Stephen Duffy

"I was working in a small recording studio in AIR Lyndhurst in what used to be studio manager's office," recalls Duffy. "I had recorded at AIR off and on over the years, and had mixed Looking For A Day In The Night there in 1999. Following that, the room became available and they offered it to me. I installed a Pro Tools Digi 001, and a G4 with Logic, and a Yamaha 02R desk and some bits and pieces I had collected over the years, and for the next three or four years I'd go there every day to work on music. Out of that time came Lilac 6, the Devils album Dark Circles [Duffy's collaboration with Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes], and Keep Going [Duffy's most recent solo album].

"I was working in a small recording studio in AIR Lyndhurst in what used to be studio manager's office," recalls Duffy. "I had recorded at AIR off and on over the years, and had mixed Looking For A Day In The Night there in 1999. Following that, the room became available and they offered it to me. I installed a Pro Tools Digi 001, and a G4 with Logic, and a Yamaha 02R desk and some bits and pieces I had collected over the years, and for the next three or four years I'd go there every day to work on music. Out of that time came Lilac 6, the Devils album Dark Circles [Duffy's collaboration with Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes], and Keep Going [Duffy's most recent solo album].

"I was working in a small recording studio in AIR Lyndhurst in what used to be studio manager's office," recalls Duffy. "I had recorded at AIR off and on over the years, and had mixed Looking For A Day In The Night there in 1999. Following that, the room became available and they offered it to me. I installed a Pro Tools Digi 001, and a G4 with Logic, and a Yamaha 02R desk and some bits and pieces I had collected over the years, and for the next three or four years I'd go there every day to work on music. Out of that time came Lilac 6, the Devils album Dark Circles [Duffy's collaboration with Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes], and Keep Going [Duffy's most recent solo album].

'Ghosts' "This song started off by me messing around with a Linn Drum. I programmed something reminiscent of 'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush, which ended up being completely changed. I think that the 'Electronic Sequential Keyboards' I'm credited as playing is a Roland JV5080."

'Sin Sin Sin' "This was the first song we ever wrote, and it basically started off as a bass drum doing fours and a bass sequence in eights over the top of it. He sang the whole of the first verse over the top of that, just like that. It was quite incredible. The sequenced section that you can still hear started off as a Reason sound, and then I added the Roland XV5080, and added an SH101 sound and perhaps a Prophet 5 to give it a little bit more of a gritty, gnarly texture. I messed around with that sound quite a lot. We changed the speed of the song many times, and the Reason sound became so strange and deconstructed that it became part of the song."

"In the end the studio consisted of a 48-channel Pro Tools HD system running on a G4 with one Prism AD8 converter, a Yamaha 02R96 desk, which we soon got rid of, plus things like an Apogee PSX 100, Lexicon 960, Eventide H3000 and other outboard equipment. There was another G4 for Logic Audio with an RME interface to connect digitally to Pro Tools. We transferred everything we'd done on my Digi 001 to Rob's HD system and, in the end, also everything that we did in Logic."

"In the end the studio consisted of a 48-channel Pro Tools HD system running on a G4 with one Prism AD8 converter, a Yamaha 02R96 desk, which we soon got rid of, plus things like an Apogee PSX 100, Lexicon 960, Eventide H3000 and other outboard equipment. There was another G4 for Logic Audio with an RME interface to connect digitally to Pro Tools. We transferred everything we'd done on my Digi 001 to Rob's HD system and, in the end, also everything that we did in Logic."

"In the end the studio consisted of a 48-channel Pro Tools HD system running on a G4 with one Prism AD8 converter, a Yamaha 02R96 desk, which we soon got rid of, plus things like an Apogee PSX 100, Lexicon 960, Eventide H3000 and other outboard equipment. There was another G4 for Logic Audio with an RME interface to connect digitally to Pro Tools. We transferred everything we'd done on my Digi 001 to Rob's HD system and, in the end, also everything that we did in Logic.

"We used quite a lot of strange old pieces of gear that we would not have chosen ourselves. We had, for instance, an ad hoc microphone set up, a vintage AKG C12, with Neve 1073 mic preamp and EQ, which often went through a valve Teletronix LA2A compressor when recording vocals and acoustic guitars. It was not a microphone I would have chosen, but it sounded good to me. Rob also had a Roland JV5080 and a Yamaha Motif that someone had once bought for him, still boxed up. These were not boxes I'd ever looked at before."

"We did not go to tape at any point," explains Duffy. "It just didn't occur to any of us that we should use analogue tape. I got into Pro Tools during the recording of Keep Going, mainly to try and see how analogue one could make it, and I found that it sounded very good indeed. I recorded Looking For A Day In The Night on an Akai MG1214 analogue 12-track, which had a Betamax-like cassette in it, as well as a built-in mixing desk. I couldn't tell whether Day In The Night or Keep Going was analogue or digital, or vice versa. Obviously HD offers a sonic improvement, but with people turning to MP3, that's quite meaningless. Yet you can't knock it. Everyone is so on love with their iPod, that it's bringing people back to music. So people are falling in love with music again, and this means it's a very healthy time for music."