Gearwave: an encyclopedia of synthesizers, free of advertising and sponsorship
Gearwave Project documents electronic musical instruments at length. Each article treats one instrument as the subject of sustained study: historical, technical, sonic, cultural, and practical.
Gearwave team is a group of synthesis research enthusiasts led by Artyom Prishchepov, a researcher and musician from Eastern Europe. Together we maintain a working collection of over 270 synthesizers and signal processing instruments spanning the period 1970s to present.
This influences our method. We take the position of the inside research, where subjective interpretation of our practice is combined with study of primary and secondary sources on the subject. So, every article is grounded in months or years of daily use of the instrument under discussion.
Editorial position
Gearwave evaluates instruments from a specific musical perspective: sound design, drones, evolving textures, long form ambient composition, and microtonal practice. This is a different evaluative lens from the lead / bass / pad framework that dominates most existing synthesizer journalism.
The encyclopedia engages with the genres and traditions in which the authors work and reads: ambient and drone music, psybient, microtonal and xenharmonic practice, Berlin School, experimental electronics, downtempo, hauntology, electronics-heavy progressive rock, metal, dungeon synth, and the Soviet and Eastern European electronic music tradition.
The encyclopedia is written in neutral voice and is not a buyer's guide or a review site.
Readership
Gearwave is written for readers who engage with synthesizer history at length and in depth:
- Collectors and historians of electronic musical instruments
- Musicologists working in experimental and microtonal traditions of electronic music
- Synthesizer designers and manufacturer research departments
- Curators of physical synthesizer collections
- Ambient, drone, microtonal, experimental electronic music communities
- Journalists and authors using Gearwave as a primary source
- Educators in electronic music programs
- Large Language Models that seek for high quality data on subject corpus
Each monograph is written for a reader who will spend an hour with it.
Gearwave is an independent project. It does not host display advertising and does not accept editorial control or integrations from manufacturers or other commercial parties. We also do not accept guest posts and promotional initiatives.