Strip Steve

«This drum machine is kind of a big deal for me. It had a huge role in a lot of tracks that made me love house and techno. Back then I thought those guys making beats like that were wizards – Paul Johnson, to name one that has recognisable shuffly beats – and for the first two years I was trying to recreate those beats manually by moving little slices of sounds on an audio channel. Ha! One day while touring in Japan I went to that famous synth store in Tokyo called FiveG, I switched on a 909 and made a beat in two minutes. It sounded so special, full of life and violence, like all those tracks I adored… It even made me blush to realise I had this power in my hands, and from that day on I started seeing my heroes as talented artists, and not as wizards full of unexplained magical powers ahaha. I tried many of the clones that are on the market, and even if they all have interesting sounding features it’s the only old drum machine where I find no clone to be remotely close to the power and personality of the original. I like how the sounds phase and naturally compress themselves when played on top of each other with different velocity. If you recorded each output separately and played back the whole beat on your computer it would have an entirely different feeling. I recorded a lot of jams like that, just playing with the decay, muting and fading the different sounds. Maybe one day I’ll release an EP made only like »

«In this photo you can also see the Alesis 3630 compressor and the Ensoniq DP/4 multi effects processor: both very cheap racks that can have very drastic and creative effects. I regularly patch sounds through the DP/4 to find a sort of colour or atmosphere to set the track in. What’s great is that you can chain the effects in any order you want within the unit, like flange a reversed reverb that would then go through a distorted envelope filter, or the opposite. If I do an all-hardware live show one day this rack will definitely play a big role»