Stephen Morris

In this response to a fan's question, Morris identifies an RX-11.

What would be your favourite drum kit to use?

My favorite drum kit. Oh, that’s easy. The one I have at the moment, the DW. Don’t ask me what kind it is, I can’t remember. It’s a blue sparkly one. I have had a few through the years, obviously, but the last one I’ve got, The DW Collector Series that’s right that’s what it is. Fantastic, really great-sounding drum kit.

The E-mu Emulator is clearly visible for the first 16 seconds of this video, where Stephen is playing it at the back of the room. Additionally, this article about the making of some of New Order's biggest hit singles lists the Emulator II among the synths used by the band in the studio.

In this interview, Stephen is asked what his first drum machine was. "It was just after [recording Joy Division's album] Closer that I got the first affordable programmable drum machine, the Boss Dr. Rhythm DR-55 and that was on the early New Order stuff like 'Truth.' I think there's even a version of In A Lonely Place we did with the drum machine, it didn't work out too well."

"I used to have a Yamaha RX5 but that was stolen. When I went out to get a replacement I walked into a music shop and saw the R8. It looked like it was covered in fuzzy felt which I thought was a good gimmick for a start. I've not yet completely got to grips with its Human Rhythm Composer title, but it's an interesting box with good sounds. I wish Roland would bring out 808 and 909 cards for it. The thing that I liked about the R8 was that someone was putting out a drum machine with the specific idea that it shouldn't sound like a drum machine. Even putting very subtle variations in can make it harder to detect as a machine."

"I used to have a Yamaha RX5 but that was stolen. When I went out to get a replacement I walked into a music shop and saw the R8. It looked like it was covered in fuzzy felt which I thought was a good gimmick for a start. I've not yet completely got to grips with its Human Rhythm Composer title, but it's an interesting box with good sounds. I wish Roland would bring out 808 and 909 cards for it. The thing that I liked about the R8 was that someone was putting out a drum machine with the specific idea that it shouldn't sound like a drum machine. Even putting very subtle variations in can make it harder to detect as a machine."

An Octave Plateau Voyetra Eight is visible for the first 16 seconds of this video, when Stephen is playing it in the back of the room. Additionally, this article about the making of some of New Order's biggest hit singles lists the Voyetra among the synths used by the band in the studio.

In this interview, Stephen explains how he encountered his first drum synthesizer. "When I actually saw one, I think it was a Synare I in a music shop in Manchester. What I really liked about it was that it had a handle... it was like a suitcase and the fact that it had a handle, I thought that was cool because you could carry this thing about. When I actually got a drum synthesizer, it was the Synare III."

"Throughout the recording of Unknown Pleasures, drummer Stephen Morris played a traditional Rogers concert kit with a 14-inch Gretsch snare, 12, 13, 14 and 15 inch hanging toms, 15-inch Super Zyn hi-hats, 20-inch Earth ride cymbals, and 18 and 14 inch Zildjan crash cymbals."

Asked in this interview about how he achieved some of the distinctive noises on Joy Division records, Stephen responds, "The unusual noise that I like the best is on Atrocity Exhibition. By then, I had a Synare III and a Simmons SDSVI [sic]..."

In this interview, Stephen was asked if he was using any electronic percussion while playing with Bad Lieutenant. "I use a Roland SPDs sampling pad for samples and an expanded TD20 driven by triggers from the kick and snare for odd sounds," he explains. "These are only used on about a quarter of the Bad Lieutenant songs — the more electronic ones obviously. Previously (for the last ten years) with New Order, I used either a TD10 or TD20 V drum kit exclusively with only a real kick and snare to provide triggers."

What’s your favourite synthesizer?

The Monomachine. I use that an awful lot. I have two Voyetras that are getting mended at the moment; I remember them very fondly. But the one that gets the most use is the Juno 106. So I suppose that is me favourite. A close thing between that and the Monomachine.

In this interview, Stephen is asked, "The acquisition of your first digital drum machine in the beloved Oberheim DMX of course gave you Blue Monday. It must have been like night and day compared with your Boss Dr Rhythm but how was it trying to synch up this state of the art technology with the Polysequencers in those pre-MIDI days." He replies, "It was fine, I never had a problem with synching it up because it was just a clock really. I have honestly come full circle and getting back into it again now."

"Technique was an interesting album because we’d moved on to Voyetras (fetches one), a rack-mounted synth. Midi came out so you could plug a keyboard into it.

Earlier, when we did with [producer] Stephen Hague to do True Faith he had a Drumulator Mk.1 which was a drum version of the Emulator, so it had compression on it. On the record it’s a drum machine and live I play a sample. It turned into the E-mu SP 12, which was the sampling drum machine that launched hip-hop. By the time we got to Technique we were still using those synths but we’d moved on to Akai samplers, loads of them.

So we had a Mac running Upbeat software, a simple drum machine and all these Akais. A lot of the things on Technique that sound natural are not. For Dream Attack, we were too lazy to play an acoustic guitar, so we sampled every note in the riff and programmed them individually. It was bonkers, one sampler per string!

Oh and before you could quantise things we’d sample every drum and reprogram the whole backing track out of these parts. I basically turned myself into a drum machine. When we did Technique it felt new and pioneering, but then everybody started doing it."

On this article, on the Arturia website, Stephen Morris claimed to use Polybrute from Arturia

In this interview, Stephen explains how he was drafted to play keyboards instead of his usual drums on certain New Order songs. "Did I want play keyboards? I'm the world's most reluctant keyboard player, I didn't really want to but it happened early on because there was just the three of us. It just happened that Bernard can't sing and play guitar at the same time, Hooky can't sing and play bass, and I just can't sing playing anything! So I ended up playing keyboards. We got the ARP Omni towards the end of Joy Division for Closer after using an ARP Solina earlier. So I ended up playing that with the drum machine on top."

Photo from a Factory Floor session at Stephen and Gillian's studio.

"The vocal choir part on 'Blue Monday' was sampled, and it was probably one of the first instances of someone sampling something from someone else's record. New Order originally used an Emulator II to play their samples live, but a lot of the time the Emulators wouldn't load up so the roadie would have to hit one of the legs with a hammer to start it working again — it was that kind of technology! So Steve had that part loaded up into his Kurzweil K2500."

In this live video from 1985, Morris has an Octapad-8 mounted above his hi-hat. A clear shot is available at the 4:10 mark when a stage light sweeps across the device's face, reveealing the "Octapad" logo in the upper-right (distinguishing it from other iterations that would follow).

This tweet from Morris depicts his DRM1 MKIII, sitting below his SY-1.

This tweet from Morris is discussing how he enjoys playing a dulcimer, which is laying across a reissued version of a Synthi Hi Fli unit.

"This was on OMD’s Enola Gay, Blondie’s Heart Of Glass and a lot of things in the late 1970s. Martin didn’t like the Synare so for Decades [on Closer] he told me to get a drum machine. It sounded great but I was sat there with the bloody Roland manual trying to programme it. It said ‘requires accessory X’, so we’d get this extra bit. It drove me potty.

The manual didn’t make any sense and then even when you got the fucking extra pedal programming it still didn’t work. We accidentally discovered how to do Temptation, but that’s another story. I gave up on it and for years afterwards, I thought computers were complete shit. Then I realised there are two different pedals you can get for it, one for programming and one was the start-stop thing, and I’d got the start-stop thing! When we did the first New Order album, Movement, Martin got us a deal on a little battery operated Dr. Rhythm which was easy to programme because it only had two buttons. So we did the song Truth on that."

Stephen explains how he used the Moog Ladder Filter in tandem with his Synare 3 drum synth, in this article, to produce "that sound on 'Insight'... I didn't quite understand how a Moog ladder filter worked which is why when you listen to bootlegs of 'Insight'... basically you'd crank the resonance up and it would turn into 'tweeting birds' for these weird freak out breaks but of because of this filter, the volume went up by 10! So yeah, in a lot of bootlegs, that's all you can hear!"

This article details the making of The Other Two and You by Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert. "The pair have been resident at their farmhouse home for four years since moving the short distance from Stephen's native Macclesfield. The 200 year-old dwelling commands impressive views of the local countryside and their home studio has been set up in the large converted loft area of the farmhouse's adjacent barn... Their studio at that time, just following [New Order's] Technique, was based around a little Seck desk and a Fostex E16."

"For other tracks in New Order's live shows, a click pulse from the DR16 was fed to Stephen's headphones so that he could play his Roland TD8 electronic drum kit in time to the assorted sampled material."

Stephen is playing an Emulator throughout this video.

What’s your favourite synthesizer?

'The Monomachine. I use that an awful lot. I have two Voyetras that are getting mended at the moment; I remember them very fondly. But the one that gets the most use is the Juno 106. So I suppose that is me favourite. A close thing between that and the Monomachine.'

This tweet from Morris regarding the recording of New Order's Music Complete album states that he owns a Matrix 12, although he doesn't seem to have played it on the record.

This tweet from Morris indicates that he replaced the Boss DR-55 with a Rhythm Master.

This tweet from Morris depicts his SY-1.