win out with the MicroKORG is how easy it is to instantly dial in a fantastic sound and just play with the realtime knobs.

The sounds are catagorised for easy discovery and written right there on the front panel so you’re not scrolling through some menu. The filter has multiple modes, the apreggiator has six types and there are all sort of effects. Not least of which is the vocoder mode which you can use to shape sounds using the included gooseneck microphone.

The MicroKORG is compact, portable, easy to use, fun to play with. Even though there’s a recently released version 2 that’s just outside our budget, the original is here to stay.

Street Price: $429
Korg.com

This is a classic remake of one of the most popular analog synths of the 1980s, the Korg MonoPoly. Behringer has brought this one back as a proper instrument with a full-sized keyboard, mod and pitch wheels and the killer looks of the original.

The MonoPoly features four analog oscillators with a spread of individual waveforms that can play together as a thundering monosynth, detuned as a duophonic synth or spread out into four voices with one oscillator per voice. The filter is modelled on the aggressive Korg MS-20 filter for extra bite and excitable tone. There are two envelopes for shaping the VCA and the filter and then a super versatile dual modulation and cross modulation system with hard sync and a noise generator.

It’s full of analog goodness, looks and sounds awesome and brings a bit of synth history right back to our fingertips.

Street Price: $489
Behringer.com

IK Multimedia pack an awful lot into their synthesizers. They like to dazzle with the modern, streamlined flair while being solidly analog on the inside. The UNO Synth Pro X is ordered and rigorous with vast sonic potential, performance power and a great deal of punch.

The UNO Synth Pro X has three discrete wave-morphing oscillators that can seamlessly move through tones and harmonics. Your personal mix of source materials then cascades into the filter section that uses two classic designs to generate 24 possible combinations of signal processing. The dual state-variable filters include OTA and SSI chips  that you’ll find in many classic synthesizers.

Other textures can be conjured using pulse width modulation, noise generator, oscillator sync, FM and ring modulation. A 16-slot modulation matrix gives you almost endless possibilities in moving signals around the synthesizer and drawing on a pair of LFOs and loopable envelopes.

It has a very performable 64-step sequencer which can be saved as part of an onboard preset so you can recall your melody as well as your patch. It comes with 256 presets right out of the box. You’ve got overdrive, three effects slots and a choice of 12 studio-quality effects. It’s packed full of rhythmic features, and arpeggiation modes and has both CV/Gate and MIDI connections.

UNO Synth Pro X is a monster mono synth that can be stretched to three notes and sounds completely epic.

Street Price: $499
IKMultimedia.com