Our Method
Every reference work is an argument about how its subject should be organised. Gearwave makes that argument in public on this page, so that a reader can judge our entries against our own stated rules rather than against an unwritten house style.
Below sections cover how we divide a century of instruments into eras, how we group them by engineering lineage, how we declare the limits of our own knowledge before a reader has to guess at them, how we source and verify a claim, and what we refuse to do. Each article header links back here, because none of our entries can be read properly without it.
This page says "we" because methodology is an editorial matter. The entries themselves do not: a Gearwave monograph is written in the third person, in the register of a lexicographer. The author appears in it only as an observer with a stated number of hours behind an instrument.
What Gearwave is
Gearwave is an independent academic encyclopedia of synthesizers and signal processing instruments, written from a hybrid position: academic reference on one side, author as owner on the other. Entries are monographs of substantial length, combining historical research, technical analysis, cultural context, and primary source observation drawn from extended hands on engagement with instruments inside a single working collection of more than 270 machines spanning the 1960s to the present.
Our reference models are Grove Music Online for structure and citation discipline, Mark Vail's Vintage Synthesizers (Backbeat, 1993/2000) for the register in which an owner may credibly write about an instrument, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's Analog Days (Harvard University Press, 2002) for narrative history, the MIT Press electronic music histories for academic footing, and Gordon Reid's Synth Secrets series for the standard of technical explanation we try not to fall below.
Gearwave Project is not a review site, not a buyer's guide, not a collection showcase, not a blog, not a synthesis news site or storefront.
The chronological spine: eight eras
Chronology is our primary navigation axis. This mirrors how the standing histories of the instrument are structured, and it preserves a narrative arc that a taxonomic organisation destroys.
Each era opens on a landing page carrying a reference table of its significant instruments, every row annotated with a Familiarity badge. From that table a reader moves either to a full monograph or to a short essay, depending on the badge.
Why the era names avoid technology
An earlier draft of this framework used technology bound labels ("Early Digital Revolution", "Workstation Era", "Virtual Age") and each one falsified its own decade.
For instances, the 1980s decade held digital synthesis, a stubborn and productive late analogue resistance, the first hybrid responses, the sampling revolution, and the closing chapter of Soviet analogue manufacture. A label reading "digital revolution of 80s" excludes the majority of the decade's instruments, which is an odd achievement for a heading. The Split Decade names the actual condition of that age, the parallel lines running at once.
Same comes for the 1990s: Years of Plenty avoids naming by the workstations technology outburst, and instead carries the premonition that the reader will need in the following chapter, when the lean years arrive.
The 2000s held five simultaneous lines: virtual analogue, the return of true analogue, workstation maturity, hybrid experiments, and the rise of software. Our early label "Virtual Age" named one of the five. The Parting of Ways, instead, names what happened: a single industry splitting into software, boutique hardware, and controllers, three streams that have not rejoined.
There is one further discipline in the naming. The word "Era" appears exactly twice, at the entrance and at the exit, framing the cycle, as the boundaries for both periods are largely unknown at this moment.
The empty first chapter
The Proto Synthesis Era contains no instruments from our collection, and the chapter exists anyway. It carries historical overview essays on the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot, the Trautonium, the Novachord, and the RCA Mark II, written entirely from literature and marked as such.
This is the point at which our method either holds. An encyclopedia built around a private collection is under permanent temptation to mistake the shape of that collection for the shape of the field. Where we have nothing in hand, we say so and write from the archive.
The sub axis: ten engineering schools
Within dense eras, chronology alone is not navigable. The 1970s and the boutique renaissance of the 2010s each hold more instruments than a single chapter can carry, so those eras subdivide by engineering school.
A school first framework was considered and rejected. The boutique instruments of the 2010s account for more than half of the collection, and organising by school would have let a single decade dominate the entire encyclopedia. School subdivision handles density where density exists, and stays out of the way elsewhere.
School means engineering lineage (opposing to factory address)
This is the definition that makes the axis usable, and it decides the hard cases.
Behringer belongs to the German school. Music Tribe is registered in the Philippines, its engineering centres are in Manchester and Willich, and mass production runs from a company owned plant in Zhongshan. Engineering thinking lives in Germany; manufacturing location is recorded as a separate facet tag, not as a school.
ASM belongs to the Chinese school. We had it wrong at first, filed under American on the strength of familiar western names in product vision and sales. The DSP engineering roots are in Shanghai, the capital is Chinese, production is in Zhuhai. Corrected, ASM stands as the only current representative of a Chinese engineering school in the collection, which is a finding about the collection, not about Chinese engineering.
The Soviet school keeps its own section on five instruments rather than being dissolved into an "other" bin. The Soviet layer is historically closed and self contained, which makes it an ideal size for one overview essay and a handful of monographs, and a poor candidate for footnote treatment.
Facet filters
Beyond era and school, each entry header carries facet tags for architecture, synthesis method, microtonal capability, sonic function, manufacturing location, and provenance. These exist so that a reader can assemble a query the primary axes cannot express (West Coast modular, drone capable or natively microtonal) and receive a meaningful slice of the collection.
Two facets are default evaluation criteria in every entry. Longform behaviour asks how an instrument holds up across a five to thirty minute take: drift, stability, noise floor, the way a texture evolves when nobody touches it. Microtonal capability asks about tuning resolution, scale memory, MIDI Tuning Standard and MPE support, and the practical workflow of getting a non-12-TET scale into the machine. Where an instrument cannot do these things, we say so and explain the technical reason. Most reference works treat both as specialist concerns; our audience does not, and neither do the Xenharmonic Wiki communities we write for.
Familiarity: declaring what we know explicitly
Reference works about instruments carry an unstated ambiguity. Did the writer live with the machine for a decade, borrow it for an afternoon, have never seen it or read three articles about it? Gearwave resolves this with a badge in every header. Familiarity is a seven-level measure of the author's depth of acquaintance with the instrument.
The scale is logarithmic by design. The first fifty hours with an instrument create more understanding than the next two hundred, and the threshold rises again after that, so equal intervals would have been a lie about how learning works.
The hours are estimates. Nobody logs hours over fifteen years, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. "1000+ hrs" is a self assessment of expertise, and the logarithmic spacing is chosen precisely to dissolve the question of decimal accuracy: the distance between 500 and 1000 reads as a threshold of competence. We state this once, here, and consider the system legitimated.
We chose the word Familiarity over Experience after some argument. Experience contradicts its own lowest mark (it would imply that a chronicled instrument represents zero experience, when in fact it represents a particular kind of knowledge, mediated by texts). Familiarity covers all seven marks, and it is an established term in musicology and listener psychology, in the sense used by Daniel Levitin in This Is Your Brain on Music and Eric Clarke in Ways of Listening.
Encountered and chronicled are categories
The two lowest marks describe different relationships. Encountered means a live meeting with a working instrument in someone else's studio, without playing time worth calling playing time, an honest and fairly common status for the rarest machines. Chronicled means knowledge drawn wholly from literature, recordings, patents, and cultural record.
Clones require a related honesty. Where we have five hundred hours on a modern recreation and no contact at all with the original (like with ARP 2600), both instruments receive entries, in different genres. The clone is treated as a channel of access: the original's entry states plainly that its knowledge is mediated, and marks the points where clone and original are known to diverge.
Format follows the badge
The badge is not decoration. It determines the shape and length of the entry automatically, which produces a genre-coordinated pyramid rather than a uniform template stretched over unequal knowledge.
Two article formats
Type 1 is the canonical monograph, for instruments we own and can put our hands on. Nine sections, at full length, the whole of it resting on the ability to go into the studio and check. Its fifth section is the personal chapter (extended owner voice observation of undocumented behaviour, calibration quirks, signal routing discoveries, productive pairings with other instruments, and limitations that only surface after months). This is the section no other reference can produce, and the section most likely to fail on tone, which is why it carries the longest list of prohibitions in our internal specification.
Type 2 is the historical monograph, for instruments in the first two eras that cannot realistically be engaged with in private hands today: surviving examples live in museums, university archives, or single digit private collections. It may also be used, at the author's discretion, for later instruments marked chronicled. Type 2 inherits every editorial rule of Type 1 (voice, citation convention, forbidden language, the specificity requirement, the gap convention) and overrides only what genuinely differs when nobody can touch the instrument:
The personal chapter is removed entirely, and replaced by two sections that the archive can actually support: Notable Episodes and Anecdotes (documented commissions, premieres, disasters, recoveries) and Documented Reception (how the instrument was received at release, and how its reputation moved across the following decades).
Technical Anatomy is compressed and renamed Technical Description. It documents architecture, signal flow, oscillator and filter design from schematics, patents, service documentation, and designer interviews. It omits longform behaviour, microtonal behaviour, because no primary observation of those is available and we are not going to guess at them in a technical section.
Cultural Footprint expands and takes on more of the article's centre of gravity. For a pre 1955 instrument, cultural record is frequently the largest body of evidence in existence.
A Survivors and Preservation section replaces Comparisons: known surviving units and their locations, restoration projects, replicas and reconstructions, and software emulations assessed for provenance and accuracy.
Sources and verification
Our source hierarchy is ordered (the order is enforced).
Primary sources are the foundation of all historical and technical content: original manufacturer documentation, service manuals, schematics, patents, period press material, and designer interviews in the designers' own words, preferably from the era of release. For Soviet and Eastern European instruments this extends to digitised Soviet engineering journals and factory documentation, which are harder to reach and worth the trouble.
Secondary sources supply context and cross checking: Sound on Sound's historical features, museum grade documentation from the Audities Foundation and comparable archives, the standing books in the field, and the academic literature on electronic music history.
Four rules govern how sources become text:
- Wikipedia is never a source. Wikipedia is a finding aid for us, but where a claim is found there, we follow it to the original and cite the original.
- Every factual claim carries a date, a number, or a citation. "Many musicians used it" is not treated as a claim. "Often considered" invites the obvious question of by whom, where, and when.
- Citations are inline, at the point of claim, with descriptive anchor text.
- Disagreement is surfaced. Where two credible sources give different dates or attributions, the entry says so. Where information does not exist, the entry carries an explicit gap marker naming the open question (for instance, whether a particular revision changed a filter's capacitor values) rather than a smooth sentence covering a hole. A visible gap is more useful than an invisible guess. It also tends to get filled, occasionally by a reader who owned the machine in 1979.
What we do not do
Some of the method is a list of refusals.
No scores, rankings. An instrument is not a number out of ten, and any scale that puts a Trautonium and a Hydrasynth on the same axis has measured nothing.
No buyer's guide verdicts. Practical purchase and service intelligence exists in our entries in neutral register: what to inspect, known faults, parts availability, technician resources or manuals. It is information for a reader who has already decided to look, not a recommendation.
No promotional vocabulary. Iconic, legendary, revolutionary, and game changing do not appear in our entries unless they are inside quotation marks with a name and a date attached. These words are claims of significance dressed as adjectives. Where significance exists, it can be demonstrated with evidence, and where it cannot, the adjective was doing the work of an argument it could not win.
No price or rarity as achievement. The personal chapter never mentions what an instrument cost, how few exist, or what it took to obtain one, there is no survival rhetoric, no crown jewels, no holy grails, no comparisons framed around abundance. The internal test is: if a paragraph cannot survive the removal of every first person reference, it was not about the instrument.
No omission of what we lack. The collection is the source of our primary observation but by no means it is the boundary of the subject, and the method exists partly to keep those two things from being confused.
A living encyclopedia
Gearwave is versioned by design, which is a consequence of the Familiarity scale.
An instrument at 10+ hrs today may sit at 50+ hrs in two years. When it does, the badge changes, and the entry changes with it: the format lengthens, an encounter note grows into a working acquaintance section, a working acquaintance eventually becomes a personal chapter. New schools may open when a genuine engineering lineage arrives to fill one. Corrections of the kind we made to the ASM classification are recorded.
A reader who returns to an entry after two years should be able to see where our knowledge has moved.
Corrections and peer review
We are wrong somewhere on this site right now. The interesting question is only which entry. This is work in progress and the invited peer reviewers search for errors of fact, misattributed designs, dates contradicted by a primary document, gap markers. This procedure is run in batches, semi-annually.