Vince Clarke

"The MC4 came in very useful when I left Depeche Mode and formed Yazoo, because I used it in place of other musicians. The only problem was that the Jupiter 4 hasn't got Gate or CV In, so I had to get a Pro One to work in conjunction with the MC4. That was more or less all I had when I came to do the first Yazoo album: the JP-4, the Pro One, the MC4, and a TR808 to provide any percussion sounds the Pro One couldn't generate!"

Depeche Mode album gear discussion on 1981 album: "I SPOKE TO VINCE CLARKE A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO AND HE TOLD ME THE DRUM MACHINE USED ON SPEAK AND SPELL WAS A KORG KR55 PRESET MACHINE .THE BAND USED JUST THE SNARE AND HIGH HATS SOUNDS FROM. THE BASS DRUM WAS GENERATED FROM AN ARP 2600 SYNTH WHICH WAS SYNCHED TO THE MACHINE AND AN OLD ROLAND MC4 MICROCOMPOSER SEQUENCER. SO THERE THE ANSWER IS!"

The live Erasure set-up - excluding the human beings - runs to an Oberheim Xpander module, a Yamaha TX rack with three modules (equivalent to DX9s in a small box, reckons Vince), a Sequential Pro-One synth, plus two Casios, the CZ1000 and CZ101, all driven by a BBC computer using the almost universally praised UMI-2B MIDI sequencer. A Yamaha RX11 and Roland TR727 (latin) supply the drums.

The live Erasure set-up - excluding the human beings - runs to an Oberheim Xpander module, a Yamaha TX rack with three modules (equivalent to DX9s in a small box, reckons Vince), a Sequential Pro-One synth, plus two Casios, the CZ1000 and CZ101, all driven by a BBC computer using the almost universally praised UMI-2B MIDI sequencer. A Yamaha RX11 and Roland TR727 (latin) supply the drums.

Vince Clarke is listed as an artist associated with the Roland TR-505 Drum Machine on Vintage Synth Explorer.

"When I got the LinnDrum, I forgot about my TR808 totally. But the other day we decided we'd like to sync it to the Fairlight, and we realised we'd have to do a lot of internal fiddling around to make it work properly, so in the end we just sampled each of the sounds, which was really quite interesting. I don't really like any of the sounds themselves; they're not much use unless you actually want to use sounds that are obviously electronically created. The difference between the 808 and the Linn is simply that one sounds like a drum-machine while the other sounds like a real drummer, or at least that's how I see it."

"Mind you, the thing I want to get into even more, and I'm doing already, is collecting old drum machines. I've got this thing called a CR78, an early Roland Compurhythm, and an Electro Harmonix thing which is like a disco beatbox with preset rhythms. All disco beats, and wicked sounds!"