equipment they used, please

This is like the sixth time I've seen people come to the board to write college papers on NO... what type of unis and degrees require thesis' on NO? Now THAT folks is money well spent...

This request comes up a fair bit and I thought there was a sticky elsewhere due to that. Still, once more with feeling, Al...

As my esteemed colleague said, BM is a triumph of the technology of the time: Steve programming the DMX with all of them contributing to the pushes (the drum programme is a real four-way collaboration!), the Moog Source background bass, the Prophet 5 bits and the Emulator samples: c'est magnifique! Confusion was basically a celebration of the Roland TR808 and the Pro-One and the DMX reappeared on Thieves Like Us and This Time Of Night. The DMX had a volatile memory: a roadie tripped over the power cable before a gig, it wiped five songs they were due to play and they were forced to drop them from the set!

The synths in Joy Division were mainly the Powertran Transcendent 2000 which Barney built from a kit, a Sequential Circuits Pro-One (which is the same one which later turned up on Confusion and was sold on Ebay a while back) and an ARP Quartet which was later replaced by a Quadra. All of this lot was used on Closer, Movement, Everything's Gone Green and Temptation...and was later nicked in New York (except the Pro-One which I think was being fixed). They also used a EMS vocoder which appeared on The Beach and Ecstacy but frequently broke down and eventually stopped working, despite having a fortune spent on it.

Their most reliable synth was the infamous Octave Plateau Voyetra, the one you can see Gillian playing in The Perfect Kiss video (mmmm...lovely blusher). They then went Yamaha mad and bought DX816s (eight DX7s in a rack) which is all over Low-Life which was sequenced by a hideous QX1 sequencer.

I think Technique signalled a move to Mac-based sequencing etc and they've been able to slim down their live kit since then, using Roland A50 master keyboards and XP50 workstations . Check the new live DVD to compare what they used years ago and what they used at the cessation of live action in 2006?

Hope this helps a bit. Good luck!

it's Tx816 (or Tx81z maybe), only keyboards bore the title DX. Fuckin rancid things, hateful hateful, hateful, thin, washy, and reeking of all that was shit about the 80's. Their saving graces are light, washy strings, bell sounds and very thin solo instrument sounds, just the sort of thing NO used them for, although SOTN and 1963 stink of DX bass (ironically I think it may be the Emulator actually doing those tho). And as for the QX1....Gillian has bigger balls than me if she took that cnut on, it's like dealing with MS-Windows using a 2 line LCD, it's just pain upon convoluted shift-menu-pain.

The above also omits the Kurzweils, a bloody clever purchase, as the K2000 can do a bloody good impression of any other synth, ever, giving them access to noises off their back catalogue without having to maintain stroppy steam powered gear. (and if you need a measure of how good it's impressions are, check out Pink Floyd using it to "be" an EMS Putney on On The Run live.)

Old Lead Foot wrote: they have used pretty much every synth released since 1978, all of them are stacked up against a wall in steves studio, its a pile about 12 to 13 feet high 20 feet across and about 5 foot deep

I feel your pain leady, in fact I'm glad I've not had to walk away from that pile as you have :(

I'd be straight in digging for the Casios, to remind Steve to actually use them (and then nicking them, cos my CZ3000 is tatey-bread and I'm still always keeping an eye out for another one or a VZ1). Must be some oddities and rarities among them too, things that were the "next big thing" that fell flat on their arse.

I always suspected Steve would bore ME with geek talk

(and I'm fairly sure, that if he could ever be coaxed into it, Bernard could geek-talk until even Robert Moog woulda told him to F* up.)

He'd need a medium to do this as Dr. Rob has been dead a few years!

Sorry to omit the Kurzweil and yes, they are plenty useful. It's the bugger that Steve has beside him on the drum riser. Am I right in thinking that the drum machine parts are not programmed as such but are actually samples of patterns which are actually triggered live by Steve on the Kurzweil? I suppose they must be because if they were recorded onto the hard drive recorder they also use live, he'd not have much to do on songs like BM!

One of the reasons I love Low-Life so much is the overuse of Yamaha stuff of the time. Songs like the 12" of The Perfect Kiss and Subculture are great examples of Steve getting into the rather naff latin percussion sounds and I think he used an RX11 which, when running the QX1 and TX816s amounted to almost a total solution, albeit one without sampling capabilities.

Hooky once said that the QX1 was far from spontaenous and would start "warming up and getting into it after three hours' use". I'm not therefore suprised they went over to Mac sequencing just as I wasn't surprised when the genius Vince Clarke later described Roland's MC4 sequencer as "a pig to use". I was even thinking of buying one before he said this and I thought "If Vince found it a total bastard to programme, what chance do I have?!".

The joys of music technology can also be a double-edged sword...