The Human League – Fascination!

It was while working on the Human League's 'Fascination' that Martin Rushent invented one of the most popular studio tricks of the '80s: using the 'loop triggering' facility on the AMS DMX1580 digital delay as a primitive sampler. "I used it for the bass, snare and bass riff," he says. "I knew AMS reasonably well by the time they brought out this very high-quality digital delay line, so I asked if they could adapt it so that it wouldn't erase its sample. I'd been working with the Linn Drum and realised that it was just a memory of drum sounds, but I wanted to make my own sounds. So they put in four seconds of delay for me. All you had to do was feed in the signal and it would start sampling the moment it saw a rise in voltage. Then you could edit it a bit. After that you'd set it to Fire mode and trigger it via a click fed into the audio input, so I used the Micro Composer to send it a pulse. AMS asked me to show them what I wanted it for so I did a demo by feeding in a bass drum sound and triggering it via the Roland. After that, they made it standard on their products, sold it to the Japanese, and I made fuck-all out of it!"