Kirk Degiorgio

"I've patched in this Dual Prismatic Oscillator from Make Noise. This is a classic kind of Buchla west coast style dual oscillator. I generally use an output from one side and then I use the other oscillator in LFO mode to modulate the sound."

In a photo from Attackmagazine, Kirk Degiorgio is seen using the Native Instruments Maschine MKII, highlighting its role in his music production setup.

He says, "so we used to share a Kawai K3, Derrick’s DX100 and I think we had one of Derrick’s reel-to-reels at one point."

He says, ". I came back from Detroit, sold my record collection, got a few grand together and bought an Akai S950 sampler, a Roland D-5 as a master keyboard, a DAT machine, a Roland R-5, which was their latest drum machine at the time, and an Atari 1040 with Opcode Vision. So I had pretty good gear to start with and I locked myself away for six months to read manuals and teach myself."

He says, ". I came back from Detroit, sold my record collection, got a few grand together and bought an Akai S950 sampler, a Roland D-5 as a master keyboard, a DAT machine, a Roland R-5, which was their latest drum machine at the time, and an Atari 1040 with Opcode Vision. So I had pretty good gear to start with and I locked myself away for six months to read manuals and teach myself."

In this studio interview with Future Music, Kirk Degiorgio mentions that his studio is mostly based around modular systems and that he also uses Ableton Live 9.

Kirk Degiorgio talks about how he uses the Sync-Gen to sync his eurorack system with Ableton.

While running the Make Noise DPO through the O'Tool, Kirk Degiorgio says, "I've got this fantastic little oscilloscope module. You can see how the wave shapes can change, you've got various angle shape, you can fold, you can get pretty much wild sounds out of this."

In a photo from Attack Magazine, Kirk Degiorgio is seen using the Akai Professional APC40.

He says, "so we used to share a Kawai K3, Derrick’s DX100 and I think we had one of Derrick’s reel-to-reels at one point."

He says, "but one thing I do know is that his 808 sounded different to any other 808 I’ve ever heard – he said he’d opened it up and adjusted a few trimpots."

He says, I got to see Metroplex Studio in 1990 and pretty much all Juan’s music was based on the Pro-One. Those classic arpeggiated synth lines on all the Model 500 stuff are all Pro-One.

He says, ". I came back from Detroit, sold my record collection, got a few grand together and bought an Akai S950 sampler, a Roland D-5 as a master keyboard, a DAT machine, a Roland R-5, which was their latest drum machine at the time, and an Atari 1040 with Opcode Vision. So I had pretty good gear to start with and I locked myself away for six months to read manuals and teach myself."

He says, ". I came back from Detroit, sold my record collection, got a few grand together and bought an Akai S950 sampler, a Roland D-5 as a master keyboard, a DAT machine, a Roland R-5, which was their latest drum machine at the time, and an Atari 1040 with Opcode Vision. So I had pretty good gear to start with and I locked myself away for six months to read manuals and teach myself."

he says, "o you want to come in and add some ideas and stuff?’ So I went into Black Dog Towers, the studio, and again it was a very minimal setup – Atari, Matrix 1000, 808, Fostex mixer – and they said, ‘Go on then, just program some drums.’ They couldn’t really read music either so that was an even bigger influence on me, seeing those guys do it."

In the "The Secrets of Kirk's Sound" section of his interview with Attack Magazine, Kirk Degiorgio discusses his use of a Eurorack modular synthesizer.

He says, "They're great monitors. Really detailed. I used to live in a bigger house so they're quite big for the room but they're decent at low level. And no complaints from the neighbours. Yet."