A Short History of the Synthesizer

The knobs we turn in SynthLab today didn't appear out of nowhere. They're the result of nearly a century of experiments. Here's the short version.

1. The room-sized beginning (1900s–1950s)

Early electronic instruments were huge. The Theremin (1920) was played without touching it; the RCA Mark II (1957) was programmed with punched paper tape.

2. Moog meets the keyboard (1960s)

When Robert Moog combined voltage control with a keyboard, the synth finally became an instrument you play. The backbone of subtractive synthesis (oscillator → filter → envelope) took shape here.

SynthLab's signal flow is a direct descendant of that subtractive design.

3. Digital and software (1980s–today)

FM synthesis (Yamaha DX7) popularized digital sound, and eventually everything moved inside the computer. Today's soft synths compress this entire history into code.

Next time, we'll take one of these apart hands-on: subtractive synthesis.