My main keyboard and MIDI controller is a legendary A-90EX thing – the cheapest keyboard with the key action indistinguishable from a real piano (for a non-professional, of course). It also has a small built-in synth that produces great keyboard sounds: pianos, organs, harpsichords, etc.
The Samson Servo-260 amplifier amplifies whatever comes out of the mixer, so I can hear what I’m doing.
My "workhorse" is Roland XV-3080 – a sample playback synthesizer that contains most of the basic orchestral and electronic sounds. It’s simple and versatile, has a lot of built-in sound effects. Everything that comes from it sounds somewhat more real than from anything else in my set-up.
Poly Evolver Rack from the esteemed synth designer Dave Smith. Great hybrid box with true analog and digital circuits. It sounds great and weird, but I wish it either had more knobs and buttons on the front panel or more convenient MIDI implementation.
The 
This is just a simplest mixer one could get for the studio work – Samson PL-1204 (mixers for a live performance are another category). My set-up has several sources of sound that are described in more details below:
- A-90EX keyboard
- Roland XV-3080 synth
- Waldorf Q synth
- Poly Evolver
- Computer’s sound card
They all have to be plugged somewhere for me to be able to hear them and this is what the mixer does: it combines all the sounds all the other boxes make. I also use it to produce recording of all hardware synths (software’s output is already on the computer).
