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)

Today we probably had 14 to 16 Synclavier tracks working, the piano is from an outboard module [Kurzweil MicroPiano], there’s a low-end thing which is a Proteus/2, and the Roland. That’s pretty much it today.

Jeff Charbonneau discussing Mark Snow's equipment in the March 1996 issue of Keyboard magazine

"Flipping through the voices on his Emu Proteus/2 orchestral synthesizer, he tried various instruments... then he stumbled on one of the higher-numbered voices, a patch called "Whistling Joe." It seemed silly at first, but the more he played a simple six-note melody with it, the more he liked it." - from a Vice / Radio Motherboard interview with Mark Snow about how the X-Files theme was created.

"I’m probably one of the last people on Earth who uses this thing called a Synclavier which was invented in the '60s by three professors from Dartmouth University... the main instrument of my set-up is the Synclavier and that’s nine years of The X-Files plus movies. There are a lot of buttons on it, but it is lightning fast and it cost as much as a house when I bought it in 1986." - from Mark Snow's interview with Mandy News.

Mark's Korg M1R can be seen near the bottom of his rack in this photo, sourced from his podcast interview at Roadie Free Radio: http://www.roadiefreeradio.com/podcast-1/2016/10/3/mark-snow

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..."

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..."

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..."

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."