Retro for me is playing a Roland D10 or calling up a suitably vintage patch on the JV-1080 or MicroKorg. From time to time I'll do something with stacks of vocal aah or ooh waveforms to build some kind of massive layered sound. It's easy, fast, and I don't have to contemplate microphones. On a good day music happens in realtime, played by either me or the sequencer.

I found the origins of vocal pads most interesting, I think I'd go nuts making chords by juggling faders on the mixing desk.

I grabbed some sound banks of my D-10 off of Synthzone.com. Some of the patch names are disturbing.

Obiwan's Horny

I bought a Roland D-10 Multi Timbral Linear Synthesizer on E-bay. It's about 10kg of 1988 in keyboard form. It's about the oldest thing around that can wired up with midi and play drums and upto 8 other instruments simultaneously.

Roland D10

I bought a new synth. Well it's somewhat second hand and 1994 vintage and despite the really low prices you can pick these up on ebay for next to nothing, but it's pretty awesome (/me fails to find an appropriately dated word to describe this, rad or mental just don't suffice). It's a Roland JV-1080, which is a rack mount version of the JV series of synth.