Richard James Burgess

"On my own album and on Melba Moore I used Fairlight CMI a lot. I use Page R mainly because it's so easy to use. It works the way the human mind works; you can bung a one bar idea into it, then modify it into a two bar idea, then into a whole song, then have different fills every eight bars. It's a great way of working because you don't have to conceive the whole thing in a blob. Previously you used to have to hold the thing in your head, but now it's getting to the point where you can actually sketch onto these machines, and from that sketch you can build the full colour picture."

"I had just moved to NYC and I didn’t have much equipment with me – a LinnDrum, DX7 and a Juno 106 and I made the record with just those instruments."

"For instance, on the Melba Moore album I used the Yamaha RX11 drum machine with the individual outputs, which is MIDIable. I would write the song pattern on the RX11 and then MIDI it up to something else. I was MIDIing to an Emulator II which had samples on it which you could tune. It's basically using it instead of a Fairlight except you're not restricted to using Fairlight samples or Emulator samples. You could mix the RX11 sounds with the Emulator sounds, or you could trigger the DX7 with the RX11, or even an analogue synth via MIDI."

"I had used very early electronic percussion on the Easy Street recordings in the mid-70s: the Impakt Percussion device and I used my Synthi A to mock up percussive sounds."

"I had just moved to NYC and I didn’t have much equipment with me – a LinnDrum, DX7 and a Juno 106 and I made the record with just those instruments."