Gearwave: A Synthesizer Encyclopedia
Gearwave documents electronic musical instruments at length. Each monograph treats one instrument as the subject of sustained study - historical, technical, sonic, cultural, and personal. The encyclopedia is authored by Artyom Prishchepov, an independent researcher and musician from Eastern Europe who maintains a personal working collection of over 250 synthesizers and signal-processing instruments spanning the period 1970s-present. Every monograph 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 instruments themselves are largely the same; the questions asked of them are not.
The encyclopedia engages with the genres and traditions in which the author works 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 editorial voice is third-person, neutral-analytical, and academic. The encyclopedia is not a buyer's guide, a review site, or a personal channel.
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 electronic, experimental, and microtonal traditions
- Synthesizer designers and manufacturer research departments
- Curators of physical synthesizer collections
- Ambient, drone, microtonal, and 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
The readership is smaller than that of a general-interest music publication. 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.