The Best-Selling Synths and Drum Machines of 2019

Next up in our series of year-end best selling lists comes the realm of synths, drum machines, and sequencers. Below you'll find rankings for the best-selling electronic music gear on Reverb sorted by both overall bestsellers as well as best-selling vintage models, followed by the top 10 new releases of 2019.

You can take a look at our lists from last year here, and see the 2019 rankings for pedals, amps, and microphones behind these links.

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The above ranking of overall bestsellers includes both new and used sales on Reverb, and in this instance, it's fair to say that our data is probably a bit different from the market at large, given how much used gear sells on our site. For instance, the Teenage Engineering OP-1 taking the top slot is likely the result of the limited availability of new inventory for this model at different points in the year, which helped fuel demand in the used market. Similarly, Reverb likely sells fewer new Behringers than gear sites that only sell new instruments, given how many buyers rely on long pre-orders for those units. Exceptions like this aside, though, when we separate out just new and used sales, the overall list tends to stay more or less the same.

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In the vintage table, we're drawing the chronological cutoff at anything made before 2000. That may seem a bit too recent, but given that "vintage" is a totally subjective descriptor and, in the synth world, there's a certain renewed fetishism for '90s gear, synths like the Korg M1 can rightfully fall into the "vintage" bucket. It's a new decade next month anyway, so it's as good a time as any to move the lines. With the exception of the perpetually in-demand Juno models, most of the vintage bestsellers come from the lower end of the market, where module synths like the Roland JV-1080 still offer a good value to bargain-minded soundscapers.

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Turning our sights away from the old and into the new, below you'll see the rankings of the 10 best-selling new releases from 2019 by number of orders. With the exception of the powerful Pioneer Toraiz Squid Sequencer and Roland FP-10 Digital Piano, all of these models represent affordable takes on popular synth formats and legacies, such as the Elektron Model:Samples, the cheapest entry into the Elektron line to date, two new Korg Volcas, and two entries in Behringer's growing army of clones.

Like we've seen in the pedal market—where players are quick to buy something new, test it out, and re-sell if it doesn't suit their tastes—synth buyers seem open to at least trying the latest equipment. This results not only in a strong amount of new sales, but also strong used sales of newer synths.

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