Resynator documentary traces a daughter’s search for her father’s synth
Alison Tavel’s ten-year search for her late father’s rare synth turned a family attic discovery into a SXSW-winning film now on Apple TV.
The Resynator was never just another oddball synth story. Alison Tavel’s ten-year search for the instrument her late father Don Tavel built in the 1970s reached a much bigger audience with a U.K. premiere and Apple TV release on June 11, 2026. For vintage-synth readers, that matters because the film treats one rare machine as both hardware and heirloom, the kind of artifact that can vanish unless someone records its story. Apple TV lists it as a 2024 documentary running 1 hour 36 minutes, and its description says Alison uncovers the revolutionary synthesizer her late father created and forms a bond with the father she never knew.
That search started small. Alison has said the project began as a short film she expected to interest only friends and family, but the Resynator prototype had sat in her grandmother’s attic for 25 years before she retrieved it, and the documentary grew over a decade into a much larger restoration of memory as well as circuitry. She has also said Don Tavel died in a car crash when she was 10 weeks old in 1988, that he created the Resynator around 1979, and that records suggest only about six units may have been made. The film’s reach widened through conversations with Mike Biegel, Emmett Chapman and Peter Gabriel, who reportedly bought three Resynators through Syco Systems.
The gear itself is the hook for synth heads. Synthtopia describes the Resynator as an instrument-controlled, monophonic, rack-mount analog/digital hybrid synthesizer, and Synth History quotes Alison Tavel saying it can digitally track anything from a bass note to a piccolo note. That pitch-tracking range is the sort of detail that makes the machine feel less like a curio and more like a lost branch in electronic-instrument design, especially when set against Don Tavel’s academic background. Indiana University says Donald Louis Tavel became the first person to receive a Master of Music degree from the Indiana University Center for Computer and Electronic Music in 1976 in Bloomington, Indiana.
The film’s festival run reinforced that sense of rediscovery. Resynator won the SXSW Audience Award for Documentary Feature and was among the documentary-feature audience favorites at the 31st SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas. The official watch page calls it Alison Tavel’s directorial debut, which fits the arc here: a private family project became a documented history of an instrument that almost disappeared. Now that it is on Apple TV in the U.K., the Resynator is back where vintage-synth culture does its best work, in the overlap between rescued hardware, incomplete archives and the people still trying to map what these machines were capable of before time buried them.
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