Stephen Morris

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.

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."

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."

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).

"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."