Stephen Morris

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

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."

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 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."

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."

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."

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

[This tweet] from Morris mentions that he bought a QX-1 shortly after New Order recorded Low Life.

This tweet from Morris talks about his use of the SDS7.