808 State – Transmission Suite

"It's just a matter of what you can get your hands on", Massey confirms. On Newbuild the group used almost exclusively Roland gear, with a TR808, TR909, TB303, four SH101s and a Juno 106 which sports a broken key and a note which sticks on every patch except patch 41.

"It's just a matter of what you can get your hands on", Massey confirms. On Newbuild the group used almost exclusively Roland gear, with a TR808, TR909, TB303, four SH101s and a Juno 106 which sports a broken key and a note which sticks on every patch except patch 41.

"One of our favourite sounds, that we've used a lot and that keeps cropping up, is from an old ARP Quartet that we picked up for £30. It's a really 'cheesy' string synth of which we're great fans - we've also got a Moog Opus III. The trouble with old stuff is that it's always going down, but we're lucky in that we've got this friend Tony Wride, who we call Captain Techno, who helps out. He's an airline pilot [and ex-SOS writer] and he flies to America a lot - he's also an analogue freak and he brings over synths, repairs them, and then sells them. In fact we've got another ARP 2600 coming over with him - that's a synth that we've used a lot on this album."

GM: “After the process, it’s hard to tell the difference between a softsynth and a live synth but we used quite a few. There’s a lot of nice stuff in the Arturia package like the CMI Fairlight and Buchla libraries. We can’t afford the original gear so they’re useful.”

Graham Massey interviewed on MusicRadar, discussing the creation of the album Transmission Suite.