If you were alive in the 1980s, you were probably exposed to unhealthy amounts of Yamaha DX7 at an early age. In fact, even now, scientists tell us that people who live in cities rather than the countryside are never at any time more than 2 meters away from a DX7.

Wait. That might be rats. Anyway, the point we're trying to make is, this thing was everywhere in the 80s, so much so that it's become for many folks the Synth To Hate: not only did it usher in a new age of tiny LCD panels and pushbutton, menu-driven editing, plus a hugely complex and frankly rather overwhelming new form of synthesis, but it also defined a whole new sound - clean, crisp, shiny, and perhaps just a touch sterile. This was CD versus vinyl, digital versus analogue, the DX versus... well, every other synth out there. And it had one killer advantage over them all: it had the best Electric Piano patches on the planet.

In retrospect it's easy to understand why people were blown away by it, though. The original DX7 may have been a bad pizza dream to program, but it had 16-voice polyphony, stable tuning, you could carry it under one arm, and there was a whole range of credible sounds lurking in its innards - okay, so the strings were a bit thin, but man, listen to those electric pianos, and dig that funkadelic bass! Most of all, really, it just sounded different from analogue; before we knew it, everyone was swept up in the craze for everything digital, and it would be 20 years before the world came to its senses again. At the time, there was simply no hope: everyone from Jan Hammer and Herbie Hancock on down had to have one of these things. Brian Eno had dozens of them.