Arp's masterpiece, the 2600 was a patchable sort-of modular from 1970. Used a lot by Jean Michel Jarre, the 2600, in addition to things described elsewhere, has some incredibly cool features that make you just want to hug it - for a start, it has a built-in amplifier/speaker system, complete with a spring-reverb unit! Perhaps more importantly it also looks incredibly imposing - a fat briefcase-sized panel stuffed with sliders and sockets, and some useful diagrams that explain the signal path. It was used a lot in education - a bearded californian called Deverahi wrote a big book in the early eighties about synths, and he still used the 2600 as a model example. Vince Clarke, of Erasure, uses one exclusively for percussion noises, and it's fantastically useful if you're into modern dance music.
Rating: 5 out of 5
posted Wednesday-Aug-05-9898 at 23:35
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