Music is broad, deep, and diverse—and so are musicians. With a plethora of musical instruments, tools, and tastes, finding the right gift for a musician can be a daunting task. In this shopping guide, we explore five products sure spark the creativity of any musician and will leave them impressed with your taste and knowledge in gear.
A Unique, Fun, and Surprisingly Complex Classic:
Suzuki Musical Instrument Corp Omnichord OM-108 Electronic Musical Instrument
Better known as just "the Omnichord," this instrument ceased production in 1996, but a surge in nostalgic popularity had its manufacturer reintroduce this unique and portable instrument to the market in 2024. It may look like a toy, but don't be fooled by its playful form factor. While the Omnichord can easily be picked up and played, its capability of complex harmony and expression is extensive enough to start even the most experienced musicians' creativity flowing.
The Omnichord instrument is played somewhat like a harp, and up to three chord buttons can be pressed simultaneously to play 108 different chords, including sus4 and add9 harmonies. It features 10 different tones, a built-in speaker, a MIDI out, and 10 premade rhythm patterns—famously, Gorillaz's "Clint Eastwood" was inspired and originally composed with the Omnichord's "Rock 1" preset, so don't overlook its potential.
The Omnichord is not an inexpensive gift by any means, but the musician in your life will love this unique instrument for its creative potential. It's also a fantastic conversation piece: it's portable, goofy, and anyone can pick it up and play right away! You may also consider purchasing the kit that includes a gig bag, strap buttons, and a power supply.
Impress with Portable Tech:
teenage engineering OP-1 field Portable Synthesizer Workstation
The OP-1 is an iconic, portable, and powerful synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer used by many big-time musicians. It's also a fantastic gift for anyone who is serious about music production.
Meant to be a mobile music studio, the OP-1's form factor is incredibly small; however, its suite of features is anything but, with over one hundred added to this newest "field" version. Different modes and workflows are displayed using a bevy of slick and well-designed skeuomorphic UIs on its hi-res AMOLED display, and its notable tools include a vocoder, built-in FX, Bluetooth for wireless MIDI, an accelerometer, built-in speakers, and an FM radio receiver and transmitter, allowing you to loop and sample anything on the radio.
Beware that this machine is quite pricy and requires some intensive study and practice to understand and use properly. If you're sure that your gift recipient has some prior experience and the motivation to learn how to use this beast of a machine, they will be absolutely thrilled to receive the OP-1 field.
For Those Who Like to Experiment:
teenage engineering Pocket Operator Series
If you're looking for a more inexpensive gift, the teenage engineering Pocket Operator Series is a great choice. The PO series is a lineup of nine ultra-portable music devices—each with its own personality, intended functionality, and sound character. All models feature a unique LCD screen invoking the charm of Nintendo's old Game and Watch series of electronic games. Emblematic of teenage engineering's idiosyncratic design philosophy, the UIs of the PO series are amusingly cartoonish, featuring boxing matches, bar patrons, and arcade machines—but they do surprisingly well conveying real-time information to the user.
Any one Pocket Operator can be a powerful creative tool, but we love the fact that the PO series is designed with modularity in mind, meaning you can daisy-chain and run any number of them in any order in a series using 3.5mm stereo audio cables—or in parallel if you use a signal multiplier. Pocket operators can also be used modularly with many different devices, even those from different brands (as long they support audio pulse sync signals—mileage may vary).
The Pocket Operator series' lineup includes the a drum machine and sequencer (PO-12), a bass synth (PO-14), a lead synth (PO-16), a chiptune "arcade synth" (PO-20), an "office" percussion machine and sequencer (PO-24), a "robot synth" (PO-28), a microtonic drum synth (PO-32), a sampler with a built in mic (PO-33), and a vocal manipulator, also with a mic (PO-35).
These machines are tiny and delicate, so you should consider purchasing a case along with it (though there are many interesting 3D printer blueprints available online as well). We love how customizable, inexpensive, and fun the Pocket Operators are, how you can get the one that makes the most sense for your recipient, and the fact that this gift can grow if the recipient wants to expand their collection or explore different possibilities.
For Producers, Composers, and Sound Designers Working in the Box:
Spectrasonics Omnisphere Power Synth 2 Virtual Instrument
If your musician's workflow is primarily "in the box,"—i.e., on a computer running a digital audio workstation (DAW)—then you can't go wrong gifting them perhaps the most useful tool they may ever use. Omnisphere is absurdly powerful. Because it's a hybrid synthesizer, it can create simple digital waveforms to wholly unique ones using granular, wavetable, and FM synthesis, combining up to 8 sources at once. If that's giving you choice paralysis, Omnisphere comes with a sound library of over 14,000 presets and fifty-eight FX units, along with simple sine, square, saw, and triangle presets, making it simple to experiment and explore.
Omnisphere also offers hardware synth integration, a bespoke feature that can transform over sixty-five popular hardware synthesizers into hands-on controllers, automapping parameters instantly to the instrument. This allows one to use Omnisphere as one would use a hardware synthesizer instrument, and immediately unlocks huge creative potential while being able to take your hands off the mouse and keyboard.
The reason we think any musician will love Omnisphere is its versatility: it can be used either in the studio or live on stage for a wide variety of genres, while also being a powerful tool for sound designers, film composers, and Foley artists. Omnisphere is not the easiest tool to use, but if the musician in your life is serious about software synthesis, there isn't a better tool you could give them.
For Anyone and Everyone:
Audio-Technica ATH-M50x Closed-Back Monitor Headphones
The Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones have been a consistent and affordable solution for studio reference headphones for many years, their popularity due to their high performance compared to the price. Musicians, especially those who spend days in the recording studio or their workstation, can go through their headphones quite quickly—so even if the musician you know already has headphones, another high-quality pair tuned for reference monitoring is always welcome.
Beyond the high-level performance and attractive price, we like these headphones for their form factor, being able to fold into itself for easy transportation as well as one-ear listening for DJs and singers in the studio. It comes with three detachable cables, one short, one long, and one coiled for whatever is most appropriate for your listening or monitoring environment, as well as a 3.5mm to ¼' adapter. The musician in your life will be sure to appreciate these headphones, whether they stay in the studio or are used when they travel.
