John Linnell

John Linnell plays a Roland Fantom X8 with a Radial JD6 6-channel rackmount direct box underneath. He also plays a bass clarinet miked with a Sennheiser 908 and G3 wireless system.

"We actually have worked with DrumCore; that's something that both of us have used a bunch. But again, that's more of a reference material."

"We both have been using [MOTU] MachFive, the software sampler."

"If it weren't for the unfortunate fact that I found out installing third-party chips in the [E-mu] Proteus 2000 does something completely weird to them that more or less makes them unreliable onstage after a couple of years. I never figured out why, but I had a bunch of Proteus 2000s, and I burned sample chips and started using those. A few years into that, it completely ruined the reliability of them as live instruments. As soon as they started to warm up, the pitch would get crazy. So in frustration, I finally just completely changed my setup, and now I'm in the Roland world.

[Previously,] I used the [Roland] A-30 as the controller, and the sound sources were the Proteus 2000s with a lot of third-party stuff, including especially my own samples. You could burn your chip using flash ROM thing that you could burn in a E-mu sampler."

In this screenshot from an archived version of TMBG.com's Q&A section, John Linnell himself confirms, in his own words, his use of the Yamaha MU5 on "Your Own Worst Enemy" from the album "Factory Showroom" and on his solo EP "House of Mayors".

In a 1996 interview with Music & Computers, John Linnell stated, "That's actually an old favorite of mine—it's the four-operator version of the Yamaha DX7, the TX81Z. That was a single-rack thing with some really cheesy sounds. It does sound like a Farfisa [electric organ], though. I used to own one of those but it died." He mentioned that this synthesizer was used on the track "Twisting."

John Linnell uses the Tascam DA-88 Digital Recorder, as confirmed in the article "Giant Step-Time—Computers in the Life of They Might Be Giants" from the They Might Be Giants Knowledge Base. The article notes, "In fact we both have TAS-CAM DA-88s now. It's like the [Alesis] ADAT machine, but we think it's a better product."

"But by the time we were making our first record, we were using a lot of other things, like a Casio CZ-101. Great, great instrument. That was the portamento noise at the beginning of "Chess Piece Face." We were pretty heavily into the Casio scene at that time."

John Linnell, a member of They Might Be Giants, uses an Akai S2000 audio sampler. This information is corroborated by a quote from a 1996 interview in the "Giant Step-Time—Computers in the Life of They Might Be Giants" article on TMBW: The They Might Be Giants Knowledge Base, where it is stated: "We have an endless pile of MIDI gear... I just got an Akai S2000, which is the same thing but with more memory. They sound great, just fantastic."

"I've got a PowerBook 145B that I've been bringing into the studio and sequencing with a very minimal setup. It's actually kind of appealing--in my little bag I can carry the PowerBook and this Yamaha MU5 [General MIDI module]. They're really great, and it works as an interface too, so I can bring that along and I've got the whole setup. That and this little Opcode Time Code Machine, just about half the size of a videocassette. It takes SMPTE and turns it into MIDI code. It's what I use at home, too: I just bring it with me."

In the July 2000 issue of CMJ New Music Monthly, John Linnell confirms he used the Gretsch La Tosca Victoria II accordion on his album State Songs. The accordion can also be seen in the "Doctor Worm" music video.

In a Tumblr post by tmbgareok, John Linnell says he used the Yamaha YCL-221II Standard Bb Bass Clarinet with Low Eb on “Cloisonne” from Join Us.