The ARP 2600, introduced in 1971 by ARP Instruments under Alan R. Pearlman and engineer Dennis Colin, was the world’s first semi-modular synthesiser: a fixed selection of synthesiser components, three oscillators, a 24 dB-per-octave low-pass filter, envelope, amplifier, mixer, built-in spring reverb and speakers, internally pre-wired into a default signal path that could be overridden with patch cords. The design solved the problem that had kept the modular synthesiser in the academy. A fully modular system like ARP’s own 2500, or the Moog and Buchla, required modules to be bought separately and wired from scratch; the 2600 came as one suitcase-style unit that worked the moment it was switched on, but opened to full patching for anyone who wanted it.
That combination, immediate enough for a beginner, deep enough for sound design with no fixed limit, is exactly why the 2600 became a workhorse of experimental and industrial electronic music rather than a museum piece. It was clearly labelled and laid out for people who were not trained synthesists, marketed heavily to schools and universities, and priced at US $2,600, far below the systems it competed with. The Korg MS-20, filed elsewhere in these pages, was in part Korg’s answer to exactly this machine: a cheaper semi-modular monosynth for musicians who could not reach the 2600. The ARP, in other words, set the template the rest of the affordable-patchable category followed.
The Bureau guards the model number ARP 2600 as canon: it is one of the named machines this archive treats as a fixed reference point. Its associations run wide, from progressive rock and film scoring to the experimental and industrial electronic underground, and the honest note is that it was a general-purpose instrument rather than an industrial-specific one. But the semi-modular principle it introduced, patchable depth without the academy’s barrier to entry, is the principle on which a great deal of hands-on industrial synthesis was built. It stayed in production until 1981 and was reissued, under Korg, in 2020.