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Vintage Synthesizer Ads

Posted by Scott







Retro Synth Ads has some great scans of various electronic music equipment from the 70’s and 80’s. It’s interesting to observe how the sophistication of advertising design in niche industries — like music technology — predictably lags behind that of the mainstream. These are pretty far along and represent output from some of the biggest names of the day, but examples like this and this are fascinating in their simplicity. I’m guessing the engineers who built the machines were moonlighting as their own designers in these cases. Loving the TL-12, makes me wish I had a MSQ-700.

Source Retro Synth Ads

12 Comments Leave A Comment

2

Austin says:

November 16, 2010 at 12:49 pm

Awesome. I used to take breaks at the library looking through all the back issues of Electronic Musician. The old ads were one of the best parts.

4

T.Miles says:

November 16, 2010 at 3:32 pm

That prophet5 . The legend. Always has been way to expensieve for me. My first synth was the alternative: the Korg polysix. Good,but not like the legend.

6

fr says:

November 16, 2010 at 9:32 pm

That second one is hilarious! “Korg: for when you want to spend thousands of dollars on a synth and risk having it damaged due to inadequate packaging”

I don’t know if things are much further along now. Some of the small one-man-shop type of synth makers still have pretty hokey design and advertising. If anything, I think some of them were designing better stuff in the ’70s. At least some of those engineers were constrained by black and white and limited typefaces. Now they go hog wild with all sorts of garish colors and fonts.