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Hoovers, Grooveboxes, and ROMplers: the Synthesizers of Rave

The Technology of '90s Dance Music

Robin Vincent · 01/20/25

It's become a bit of an urban legend that the discarded analog synthesizers of the previous generation fueled the underground musical movements of the late 80s and early 90s. They'd all moved onto the new digital synthesizers and crappy old analog Roland machines like the TB-303, TR-808 and 909 could be found in thrift stores and charity shops for pennies. Aspiring electronic musicians who were frustrated with the mainstream pop and rock music of the time could pick up second-hand studio-quality gear for a handful of dollars and start making music in their bedrooms. It was the electronic equivalent of the punk and garage bands of the 1970s, but where the anger and distortion were replaced with happiness, repetitive beats and lots and lots of drugs…ahem, I mean lots and lots of dancing.

Exactly what influenced or constituted Rave music is up for debate. In my experience of growing up in the UK as a teenager in the 1980s, we were listening to HipHop, Electro and Chicago House music alongside the popular New Wave and Synth Pop hits that were in the charts. Somehow, out of that mix emerged the joyful squelch of Acid House and it lit the touch-paper of the UK's Rave culture explosion.

We can argue over the origins all you like, but by 1988's “Second Summer of Love,” there was a distinct sound being generated by some very specific synthesizers, and that's where this article starts. And then, we'll explore the synths and instruments that emerged over the following decade to support the growing and overflowing excitement around rave music.

Acid

The truth of the urban legend finds its anchor in the classic beats and fruity basslines of Acid House. The sound was found in the unassuming circuits of the Roland TB-303. The 303 was designed as a bass accompaniment device for guitarists. You would program in a bass line from a song you were trying to learn and then play along. There was a companion drum machine called the TR-606 that was the perfect rhythm partner for this little, home-tutoring setup. The pioneers of Acid House tended to favour the slightly older TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, but it was the 303 that really inspired. It had enough bite and resonance when pushed to extremes to give a stand-out character to a track. It wasn't so much aggressive as bouncy, wet and somewhat hilarious. It had a huge dose of fun that fitted brilliantly with the party-positive vibe of rave culture. Throw in some guitar pedals for delay and distortion, and things would really take off.

When UK artists sought out the gear to replicate the music, they found all the old Roland synths being sold second-hand for next to nothing. This included the SH-101 monosynth that lent a different tone and a dash of welcome musicality to the setup. In those early days, they used whatever they could get their hands on. A good example was the underwhelming Roland Alpha Juno, released in 1985. It looked very modern; Roland had adopted the infuriating mid-80s style of impossible parameter-based interfaces, but the sound was analog and clashed with the mainstream love affair with the futuristic and digital tones of the Yamaha DX7. However, in the late 80s you could pick one up really cheap which fitted in nicely with home-spun house music. It had a particular preset called "WhatThe" that would become iconic in rave music. It was known as the Hoover.

The Hoover was a pitch-modulated sound constructed from three octaved oscillators. Add some pulse width modulation and a chorus or phaser effect, and you had one alarmingly penetrating sound. It was brought to prominence by Dutch techno artists Human Resource on the track "Dominator". The analog beats, squelchy acid bass and hoover lead set the tone for a summer of illegal raves, all-night dancing and the empowerment of the DJ.

Digital Sounds

One ubiquitous sound in early rave music was the stabs of the Korg M1 piano. Released in 1988, the M1 was the first all-in-one workstation that let the user build entire songs on the one machine. It was the perfect platform for someone building tracks in their bedroom and was filled with superbly useful sounds. Other digital synths, such as the Yamaha DX7 and Roland D50, were staples of late-80s producers and fed into the scene as studios began to take notice and brought the joyful gurgles of the analog boxes to the next level with bigger productions.

Early samplers like the Akai S950 were also in demand as the music evolved past their analog beginnings and into breakbeats and sampled hits. The Prodigy's first album was written almost exclusively on the 1989 Roland W30 sampler workstation. Sampling meant you could pull sounds off records without having to be a scratch-DJ, and borrow any sound from anywhere you could find them.

Early '90s

The popularity of rave music exploded in the early 1990s. Various forms of dance music were beginning to dominate as they were trialled in the clubs of Ibiza before bursting onto the mainstream.

From the point of view of gear, the beginning of the 1990s was quite odd. There were very few jumps in innovation as most new synthesizers were variations on a theme with perhaps the exception of the Korg Wavestation. The cheap analog boxes were getting scarce as they weren't very plentiful in the first place, and their popularity had pushed second-hand prices up to unrealistic heights. That difficulty was relieved somewhat by the Novation Bass Station, a cool little dual oscillator analog monosynth that was probably the first new release to be targeted directly at the rave music scene.

It was also at this time that the Atari ST and Steinberg's Cubase made their first appearance. It allowed home producers to tap into the convenience and power of visual sequencing that had only been available on the hugely expensive Fairlight samplers. As long as you had a sampler, digital synth and the odd analog box, you were pretty much sorted for making dance music.

Virtual Analog

For a while, the synthesizer industry was obsessed with PCM-style sounds. Everyone was building sleek, featureless keyboards and modules full of intentionally realistic sounds, whether that was the Roland JV1080, Yamaha SY35 or Korg Trinity. Gradually, however, the popularity of dance music was pulling the industry back towards a more analog approach. But true analog synthesizers were expensive to produce, whereas DSP chips and microprocessors were increasingly affordable and powerful. And so when the industry leaned into analog, it did it with computer models and emulation in what we call Virtual Analog, and this gave us new synths to get excited about.

The big one was the 1997 Roland JP-8000. It looked and felt like a classic analog synthesizer, but it had all the advantages of digital reliability, patch saving and computerized performance controls. It had 38 knobs and sliders, "Motion Control" that would memorize your movements and a ribbon controller for powerful performance modulations. But its biggest contribution to the electronic soundscape at the close of the millennium was the Supersaw. Stack up a bunch of sawtooth waveforms, detune them a little and you have one powerful and animated lead sound. For the JP-8000, the Supersaw was a standard oscillator type; for dance music, it was a revelation.

Before then, the 1995 Korg Prophecy had made quite a splash. It was a unique combination of virtual analog and physical modelling in a striking form with very deliberate performance features. It was monophonic and played like an expressively fierce lead instrument. It had a lot of great effects, a screaming filter, waveshaper and distortion and had a weird barrel-like modulation controller that was enormous fun to use.

Around the same time the JP-8000 landed, the fabulously red Virus from German company Access arrived. It was DSP-powered, multi-timbral and designed to give an entirely analog experience with a layout that matched the classic synths of the decades before. It was filled with presets that were pitched perfectly for dance music with the lushest of pads, bounciest of basses and fiercest of leads. There were a number of versions along the way, including keyboards and rack versions which culminated in the Virus TI. The TI doubled the DSP capacity and added Hypersaw, Granular, Formant and Wavetable synthesis. The Virus has a huge sound, and the fact that it's 16-part multitimbral means you can use the one synth for multiple layers within your track.

Grooveboxes

By the mid-90s everyone wanted to make dance music, but many people lacked the skills. The rise in house (and mostly home) DJs deluded people into thinking making music was really easy, and Roland saw that as an opportunity to invent the groovebox. The MC-303 was a hilariously fabulous box of instant dance music. It combined a polyphonic, multitimbral digital sound engine with an 8-track sequencer. It wasn't a new idea; such things had existed since the Korg M1, but it was the form, immediacy and content of the machine that really grabbed the attention. It had all the analog drum kits you could wish for, all the 303 synth basses, it had leads and pads all ready to go, and it had 300 onboard patterns of dance music cheese.

The MC-303 was a heck of a load of fun, and it didn't really matter that you were playing with preset patterns and doing very little to find your own groove. I don't think anyone actually produced music with it, but it hooked into the market of home, wannabe producers epitomized in the below promo video from 1998.

However, the Groovebox concept was turned into something more constructive by German synth company Quasimidi in the now legendary Rave-O-Lution 309. Quasimidi had already released a couple of synths focused on the dance music crowd. The slightly fiddly Quasar sound module in 1994 came with 1000 dance-ready sounds, 16 parts, drum kits and effects. A couple of years later, the Raven pulled together a curated collection of dance music-inspired sounds into a beautifully designed keyboard. It came with an 8-track sequencer that had a "Motivator" function for recording tweaks and instant "motifs", which would pump out hooks and grooves.

I worked at the Turnkey Music Store in London when it became the UK distributor for Quasimidi products. We had a Rave-O-Lution 309 setup in the middle of the sales floor, and it played all day, every day. The 309 was simply brilliant. It had four analog-style drum parts and a wonderfully 303-like bass synth. Each part had real-time knob controls; you could drop parts in and out, isolate the kick drum and then throw it all into the drop. You could record knob movements, chain patterns together and play the whole thing live. I'd take one to a party, set it going, and people would happily dance to it. It's not trying to emulate techno with clever patterns like the MC-303; this thing was techno, and it gave you the space to make it your own.

Other grooveboxes came along, like the fabulous Korg Electribes, but nothing, for me at least, has matched the purity and joy of the Rave-O-Lution 309.

ROMplers

I did a bit of a survey across social media for the most influential rave music synths, and one that came up a lot was the Emu Orbit. Emu had been famous for their big Emulator sampler keyboards in the 1980s, but they were cumbersome, required loading samples from floppy disks and were challenging to use. The Korg M1 and Roland D50 demonstrated that you could store samples directly onto ROM chips inside a synth and use them as a sound source. Emu looked at their huge library of sampled sounds and thought, "F*ck yeah."

In 1989, they released the Proteus, which was a very basic and compact rack module that incorporated 192 sampled sounds and squeezed them into 4MB of Read-Only-Memory. There was a little bit of envelope control, but you couldn't really call it a synth; it was a sample playback machine. These were often known as a "ROMpler" because they sounded like a sampler but didn't actually sample. It sounded amazing, had 32 note polyphonic and was 16-part multitimbral - it was a massive success. Emu released new versions of the same hardware with different sound sets. The original was rebadged at "Pop/Rock", then came the Orchestral and World Instruments. They became an easy and affordable source of sounds for producers who were not willing to take on the hassle and expense of hardware samplers.

In 1993 a new version of the Proteus concept hit the streets in the form of the Vintage Keys. It had 8MB filled with samples from vintage synthesizers. Emu added a filter, portamento and a chorus effect, making it more synthy and a much more expressive source of sounds. A “Plus” version a year later doubled the size of the memory, and I think every dance music producer probably had one.

In 1996, Emu gave us Orbit, The Dance Planet, and unlike the Roland MC-303, this little golden box oozed class. It had 256 dance-music-ready presets and the same amount of room for your own tweaks, but it also had 55 preset beats and percussive tracks that sounded fantastic. We had a rack full of the Emu modules at the music store, and when the shop was quiet, I would spend loads of time fiddling with the Orbit. A version 2 added more sounds, more beats and a song mode for sequencing. You only really needed the Orbit and an Atari, and you could bash out a track in no time.

More modules came later, like the Xtreme Lead-1, XL-1 Turbo and even an Orbit V3, but they never hit the pulse of the scene quite like the original Orbit.

Computers and Diversity

In 1996, Propellerhead Software released Rebirth RB-338 for Apple Mac and Windows PC. Suddenly, the quintessential techno tools were available to everyone with a computer. It sounded fantastic and gave you a pair of virtual TB-303s and a TR-808 drum machine. We were back in the old skool Acid House days as if a decade hadn't passed us by. It kickstarted the era of software synthesizers and along with the launch of Cubase VST and Fruity Loops, heralded a new age of computer-based music making. Who could have predicted that nearly 30 years later, we're still buying hardware clones of those old Roland boxes?

With computers and the move into the 2000s, every form of synthesis became available, and music genres began to be defined by other things such as cuts, slices, ratchets and computerized trickery. The legacy of rave culture remains in the excitement and joy we still feel when approaching hardware music making. Techno and dance music is one of the easiest things to find when playing with the machines we have available to us. The simplicity and energy of it have embedded itself into our culture. There's something about it that taps into the pulsing of life. You'll find it banging away from many music makers' bedrooms and squelching away from Electronic Music Open Mic performers, and it always brings a smile to your face, a tap to your feet, and a nod to your head.