Brian Eno

In this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, Eno's acquisition and use of a Shure SM-58 is described in detail. "For Eno, a sense of urgency in music making is paramount, the kind of urgency that says: ‘if a demo tape is exciting enough, then use that as the core of a track and avoid endless mixes and takes’. Wrong Way Up is about this kind of urgency. Take for example Eno’s use of an 'old beaten up Shure SM58 microphone'".

“'I found this microphone that I think is sort of a magic microphone. When we were working on 'Carmen Miranda' and 'Words For The Dying' at the Strongroom, we tried this mic, and that mic, and they all sounded terrible. And there was this Shure, which is the cheapest basic rock’n’roll mike you can get. John didn’t want to use it ‘cos he didn’t like it, he thought. I said ‘John, try this Shure, you might as well’. He just said four words through it and I said to the studio engineer, ‘I’ll buy this mic.’ (laughs) And I bought it on the spot.”

In this interview with Chris Everard of Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music conducted in October 1984, Eno says, "I have two instruments which I love, one is a copy of a 1957 Stratocaster a Fernandez copy, it's a brilliant instrument, beautiful guitar, which Bob Quine, Lou Reed's guitar player, selected for me in New York. He'd already bought three or four Fernandez guitars himself, he's a Stratocaster fan.

"A Fernandez copy costs the same as a brand new Stratocaster, but they are perfect copies of, perfect copies - like they do a '53, a '57 and a '61 and I have the '57. It's an absolutely identical copy, you can't get a '57 Strat now that sounds good for less than 15 hundred dollars. My one's a beautiful, beautiful instrument."

In this image from the late 1970s, we see Eno in the studio with his then-favored Starway guitar.

In this BBC-produced mini-documentary, Eno is sitting in his studio and pulls out a Stratacoustic to briefly perform the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" in an open tuning.

What kind of fuzz box do you have?

"I have a great one. It's very old. It's called a Project WEM. I've never seen another one. But it's a lovely fuzz box. It's been used by many famous guitar players, because they say it's got a unique sound. People have actually tried to make copies of it. They took down all the components and tried to build another one, but they never really got quite the same thing. I've used it on all my records, actually, from the first record I made. Whenever you hear my particular fuzz guitar sound, that's the fuzz box. "

http://www.effectsdatabase.com/model/wem/project5#

In an image from this blog detailing the recording of Karl Hyde and Brian Eno's collaboration on the album Someday World, we see Eno's GDI21 laying across his guitar.

In this article, this photo shows a Fender Squier Precision bass in Eno's studio, with the caption "Eno's studio is still home to a few traditional instruments..."

In this Sound On Sound article, there is a photo of Eno's studio showing an Ampeg AMUB-1 Fretless bass.

In this transcribed interview from Sound On Sound magazine's October 1990 issue, Eno is asked if he has a lot of instruments in his studio. He replies, "No, I don’t have a lot of instruments. I have a DX7 which is my main instrument. I still keep discovering great new things about it. I’m not really interested in all the options that an instrument can give you, and I know now that they are pretty much infinite. What I’m interested in is the kind of rapport I have with an instrument, and that takes a long time to develop. You wouldn’t just pick up a guitar and expect to immediately understand the thing."

In this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, Eno is asked if he has a lot of instruments in his studio. In addition to the Yamaha DX7, he answers, "I’ve got two others as well — I’ve got a Prophet VS and an M1."

In this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, Eno is asked his recording process, and he replies "All the drum track are originally played on an M1 — they’re M1 sequenced drum tracks. Then they are quite severely treated so that they become more industrial sounding than the M1 would normally allow. But it’s the kind of thing that people generally do these days, you know."

In this article on the making of David Bowie's "Heroes" album, producer Tony Visconti recalls, "Brian brought his EMS Synthi with him, which is a synthesizer built in a briefcase, and it has no real keyboard — it's got a kind of flat, plastic keyboard which Brian very rarely used. He used the joystick a lot, and the oscillator banks, and he would do live dialing — they look like combination-safe rotary knobs on the three oscillator banks."

In this interview with Chris Everard of Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music conducted in October 1984, Eno says, "I don't like the Prophet Five... I like the Pro One though. I've also got a Casio 202."

In this interview with Chris Everard from the October 1984 issue of Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music magazine, Eno is asked, "I seem to remember seeing an old film of you with Roxy, I think it was The Old Grey Whistle Test or something similar, and you were playing what seemed to be an ARP2600, is that right?"

He replies, "No, I tell you what that was, it was essentially an EMS VCS3 synthesiser built into a unit that I designed. With Roxy you see, a lot of the time I was taking live instruments and feeding them into the synthesiser and treating them, so what I had was the basic synthesiser with some extra bits to help me... they are quite rough though, those early synths."

In this article in the December 1995 issue of Future Music magazine, the TG77 is named in the "Kit List" as being one of Eno's synths.

In this live clip from 1995, Eno joins U2 to play "Miss Sarajevo" with Luciano Pavarotti. Eno's Omnichord is on the music stand directly in front of him, and we our first good look at the 1:10 mark.

Photographs accompanying the Sound on Sound article show Eno's setup to include a Korg Triton Studio 88 Workstation.

"I suppose it does sound synthy, yes, a pure, soft sort of middle frequency sound. It was one of the most important sounds in those earlier albums. It was the sound I kept working with and returning to... I never had a Minimoog at that time, I didn't get a Minimoog until about...1976."

"I don't like the Prophet Five... I like the Pro One though. I've also got a Casio 202... "

In this image, we see Eno tinkering with a PT-80, presumably during the course of an interview.

Included in Eno's kit list.

In this transcript of an interview from Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music in October 1984 by Chris Everard, Eno reveals that he didn't at the time own many instruments. One, however, was "an old, old Farfisa organ - it used to belong to Pink Floyd."

More detail is provided in this interview with John Kavanaugh who purchased the instrument from Eno. He provides much more detail about its history, including the name of the model:

"Earlier on John told me about his fondness for vintage gear and old mics, but the best piece in his collection is a Farfisa Compact Duo organ which was once owned by the Pink Floyd. 'It came to me when it was being sold on the Internet by Brian Eno,' John explains. 'Brian Eno got it from a guy called Bill Kelsey who's now sadly dead, but his son Marlon still works for Eno. Bill was the Pink Floyd's sort of gadget boffin and he would make up bits of effects and bits of stuff for their live sets in the late '60s and early '70s. When he went to work for Eno, he took the organ with him. I've actually got a film of it with the Pink Floyd in the Syd-era, I've also got a couple of photos of it on stage. Most Farfisa organs were pale grey with a black band around the middle, but this one is charcoal grey, it's a sort of early model of the organ and it's quite distinctive for that reason. Eno used it on two of his albums, on tracks on "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" and "Another Green World". The organ comes with a certificate from Eno which says where it came from and now it has been restored and it works... The interesting thing is that the guy who fixed it found a plectrum inside. Syd wasn't much of a plectrum guy and Eno doesn't strike me as much of a plectrum guy. I can only assume that it may have come from David Gilmour. I also found on the front panel of the organ, on the little metal panel at the side of the lower manual, "accord to progression" written in pencil marks. I played that progression on another organ and thought it was "Saucerful of Secrets," the title for the second Pink Floyd album, but it was actually the prototype version of "The Massed Gadgets Of Hercules" and this was the organ part for the end of it which must have been penciled down there by Rick Wright when they were rehearsing the track in the first place. I remember I was home because I had lost my voice and wasn't feeling very well when I discovered this, but I felt like phoning everybody to tell them what I had found!'"

Brian Eno uses and briefly speaks about Synplant in this BBC Documentary

The item can be seen into this video.

The item can be seen into this video

"Instruments that sound good inspire better music, and it's a struggle to make music with bad-sounding instruments, irrespective of how talented you might be. Software instruments are no different: although they are usually discussed and sold in terms of their 'features' what really makes you return to an instrument repeatedly is the much more elusive factor of inspirational sound quality.

I don't know enough about programming to understand why some software tools fascinate you while others make you want to get another job, but I do know that when I use anything by ES I get excited by what I'm hearing. These tools have the sonic richness of great analogue instruments - with the features of innovative digital ones."