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. Every era answered the same question — "how do we make sound with electricity?" — in a completely different way, and those answers stacked up into the synthesizer we know. Let's follow the through-line.

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

Early electronic instruments were huge. The Theremin (1920) was played without touching it — the position of your hands around two antennas controlled pitch and volume. It's the original source of every horror movie's "oooOOOooo". France's Ondes Martenot (1928) added a keyboard and a sliding ribbon for swooping pitches, and composers like Messiaen wrote it into real orchestral scores.

By the RCA Mark II (1957), sound could be programmed with punched paper tape. But the electronic sound of this era lived in university research labs — less an instrument, more laboratory equipment.

2. Moog and voltage control (1960s–1970s)

The turning point was Robert Moog. His key idea was voltage control — pitch, timbre and loudness all steered by voltages, with modules patched together by cables. Attach a keyboard, and the synth finally became an instrument you play. Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach (1968) became a massive commercial hit and put the synth in everyone's ears overnight.

Then came the Minimoog (1970). It shrank a wall of modules into something you could carry on stage, and hard-wired the subtractive signal path — oscillator → filter → envelope — right into the panel. That layout became the blueprint for virtually every synth since.

SynthLab's signal flow (OSC → FILTER → ENV) is a direct descendant of that subtractive design.

3. The age of chords — polysynths (1978–)

Early synths had one big weakness: one note at a time (monophonic). The Prophet-5 (1978) played five notes at once and, thanks to a microprocessor, could store every knob position in memory. The concept of "loading a preset" was born right there. The glittering pads and brass of Journey and Toto are the sound of this era.

4. The digital strike — FM and sampling (1983–)

The Yamaha DX7 (1983) abandoned analog circuits for FM synthesis — shaking one sine wave's frequency with another — and poured out glassy bells and electric pianos that analog could barely attempt. Nearly every sparkling keyboard on an 80s pop ballad is a DX7. It was also cheaper than analog and sold in enormous numbers, which spread a new habit: choosing presets rather than programming sounds. Around the same time, samplers like the Fairlight and Akai opened another road entirely — record a real sound and put it on the keyboard.

5. Into the computer — soft synths (1990s–today)

Once computers got fast enough in the late 90s, the synthesizer became software outright. Plugin synths inside a DAW have no physical constraints, so new sounds appeared: hundreds of unison voices (the supersaw!), free wavetable morphing, screenfuls of modulation routing. Modern soft synths like Serum and Vital are the flag-bearers. Amusingly, the same years also revived analog reissues of the Minimoog and Prophet — so today, a hundred years of history are all in active service at once.

And now, in your browser

All of it now runs in a browser too. SynthLab's synth is a subtractive synth rendered in real time with the Web Audio API — the signal path Moog fixed in place, the preset concept the Prophet invented, even a DX7-style FM mode. Walk through it step by step in Learn. Knobs sound different once you know their history.