Brian Eno
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Brian Eno's Gear
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In this video about Eno's work with Ben Frost, there are a couple of shots of Brian's monitor where we can see that he's using the Transient Shaper plugin within the context of an unspecified version of Ableton Live. A brief but clear look occurs 3:08 mark.
What kind of fuzz box do you have?
"I have a great one. It's very old. It's called a Project WEM. I've never seen another one. But it's a lovely fuzz box. It's been used by many famous guitar players, because they say it's got a unique sound. People have actually tried to make copies of it. They took down all the components and tried to build another one, but they never really got quite the same thing. I've used it on all my records, actually, from the first record I made. Whenever you hear my particular fuzz guitar sound, that's the fuzz box. "
In this article about the making of Eno's album Another Day on Earth, the author describes his studio setup, saying that "and it emerges that Eno recorded most of [the album] on a Mac, using Logic."
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This blog about the recording of the Eno/Karl Hyde album Someday World discusses Eno's setup during the sessions. "The remaining inputs included a spare channel, plus ones for Karl’s guitar, the stereo feed from a Mackie Micro Series 1202 sub mixer, and Brian’s laptop computer from which he fed a number of pre-prepared loops. The mixer’s two send channels were assigned to the Kaoss Pad’s left and right inputs respectively so any combination of the main mixer inputs could be fed into it (and the Air FX), and an auxiliary channel was used for the return."
In this article on the making of David Bowie's "Heroes" album, producer Tony Visconti recalls, "Brian brought his EMS Synthi with him, which is a synthesizer built in a briefcase, and it has no real keyboard — it's got a kind of flat, plastic keyboard which Brian very rarely used. He used the joystick a lot, and the oscillator banks, and he would do live dialing — they look like combination-safe rotary knobs on the three oscillator banks."
In this article, on the making of the Brian Eno sound, it read, "Kevin Killen, answering a question about the signal flow on the U2 song “4th of July” on Gearslutz, described the signal path as follows:
'The delay and modulation was derived from the AMS 1580. On its fader return, some hi frequencies were rolled off, then it was fed into a 224 Hall setting, probably 5 seconds but with a rolloff in the top and bottom. This return may have been equalised also. We may have added a second delay but then the delays have to be timed to the track as the net effect is blurring the chord progression… Our last tweak would be to play with the sends on all of the returns to the point that its almost recirculating out of control, which in turn is creating a layer upon layer effect.'"
“I don’t think there were that many things that would surprise people who work in studios. My studio is fairly basic... an Eventide H3000 processing thing — that’s very good indeed," Eno says, in this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, after being asked what gear was used in the studio during the making of Wrong Way Up, his collaboration with John Cale.
In this interview with Chris Everard of Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music conducted in October 1984, Eno says, "I have two instruments which I love, one is a copy of a 1957 Stratocaster a Fernandez copy, it's a brilliant instrument, beautiful guitar, which Bob Quine, Lou Reed's guitar player, selected for me in New York. He'd already bought three or four Fernandez guitars himself, he's a Stratocaster fan.
"A Fernandez copy costs the same as a brand new Stratocaster, but they are perfect copies of, perfect copies - like they do a '53, a '57 and a '61 and I have the '57. It's an absolutely identical copy, you can't get a '57 Strat now that sounds good for less than 15 hundred dollars. My one's a beautiful, beautiful instrument."
In this 1974 image of Eno working in his studio, a Pignose amp is clearly visible sitting before one of his two reel-to-reel tape machines.
In this transcribed interview from Sound On Sound magazine's October 1990 issue, Eno is asked if he has a lot of instruments in his studio. He replies, "No, I don’t have a lot of instruments. I have a DX7 which is my main instrument. I still keep discovering great new things about it. I’m not really interested in all the options that an instrument can give you, and I know now that they are pretty much infinite. What I’m interested in is the kind of rapport I have with an instrument, and that takes a long time to develop. You wouldn’t just pick up a guitar and expect to immediately understand the thing."
In this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, Eno is asked his recording process, and he replies "All the drum track are originally played on an M1 — they’re M1 sequenced drum tracks. Then they are quite severely treated so that they become more industrial sounding than the M1 would normally allow. But it’s the kind of thing that people generally do these days, you know."
"I suppose it does sound synthy, yes, a pure, soft sort of middle frequency sound. It was one of the most important sounds in those earlier albums. It was the sound I kept working with and returning to... I never had a Minimoog at that time, I didn't get a Minimoog until about...1976."
The Eclipse TD website lists Eno as an endorsing user of their products, and this image shows his studio outfitted with a pair of the 510 MK2 monitors.
Photo 'table of tools' in 2010 Guardian interview with Eno
In this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, Eno's acquisition and use of a Shure SM-58 is described in detail. "For Eno, a sense of urgency in music making is paramount, the kind of urgency that says: ‘if a demo tape is exciting enough, then use that as the core of a track and avoid endless mixes and takes’. Wrong Way Up is about this kind of urgency. Take for example Eno’s use of an 'old beaten up Shure SM58 microphone'".
“'I found this microphone that I think is sort of a magic microphone. When we were working on 'Carmen Miranda' and 'Words For The Dying' at the Strongroom, we tried this mic, and that mic, and they all sounded terrible. And there was this Shure, which is the cheapest basic rock’n’roll mike you can get. John didn’t want to use it ‘cos he didn’t like it, he thought. I said ‘John, try this Shure, you might as well’. He just said four words through it and I said to the studio engineer, ‘I’ll buy this mic.’ (laughs) And I bought it on the spot.”
So what is exciting to Brian in terms of gear? "These [points to the KAOSS Pads] without any doubt. I think these represent the other side of the electronic revolution. I thought these were just the most brilliant new idea in electronic music because of what happened with computerisation. The computer thing is one side of it and it encourages a kind of cerebralness... is that a word?," he laughs. "This has brought some things to music and really filtered other things out. These things [the KP2s] catch what was filtered out for me by the computer revolution and they suddenly bring us back to the idea of physicality and motion and muscular intelligence and expressiveness, so these have been very important to me. As you see, I have them all over the place.
"The things that are made for DJs in general have been very exciting to me. That's because DJs have to get results immediately... they're dancing, they have to be physical and the equipment has to be robust enough to stand that and they don't want to sit programming something for hours; they want something that works now."
And the KP2s are being used to great effect in Brian's new work as he demonstrates to us by chaining three together and using them to control, distort and rhythmically trigger some vocal samples from some old '30s and '40s a cappella tracks. In fact, the vocal side of things is going to be very important in Eno's forthcoming new album, as he explains...
"I'm very surprised because I suddenly got interested in singing again. One of the issues I've always been interested in is what you can do with singing, not only lyrically but also sonically. The next innovation is the voice and what we do with voices and trying to straddle this area between natural voice and synthesized voice.
"I have a couple of songs that sound confusingly slightly inhuman. But I haven't made them like those R&B things where they go very inhuman, very vocodery. What I've tried to do is keep it like a human, but a rather over-perfect human in one case and in another I've made it extremely frail. I found a way of making the voice almost fall apart so it almost turns to breath some of the time and it's a very, very tender, sensitive sound."
And the KP2s look like providing the backbone to many of the tracks on the album. "There is actually a lot to get into with these KP2s," Eno explains. "As you can see, I use them in a chain so what I'm always thinking is that I have groups of programs that work together and then I'm kind of doing this [demos triggering a KP2]. It's really something new in terms of instruments I think, especially when you group them together so you're cross-fertilising them, as it were. I can do amazing things with these. Really, I think I've got these down in a way that nobody else has."
And what about other Korg gear? Korg Magazine spies a Triton in the corner on one of Brian's keyboard stands. What does he think? "I've looked at it enough to know that it's fairly complex," he laughs, revealing at a stroke the hidden depths of this do-it-all workstation. "There are a couple of the stock sounds on it that are brilliant and that I really like using," he adds with a smile.
In this interview with Chris Everard of Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music conducted in October 1984, Eno says, "I don't like the Prophet Five... I like the Pro One though. I've also got a Casio 202."
"I'm a big fan of Native Instrument's FM7 program, which is sort of based on the Yamaha DX7 [Eno is famous for his mastery of Yamaha's FM synth]. It's the DX7 that I always wanted to have, because you can suddenly connect things in different ways. With the FM7 you can also tune the keyboard in any way you want, so you can make music in just intonation, or Arabic intonation, or whatever."
In this undated image of Eno in his then-studio, a Studio Quad rack unit is visible behind him (it's the fifth one down from the top, and despite the blurriness of the photo, it can be easily identified by the large Digitech STUDIO logo on the left side of the faceplate, as well as the large green menu screen in the center).
In this transcribed interview from the October 1990 issue of Sound On Sound magazine, Eno is asked if he has a lot of instruments in his studio. In addition to the Yamaha DX7, he answers, "I’ve got two others as well — I’ve got a Prophet VS and an M1."
In this article in the December 1995 issue of Future Music magazine, the SPX90 is named in the "Kit List" as being one of Eno's effects.
In this article, this photo shows a Fender Squier Precision bass in Eno's studio, with the caption "Eno's studio is still home to a few traditional instruments..."
In a video featured by DIE WELT, Brian Eno is shown using the iZotope Iris synth plugin, highlighting its role in his creative process.
In an article in Future Music (Issue 38, December 1995), a Mackie 1604 is included in Eno's "kit list."
In this video of a conversation between Eno and Johnson, Eno is playing an Oxygen 49 (identifiable as the MK III version based on the position of the pitch and mod wheels) starting at the 0:37 mark.
Photo 'table of tools' in 2010 Guardian interview with Eno
Per this interview in a 1981 issue of Keyboard:
Since I'm normally working in studios I'm liable to use two or three echoes at once. For instance, the Roland, and then a Lexicon Prime Time, and then maybe a long digital reverb as well, a Lexicon 224 or something like that, or the plate reverb or whatever they have in the studio.
In this article in the December 1995 issue of Future Music magazine, the Sonic Maximizer is named in the "Kit List" as being one of Eno's effects.
"I don't like the Prophet Five... I like the Pro One though. I've also got a Casio 202... "
Brian Eno is known to use the Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer, as evidenced by the image associated with his work on Discogs.
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