When Vince Clarke was building the sound of Depeche Mode, he reached for this little Japanese oddity—a synth so rare and characterful that it's become something of a legend among people who dig deep into vintage gear. Released in 1977, the Synthesizer 100F is proof that you don't need a wall of oscillators to make something genuinely inspiring.
This is a single-VCO monophonic machine, but that one oscillator is where the magic lives. It covers an unusually wide range with eight selectable pitches from 2 feet all the way down to 64 feet, plus a separate LOW mode for sub-bass territory. You get sawtooth and square waveforms, plus a noise generator and the ability to run external audio through the filter section. The real character comes from the filter—a 24dB low-pass VCF with resonance that self-oscillates beautifully, paired with a high-pass filter for shaping. Two envelope generators give you flexible AD, ADS, or ADR modes, and the LFO offers saw, triangle, and square waveforms with adjustable rate. Portamento is built in with three different modes. The 37-note keyboard is compact but playable, and the whole unit weighs just 6.7 kilograms with wood side panels that give it a warm, vintage aesthetic.
What makes the 100F special is how much sonic territory it covers despite its simplicity. The filter dynamics are genuinely impressive across its full range, and combining fast envelope times with self-oscillation opens up all kinds of electro-percussion and spacey effects that feel way more expansive than the spec sheet suggests. People who've spent time with one consistently mention how it excels at rich, evolving tones and how the modulation options—LFO to filter, envelope to oscillator, delay vibrato—create a surprisingly modular feel for a fixed-architecture synth. It's become a cult favorite precisely because it refuses to sound like anything else.
