Trevor Horn

"I had this Oberheim rig, which was a DMX,aDSX and a keyboard."

Horn states in this interview with Roland that his first experience with Roland gear was a TR-808.

"We produced the Bass drum sound on 'Relax' by combining a Linn 2 base drum together with a sampled E-note, played on a bass guitar. There's nothing like this. Most speakers have problems with notes lower than the 'E' on a bass guitar. Nowadays we go up to five notes below the 'E', using synth basses, but you need large speakers for that. The 'E' however has power, even when played on the radio. 'D' isn't bad, too, but the 'E' is better. We combined this sound with a Fairlight, which played a sampled piano sound in quavers. This combination of Linn and Fairlight was also used when the Frankies played the song live." "The 'Relax'-groove was in my Linn 2 long before. It was my favorite pattern and I tinkered on it all the time. I always thought of it as some kind of 'English Square Dance', but when I saw it's impact on the band, I realized that you could make a good dance record out of it."

"It's been astonishing," says Horn. "We've been going through multitracks for this show, and 'Living In The Pastic Age' and 'Video Killed The Radio Star' were both played. We played them from one end to the other because there was no way that you could drop in on the machine that we had. It was a 24-track machine that you could drop in on but it was very hard to get out. You had to do the backing track in its entirety, so both songs — 'Living In The Pastic Age' and 'Video Killed The Radio Star' — were started with just piano, bass, drums and a [Korg MP7] Mini Pops Junior rhythm box, which we played to."

“We were always trying to get things to sound different – especially drums. Don’t forget the album was written in 1979 and the only drum machine available was the Korg MiniPops Junior, which did sound rhythms for hotels. The track ‘Living in the Plastic Age’ was the MiniPops Junior put through a flanger."