Lol Tolhurst

"A lot of things on the album are pretend versions of particular genres of music. We've got a pretend funk track, "Hot Hot Hot!!!," which sounds sort of like an old Chic track. On that, I'm using the Emulator for cello and some human voices. We've got pretend Motown too, "Why Can't I Be You?," which was a combination of a patch on the Roland JX-8P called "Stab Brass," MIDIed to a trumpet sample on the Mirage, together with and Emulator brass sound. "

"The first synthesizer I bought was a Roland Juno-60."

"Where we used keyboards as sampling devices, we'd sample a bit of guitar, say, and turn it 'round the other way, or sample a bit of noise and do something with it on the [E-mu] Emulator II, then just play it in a rhythmic fashion in the song."

"I'm most comfortable on the DX7 because it's got the easiest keyboard to play. It's definitely not the easiest to program, but in a live situation as well as in the studio, that's the one I use, MIDIing other things to it."

In this interview Lol states ". We also used an ancient ARP Solina [String Ensemble]. It only has three sounds on it, but you can't recreate those sounds on anything else...." and "We've had that Solina for about eight years, and we've never found anything that could supersede" it.http://www.musicfanclubs.org/cure/press/I15.html

In the interview "A Dose Of Keyboard Fever," Lol Tolhurst mentions, "We used to have an old Roland string machine as well, an SH-09 or something like that." Although he refers to the RS-09, which The Cure frequently used during the Pornography era, this statement highlights a common mix-up due to the similar appearance of the SH-09.

In this interview Lol states, " I found a woman who taught me for about four or five months; we used a [Sequential] Prophet-5"

"I'm using a rack system, composed of two Oberheim DPX-1 sample players, which play Mirage, Prophet, and Emulator disks. I've also got a rack-mounted DX7, a Roland digital piano module, a Roland Super Jupiter module, and a Roland DP-5 multi-effects unit. It's all controlled by a Simmons computer mixer, which has about 64 programs in it. Through that mixer I change all the MIDI channels on all the modules. I control the mixer through a Roland MIDI MKB-200 keyboard controller. You can assign split points to the keyboard, so I do that for a lot of songs where there is, say, a piano, a koto, then a trumpet sound. Rather than take an Emulator and things like that on the road, I wanted a very easy live setup, so that I could do most of the work beforehand. That's another reason for having those two Oberheim sample players. An Emulator disk takes a long time to load, and you can't say, "Sorry, Madison Square Garden, I've gotta load this disk." We've worked out a system where we can keep switching back and forth [between the DPX-1s]. The only other alternative would be to use something like a hard disk, which I don't really want to do because the hard disk has to be installed in the Emulator and is notoriously unreliable on the road. The good thing about having a rack system is that it can be well protected. You can throw it off the back of the truck and nothing will happen to it."

"I'm using a rack system, composed of two Oberheim DPX-1 sample players, which play Mirage, Prophet, and Emulator disks. I've also got a rack-mounted DX7, a Roland digital piano module, a Roland Super Jupiter module, and a Roland DP-5 multi-effects unit. It's all controlled by a Simmons computer mixer, which has about 64 programs in it. Through that mixer I change all the MIDI channels on all the modules. I control the mixer through a Roland MIDI MKB-200 keyboard controller. You can assign split points to the keyboard, so I do that for a lot of songs where there is, say, a piano, a koto, then a trumpet sound. Rather than take an Emulator and things like that on the road, I wanted a very easy live setup, so that I could do most of the work beforehand. That's another reason for having those two Oberheim sample players. An Emulator disk takes a long time to load, and you can't say, "Sorry, Madison Square Garden, I've gotta load this disk." We've worked out a system where we can keep switching back and forth [between the DPX-1s]. The only other alternative would be to use something like a hard disk, which I don't really want to do because the hard disk has to be installed in the Emulator and is notoriously unreliable on the road. The good thing about having a rack system is that it can be well protected. You can throw it off the back of the truck and nothing will happen to it."

At the 0:25 of this video and throughout the Roland JX-3P is visible