Mark Snow

I just got into the Roland S-760, and that’s a really cool adjunct to all the other MIDI gear I’ve got. It has a fabulous library, and I like the fact that it has a video screen.

(from Mark Snow's interview in the Mar 1996 issue of Keyboard magazine)

The Synclavier system may be at the heart of the studio, patched through a Soundcraft Sapphyre LC mixer, but that's not it for "MIDI boxes", as Mark refers to them: the studio also accommodates a Roland S760 sampler, Kurzweil MicroPiano module, an Emu Proteus 1, 2 (source of the famous X‑Files whistle, in combination, apparently, with a sample of Snow's wife whistling!) and 3, Emu Morpheus, Korg M1R and Wavestation SR. But these are adjuncts to the core sound produced by the Synclavier and its large library: "I have all these great samples on the Synclavier's magneto drives." Mark doesn't do much sampling of his own: "There are so many sample disks available that I have people transfer them onto Synclavier format." And is there anything else he'd like to add to the studio? "Well, the only thing that means anything to me is new sounds or new combinations of sounds. All I care about is if somebody has a great new sound library. That's what I'm looking for. Since my background is music, rather than electronics and technology, I just know as much as I have to. There are so many other composers who know about sampling rates and all that technical stuff, but none of that really interests me. So apart from new sounds, I could maybe upgrade the RAM and the number of voices on the Synclavier..."

"We use Tascam's DA88 8‑track digital recorder — I actually have Sony's PCM800 version. The music editor stripes a tape with timecode, and we mix down to that. We just drop the cassette into another machine at the mixing stage."