We have taken a look at the Alternative-Electronics music gear database to find out just which gear manufacturers are the most popular and who produces the most widely-used gear. These statistics are based on the database's current state (as of January, 2010), which includes the equipment lists of more than 250 experimental electronic artists.

The top three manufacturers are all based in Japan: Korg, Roland and Yamaha. More than 60% of the bands surveyed used a piece of gear manufactured by Korg; 55% had equipment from Roland and over 40% had a Yamaha product in their studios. Each of these three companies has produced multiple ground-breaking instruments over the years: the MS-20 and Electribe series from Korg, The TB-303 and 909 and 808 drum machines from Roland as well as Yamaha's DX7 and CS series of hardware synthesizers.

Sweden's Clavia comes in at fourth place with a total of 65 bands. This is particularly impressive considering, in contrast to other massive multinational corporations, Clavia employs just 20 workers. However their Nord Lead synthesizers enjoy widespread popularity across a range of music genres and to this day, Clavia's synths are still hand-made in Sweden.

A sign of software's increasingly important role in music production, German developer Steinberg is fifth on our list, with 61 users. Their flagship product, Cubase, is the industry standard digital audio workstation. In fact, 60 of the 61 bands with Steinberg products were users of Cubase.

Following the above-mentioned manufacturers were, in the following order: Akai, Alesis, Access Music, Native Instruments, Novation, E-mu, Waldorf, Boss, M-Audio and Moog. These are all household names for producers of electronic music, with each manufacturer being responsible for the development of pioneering equipment over the years.

my review here http://latds.com/