Michael Brook – Hybrid

When Michael Brook gets going, this deliciously trance inducing music is produced. Repeating guitar phrases, ethnic percussion, and scintillating chordings all combine to produce a sound of intuitive brilliance. Just like Hybrid, Distant Village, and Midday from his debut, he knows how to mix interesting noises. Funnily enough a Casio 202 was used on that album, and the murky swamp percussion sound was produced by feeding real percussion into a compressor, then an AMS pitch-shifter, then into speakers which fed back the results an octave higher.

"Well I remember using the Electro-Harmonix 16-second digital delay, which was pretty radical for that time. You could have 16 seconds of delay and play whole phrases on top of each other. We also did a lot of improvising at the editing stage - sort of chopping pieces up, playing new parts, and editing them together again. We also used a Yamaha CS80 synth on Hybrid, and of course there was the buzz bass - a modified instrument which sounds like a bass sitar. It produces a beautiful sound. The idea was really taken from a tambura - it's like a cross between a bass guitar and a tambura. I also used this little Hawaiian guitar quite a lot actually."

"The monitors are Yamaha NS 1000s - they've got a big, beautiful sound. Then there's the 16-track Fostex, the Atari C-Lab, the patch panel... Here's a fantastic Eventide H3000 harmonizer. This is a thing I made called a VEWA - a vocal effects waveform animator. It adds vocal-like formants to a signal. It's sort of like a random vocoder. I used it quite a bit on Hybrid. This here is a Lexicon LXP1 digital reverb, which has an incredible quality to it. The Yamaha TX802 is the synthesizer I use. This Bel digital delay line I use live a lot. It produces 13-second loops in sync with MIDI, so it's like having a rhythm guitarist who can play for 13 seconds - that's very important for my live work. Here's the Yamaha SPX90 and Roland reverb I use sometimes."

"Well I remember using the Electro-Harmonix 16-second digital delay, which was pretty radical for that time. You could have 16 seconds of delay and play whole phrases on top of each other. We also did a lot of improvising at the editing stage - sort of chopping pieces up, playing new parts, and editing them together again. We also used a Yamaha CS80 synth on Hybrid, and of course there was the buzz bass - a modified instrument which sounds like a bass sitar. It produces a beautiful sound. The idea was really taken from a tambura - it's like a cross between a bass guitar and a tambura. I also used this little Hawaiian guitar quite a lot actually."

The monitors are Yamaha NS 1000s - they've got a big, beautiful sound. Then there's the 16-track Fostex, the Atari C-Lab, the patch panel... Here's a fantastic Eventide H3000 harmonizer. This is a thing I made called a VEWA - a vocal effects waveform animator. It adds vocal-like formants to a signal. It's sort of like a random vocoder. I used it quite a bit on Hybrid. This here is a Lexicon LXP1 digital reverb, which has an incredible quality to it. The Yamaha TX802 is the synthesizer I use. This Bel digital delay line I use live a lot. It produces 13-second loops in sync with MIDI, so it's like having a rhythm guitarist who can play for 13 seconds - that's very important for my live work. Here's the Yamaha SPX90 and Roland reverb I use sometimes."

"The monitors are Yamaha NS 1000s - they've got a big, beautiful sound. Then there's the 16-track Fostex, the Atari C-Lab, the patch panel... Here's a fantastic Eventide H3000 harmonizer. This is a thing I made called a VEWA - a vocal effects waveform animator. It adds vocal-like formants to a signal. It's sort of like a random vocoder. I used it quite a bit on Hybrid. This here is a Lexicon LXP1 digital reverb, which has an incredible quality to it. The Yamaha TX802 is the synthesizer I use. This Bel digital delay line I use live a lot. It produces 13-second loops in sync with MIDI, so it's like having a rhythm guitarist who can play for 13 seconds - that's very important for my live work. Here's the Yamaha SPX90 and Roland reverb I use sometimes."

"The monitors are Yamaha NS 1000s - they've got a big, beautiful sound. Then there's the 16-track Fostex, the Atari C-Lab, the patch panel... Here's a fantastic Eventide H3000 harmonizer. This is a thing I made called a VEWA - a vocal effects waveform animator. It adds vocal-like formants to a signal. It's sort of like a random vocoder. I used it quite a bit on Hybrid. This here is a Lexicon LXP1 digital reverb, which has an incredible quality to it. The Yamaha TX802 is the synthesizer I use. This Bel digital delay line I use live a lot. It produces 13-second loops in sync with MIDI, so it's like having a rhythm guitarist who can play for 13 seconds - that's very important for my live work. Here's the Yamaha SPX90 and Roland reverb I use sometimes."

"The monitors are Yamaha NS 1000s - they've got a big, beautiful sound. Then there's the 16-track Fostex, the Atari C-Lab, the patch panel... Here's a fantastic Eventide H3000 harmonizer. This is a thing I made called a VEWA - a vocal effects waveform animator. It adds vocal-like formants to a signal. It's sort of like a random vocoder. I used it quite a bit on Hybrid. This here is a Lexicon LXP1 digital reverb, which has an incredible quality to it. The Yamaha TX802 is the synthesizer I use. This Bel digital delay line I use live a lot. It produces 13-second loops in sync with MIDI, so it's like having a rhythm guitarist who can play for 13 seconds - that's very important for my live work. Here's the Yamaha SPX90 and Roland reverb I use sometimes."

"I developed the Infinite Guitar around '83-84. I'd ordered an E-Bow for recording Hybrid. I was very interested in some techniques used in Indian and Arabic music, where you work with a lot of ornamentation and bending notes. So I thought that maybe a E-Bow might be good for that. But for some reason they kept mislaying my order. So I started fooling around myself and pretty quickly came up with this really weird looking machine. When finally the E-Bow arrived, the Infinite Guitar worked better, so I've been using it ever since."