From: [deleted] Date: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 00:14:59 -0800 Subject: Synchronicity Review/Musician, 1983 Packing up to go to the UK for a year, today in a box I found my ragged, beloved copy of the June 1983 Musician magazine with the Police on the cover. It brings back a lot of great memories of the summer of '83, which was great for me and for which Synchronicity was my 'soundtrack'. There's lots of material in this issue - a lengthy interview with Sting, a "studio diary" article by Andy, and an article about Stewart. I'll transcribe these over the next few weeks if I have time and if enough people on the list express interest. Musician scored a scoop of sorts with this issue. Synchronicity was brand new and much anticipated; the magazine had a front cover with an article by Andy Summers, and what I recall as one of the first reviews of the new album (where they usually displayed the album cover, there was just a blank white square with "Synchronicity/The Police" in plain text, so the album art either wasn't finalized or was still top secret when they went to press). If you read the review carefully, you'll notice that either the final order of songs had not been determined, or else the reviewer got sides one and two mixed up. Also "Synchronicity I" is referred to as "Synchronicity (A Casual Principle)" - no, "Casual" (which probably should have been "Causal") is not my typo. Anyway, I think it's interesting to read this review now. Enjoy. ================== Police Synchronicity (A&M) Synchronicity is such a drastic realignment of energies and personalities within the Police as to be the work of an entirely new band. The fat pillowy synth-buzz and shadowy overdub intricacies of 1981's Ghost in the Machine - a bold, necessary escape from the slowly asphyxiating limitations of the clipped pop-and-reggae snap of their first three albums - have been sharply reduced to a new radical geometry of melody and rhythm that refers back to but does not rely on that original sound. There are now pregnant empty spaces reverberating with Andy Summers' board guitar synthesizer strokes where his angular echoplex chords used to be. Stewart Copeland, whose aggressive complex drum strategies have made the Police one of rock's most artful dance bands, is now keeping a harder, simpler beat, investing his few critical flourishes with the energy and imagination he used to spend on a whole drum roll. Even Sting is singing with more dramatic economy, retreating from his grandstand yells into richer, more forceful tones. In short, everything you know about the Police is not wrong, but dramatically altered in concept and rearranged in execution. The album's lead-off track and first single "Every Breath You Take" demonstrates these changes with a wily pop flair. While Summers picks out a muted chord progression distantly related to "Invisible Sun," the dusky romantic caring in the song is quietly vitalized by the desolate plunk of a piano, the pastel wash of Summers' guitar synth and a distant chorus of Sting's in quite radiant harmony. This approach has the effect of amplifying the songhooks without inflating them, transmitting the same urgency of "Roxanne" and "Message In A Bottle" but with subtler flashes. In "Wrapped Around Your Finger," Sting glides into the chorus in a ringing, overdubbed duet over the song's dark neo-reggae rhythm, primed by a light prancing keyboard and Summers' effective camouflaged guitar plucking which then melts into an electronic mural effect behind Sting's poignant vocal rise. Summers also employs guitar mirage tricks that curl behind and around Sting's simple dominant bass and meditative croon in "Tea In The Sahara." Immediately after, he adapts that same resonance to chords that bounce resiliently off Copeland's frantic rabbit-like dash and the pasty stutter of a synthesizer in "Synchronicity (A Casual Principle)." The changes the Police put Synchronicity through seem to correspond to deep transitions the band have undergone themselves. Sting's brooding "King Of Pain" (which actually sports one of the LP's most attractive hooks) and "Oh My God," with its heavy air of supplication, may well be autobiographical slips. Only half as comic as "Be My Girl," his Cockney ode to a rubber dolly on Outlandos D'Amour, Andy Summers' "Mother" is a blast of pure primal scream in 7/4 time, the sarcastic cut of his Freudian recitation intensified by a brute rhythm attack recalling Robert Fripp's experiments with spoken words and white rock noise on Exposure. Whatever forced their hand, the Police responded to it with an album that is stirring, provocative and a hard slap at those uppity hipsters who say they just don't matter anymore. With Synchronicity, they have boldly redefined and revitalized their sound and vision. For maximum enjoyment, synchronize yourself. - - David Fricke ------------------------------ From: [deleted] Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 18:16:46 -0800 Subject: Copeland Interview/Musician, 1983 The Stewart Copeland article from the June 1983 edition of Musician magazine follows. It's interesting to note the straightforward acknowledgment by Copeland of the group's fragility: by this time it was well out in the open, and I wondered when I saw the group in August of that year whether it might not be the last time around. Also this article, like the review of the album from the same magazine that I posted a few days ago, suggests that sides one and two of Synchronicity were flipped at the last minute. With respect to his comments on his drumming on the album, it seems that he exaggerated the 6/8 thing: while he's arguably playing four over six on "Synchronicity I", it's the only song in 6/8. Also, I'm not sure I hear the Tama gong drum on anything but that first track. Some of the tone of the conversation and essay is lost because of the lack of italics here on the net, but you'll get the general idea (if you're a fanatic Copeland fan and must have it, let me know and I'll send you a formatted Word or RTF file). If anyone finds this article too long, let me know and I'll break up the forthcoming (as soon as I transcribe them) Summers article and Sting interview. Enjoy. ================== Stewart Copeland: Kindred Kinetics by Chip Stern Part of the inner dynamic that makes the Police stand out from the crowd in modern pop is the way the group's founder, Stewart Copeland, plays through the music; not merely marking time, but creating a kinetic fabric of melody and motion. While Sting marks the backflow of the music with his subtractive basslines (and relates to the women), and Andy Summers straddles timekeeping and orchestration with his polytonal arpeggios, Copeland almost takes on the role of a lead instrument, providing a subversive collage of off-beat accents, five-alarm flourishes and songlike phrases - without ever abrogating the pulse or failing to support the vocals. The celebrated tensions and artistic conflicts within the Police include matters of interpretation, the ratio of instrumental music to singing, and Summers' and Copeland's inclination to compose Police songs. But these tensions lead to something greater than the sum of their arguments, for while Copeland acknowledges a "battling brother" characterization of him and Sting, the fact is that his group has grown beyond his original conception. "That's certainly the case," Copeland says matter-of-factly. "But you see, one of the things that the fans - including myself - expect from the group is the songs. and if it sounds to you like the band's contribution to the songs isn't nearly as great as on past albums ... well, Synchronicity is all about songs - and everything else is subservient to those songs. And that's good, because we all like working on songs, developing them. And my contribution isn't limited to playing the drums, but to producing and arranging the overall sound. Same with Andy. But it's always been that way. Sting isn't limited to bass or vocals, either. "In writing material for this Police album, we were put in the same frustrating position that musicians all over the country are in, which is trying to write the next Police song. And I suddenly found myself trying to copy the Police - just like everybody else. We've certainly tried to go beyond the boundaries of our past music, but without getting distracted by the quirks or trying to be too individualistic - just straight-to-the-point - - whereas in the past we'd take a great song like 'Roxanne' or 'Can't Stand Losing You' and try to do something weird with it. "The music that I've been writing recently hasn't really been song material, and when I do write songs, they're not really Police songs. I regard songs as pop culture, and I don't tend to take it so seriously; it's serious, but it's still just pop music. Sting has the ability to write pop songs that are serious ... and I think 'Darkness' qualifies, but it's not really my forte. Mind you, I'm working on a film score now for Francis Ford Coppola, Rumblefish, and I've discovered anew, a new medium for music. Which is, instead of having a lyric or a vocal as the top line, you have a picture as the top line, and that is really exciting. And I'm really still too close to recording Synchronicity to be sure about the results. All the ideas of the past album are distilled right down to the point where they're almost subliminal. And I really don't know if they worked or not. Sometimes I think we distilled it out of existence, and other times I think we've concentrated it in such a way that it's more powerful than it ever was." Stewart's ambivalence is understandable. Gone are the trademark blips and bleeps of ambient color and percussion, the jazzed up dub: these are superceded by a kind of rhythmic shorthand as Sting catches up to his persona and tries to reinvent himself, put the recent past in perspective (confession is good for the soul), and evolve the melodic contour of his narratives in spare, tender pop miniatures with an electro-ethnic flavor. Side two sandwiches Andy's manic 7/4 Vincent Price-raga "Mother" and Stewart's bouncy iron-curtain pop "Miss Gradenko" in between some more arena-sized gestures. "Those two tracks by Andy and me are concessions, like on the Jim Hendrix albums where there'd be one Noel Redding track. We've all been growing in different directions, so our songs stand out as being different from the other tracks more obviously than they have on other albums. "I think this album will be considered more mainstream than some in the past, and I don't know if we expanded the frontiers of our music as much as we all hoped to, as we've always tried to do," Stewart muses, "but there are a lot of interesting details. I'm using a Tama system where you attach a contact mike to the drum, so they're dynamic and respond to attack, plus Paiste rude cymbals. And one instrument that I used on almost every track was the Tama gong drum, which is like a cross between a great big bass drum on a stand and tympani; you play it with a large felt mallet. We use a lot of room ambience; so there're two Sennheisers at the other end of the room, compressed beyond belief, and that gives a lot of the crack, the power to it. Also I've been experimenting with putting a 4/4 type backbeat over a 6/8 rhythm, and I thought we were pretty clever on that one. So I play the backbeat over threes, and the backbeat switches: so for one bar it's the downbeat; and the next bar it's the backbeat; and the next bar the downbeat again. There's a lot of that, and it's an interesting effect." Stewart'll probably end up liking the album as much as I do, once the novelty wears off, and with some distance from it he can let himself fall for the plain-spoken, deceptive simplicity of it ... and get a chance to bend it in live performance, his real passion. "In the studio, perhaps, there are all kinds of things I would own up to, but onstage it's almost like a religious experience, even after five years." Which only serves to amplify their collective midlife crisis - that's a long time for any modern relationship. "It's an inevitable thing, and every group has to go through this. After five formative years and five albums you grow apart. Now, the only thing that the three of us have in common is onstage and on that album. That's the only place we achieve synchronicity." He pauses and considers. "It sounds like I'm telling you that we're going to break up tomorrow." Well, you break up every few weeks, I suggest. Stewart laughs. "That's right. I mean, we've reached the breaking point, but we've never seen it. It sounds kind of jaded to say, but we've achieved all our goals. When it comes to the Police, we have to think up some new goals. In a way I kind of hunger to start all over again. And probably the guys I'd pick would be the same two guys." Copyright 1983 Musician, all rights reserved (well, might as well put it in anyway). ------------------------------ From: [deleted] Date: Wed, 29 Jun 1994 19:51:26 -0800 Subject: Summers Article/Musician, 1983 Part One of the article Andy Summers wrote for the June 1983 Musician magazine follows. I always thought this piece indicated a bit of a distance from the group and some degree of uncertainty about his place within it. Part Two, which consists of short vignettes about the recording of Synchronicity (and a sidebar on Summers' equipment), will follow at a later date (read: when I have time to sit down and transcribe it). If you're a fanatic Summers fan, and have to have it, let me know and I'll send you a formatted Word or RTF file - complete with proper quotes, italics, etc. ================== The Police Report: The Cruel Sea by Andy Summers Becalmed and fetus-like in one corner of a large bed I lie, a brushstroke in a sea of white. The sound of waves washing sand shatters my dream and I am awake. My left eye describes a tiny upward curve - vision enters and with a spectacularly feeble punch I extinguish the Donald Duck alarm. A faint sliver of memory pierces my befogged brain and it slowly comes back - December, Montserrat 1982. Police Album Number Five. I examine my arms for mosquito bites - good. Last night's spraying with Off seems to have worked. The vicious Dracula mosquitos of Montserrat have been repelled at last - may they die in their coffins. I consider my placement in the bed - curved into a corner. A vast expanse of white seems to radiate out from my body, a sleeper unconsciously structuring his bed space; the effect is quite musical. I realize that I am going off the deep end, while growing into a confirmed minimalist - how to say the most with the least; less is more - it always was a favorite Police studio motto. But what about the virtues of chaos, the pillars of density, and what does any of this have to do with rock 'n' roll and mass acceptance in the marketplace? I swing one leg over the bed and hit the shower. I emerge from the bathroom with a radiant mind and a wholesome body. I look outside - the day is simply aching with good vibes. I feel like Zeus. I bash around in the kitchen for a few minutes in an attempt to orchestrate a cup of coffee - the usual early morning conspiracy of inanimate objects defeats me and I decide to go snorkeling. Moments later I am poised on the edge of a fat rock - resplendent in snorkel and fish god persona. I survey the dark and mysterious sea slopping over my left flipper. My mother's voice echoes faintly from the corridors of childhood - "Don't get out of your depth dear." My body describes a glorious arc - my teeth flash in the sunlight and I disappear beneath the surface of the glistening Caribbean. The surface recedes darkly behind me. Aquatic flora and fauna grow large in my mask and I start reviewing the events on the new album so far, and my involvement in it. Sting, as always, has come in with a bunch of simply deluxe songs. I have my usual weirdo stuff and then some, and Stewart, who in the last few months has mastered the Appalachian banjo, has come up with some songs that are pure "Copelandia." The trick this year, as it has been every other year, is somehow to weave our various disparate musical attitudes, tastes and emotions into some sort of coherent fabric that a) the group will buy and, b) the public will buy, hopefully. So, how goes it? We seem to have passed the early ritual grunting and are now about halfway around the track (no pun intended). Unusually for us, this year we have taken the time (six weeks instead of four) to actually rehearse the songs. This is giving us the chance to record the songs in more than one version and to get more familiar with the material than is our usual bent. The one point we all agree on is that to succeed, music must be invested with a cliff-hanging quality - living and dying at the same time. It is imperative, now more than ever, that we push the edge in our music, keep the risk content high and avoid caricaturing our earlier work. I swim on. There is a flounder to my right. When we are in the studio the atmosphere is often one of children locked in a small house with big shiny machines and a handful of explosives - inevitably overtones of a perverse nature creep into the proceedings. Ironically enough, this tends to add to, rather than detract from, the dynamics of the playing situation. As a group, we seem to swing between high emotional intensity and sophomoric fraternity with frightening ease. The result, at its best, is that when "it" happens, we can play together with an empathy that is hard to imagine achieving with other people. At its worst, we can beat a song into an early grave. Generally speaking, making albums is a brutal affair - there is a huge amount of pain involved - personal dignity is slashed and all one's cherished licks go out the window. But out of the pain comes growth, and in the end that's what it's all about. This is foolish - I am getting heavy whilst still underwater. I must reach the surface before I drown. I plop into the sunlight like a dying fish and grab a lungful of air through my soggy snorkel. The glaring tropic sun beats down on my puny musician's chest and I offer a prayer of thanks to the Almighty. It is inevitable that in looking back over one's work with the or a group that one would sometimes tend to see each album in terms of "what bits I did," rather than the work as a whole. Okay! So what bits did I do so far? Well, this year my favorite bit to date is the final emergence on tape of the "wobbling cloud," something I've been doing live for a while but didn't really have recorded. The basic technique consists of playing through an echoplex with echo volume set to about three-quarter maximum and a volume pedal with a compressor; the movement of the chord position between swells and the choice of harmonies are crucial. Wearing a long-sleeved shirt is also helpful as the right arm can pivot as a long-handled brush on the strings above the twelfth fret - sea island cotton produces a pleasing tone. The effect is that of a shuddering, trembling cloud of sound which teeters on the brink of collapse at every second. The "cloud" may be heard on a very beautiful song that Sting wrote for the new album called "Tea In the Sahara," which he distilled from a wonderful novel by Paul Bowles called The Sheltering Sky (The Ecco Press, 18 West 30th Street, New York, NY 10001). Once this album hits the marketplace, the questions will inevitably be raised as to whether or not we have changed our style. Some people will say that the new album is vastly different from anything we have done before. Others will insist that we are repeating ourselves. I can only say that, for me, making music always seems to be a matter of walking out into the dark and finding your way by instinct - it's not really a verbal process. If it were, what would be the point of flogging yourself to death over an instrument for years on end? Stylistic change is governed by the voice that sneaks through the music, the instruments and the songs. After a new album has been finished and the interviewers (God bless 'em) form a line a mile long, well of course it becomes necessary to put together some sort of verbal justification for shifting another million units. The truth is that the studio is a jungle where all decisions bow to the power of the moment. And it is these moments, above all, that one strives and yearn for - the split seconds of something higher that makes all the stress, hype and absurdity worthwhile. True style is not forced, it unfolds. To repeat - there is no progress in art. Our fifth album is our first album. I roll over and look out to sea - the weather is uncertain - the future of the group is uncertain - and I am out of my depth. I grip the ocean firmly between my teeth and with a powerful thrust of my flippers, head toward dry land and another day in the studio. Copyright 1983 Musician, all rights reserved. Reprinted without permission. ------------------------------ From: [deleted] Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 16:08:07 -0800 Subject: Summers "Police Notes"/Musician, 1983 (a) NOTE: I sent this article to the list this morning, but apparently it was too big for redistribution. I've split it into two parts, of which this is the first. ================== Part two (my split) of the article Andy Summers wrote for the June 1983 edition of Musician magazine follows. Again the fragility of the group is apparent ("most of the three of us" is putting it rather gently), but it sounds like he had fun recording Synchronicity. Part one, which consists of a longer article about scuba diving and the recording of Synchronicity, was posted to the list around the end of June. I also posted an interview with Stewart Copeland. If you missed either of these and you're interested, let me know and I'll send them on. If you're a fanatic Summers fan, and have to have it, mail me and I'll send you a formatted Word or RTF file - complete with proper quotes and italics, etc. I am not sure I'll have time to transcribe the Sting interview from the same issue (I also have a Copeland interview in the February 1988 Keyboard magazine); it's fairly lengthy and I'm leaving for the UK in two weeks and have a lot of packing to do. Maybe some time in 1995, after I'm done my Masters. ================== Police Notes by Andy Summers My Brilliant Career Until I sang "Mother" on the new album, my last vocal effort with the Police was on a song I wrote in 1973 called "Be My Girl." It was about a rubber inflatable doll. In the early days of the Police, we were short on material, so "Be My Girl" was definitely on the song list, sometimes twice a night. I tended to become more self-conscious about doing it for larger and larger audiences. Then one night, in the middle of a performance, I was suddenly clouted over the head by something, only to turn around and find that, unbeknownst to me, the roadies had brought this huge rubber doll up onstage. I used it as a piece of business for the rest of my vocal performance, but that was when I retired from singing with the group. New Classics We've changed a bit on the new album. I think a lot of the songs dictated the way they had to be played, as they always should. Some of the tunes have an almost classic feel, songs like "Wrapped Around Your Finger," "Every Breath You Take" - even "Synchronicity." They're in a sort of genre, like classic 50s-type songs. "Every Breath You Take": there's the I-VI-IV-V chord progression, the classic off-beat snare drum sound and echo. It really seemed to go best with the vocal and to create the kind of updated 50s atmosphere we were really looking for, a futuristic 50s sound. It's a very emotional song and it didn't really need anything to distract from the vocal. It needed only very simple dressing. Sting brought the song into the studio with a synthesizer riff. I thought it was very attractive, but Sting wanted me to make it my own and go out and see what I could come up with to replace it. So I tried to find a riff that would outline the simple chords with a slight difference, with what is almost a classic Police chord, a major chord with an added ninth - you know, an A major with a B added, an F# minor with a G# added, etc. Actually, I cam up with the riff in my kitchen when we were working up stuff for the album I made with Robert Fripp (I Advance Masked). It was influenced by a Bartok piece. I just slowed it down a little and it worked beautifully. The Wild, the Innocent and the Six-Minute Shuffle On "Synchronicity," we had a middle section in the song which was to be an instrumental bridge. I already had a riff, a repeat of the introduction riff, but I felt the material should go someplace farther than that and we weren't sure what to do. So I went into the studio; I had on my striped costume and plugged into a 100-watt Marshall with everything at full volume, very loud, very screeching feedback. There I was. I had my sound, I was really rarin' to go. I was just waiting for the tape to start and Hugh (Padgham) the engineer indicated for me to go ahead. Sometimes, when we record feedback stuff, I'll start playing and nod at him and he'll roll the track and drop me in wherever. This time I wasn't hearing the track in the headphones but I thought I was being recorded anyway. I could see we had the tape going, so I stood there for five or six minutes with this throbbing monster, and I'm screeching, doing all kinds of feedback variations. Finally, I just assumed the track was over - Christ, it was only two or three minutes long - and put down my guitar and went into the control room. Everyone was standing there with their eyes just bulging. They had recorded me all through but hadn't put the track with it, so all we got was this incredible six minutes of convolutions. We would up using it for the middle of "Synchronicity II." Motherfreaker The riff from my song "Mother" on the new album was originally in 4/4 time; it was another little thing I did in my kitchen, based on three different Arabic scales. But it certainly was rather compelling. Then I played around with it a bit and took it into 7/4 and then it really seemed to work. At the time of writing this, I haven't prepared a story for my own dear mother, who I'm sure is going to be quite shocked and hurt when she finally gets to hear the song. But of course, she'll misinterpret it anyway, because it's not...this is a song for all men everywhere, not my poor old dear mom. (continued in next message) ------------------------------ From: [deleted] Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 16:08:11 -0800 Subject: Summers "Police Notes"/Musician, 1983 (b) NOTE: I sent this article to the list this morning, but apparently it was too big for redistribution. I've split it into two parts, of which this is the second. ================== The Ghost vs. the Machine I used to have a whole studio at home, a 16-track recorder and desk, a remote, everything. But what I found was that with the lifestyle and limited amount of time I have, I didn't want to take that much time for the process of creating music. I've found that I actually get the most done with a two-step process. First I'll sit down in my kitchen, which has wonderful acoustics, and play my acoustic guitar into a small cassette recorded in a sort of stream of consciousness flow. I note all these ideas down in a book and give them all numbers. Then the best ideas I'll pull out and work on my TASCAM 244 Portastudio using drum machines, electric guitar, synthesizer and bass. All I want to think about is the music and not the recording itself, which is why I sold all the 16-track stuff. I learned the hard way - it cost me a lot of money. I think Stewart is more geared towards twiddling knobs and spending time like that. Sting is exactly like me. He doesn't like to use a big formal system. We both just work out on Portastudios and then go to a studio to make better demos, where the engineer can spend all the time. I find it a clearer and easier way to think. The Mouth That Snored Last year, we would work twelve-hour days in the studio, and most of the creative stuff occurred after dinner, when we'd be loose after playing all day. The roadies - we call them the three wise men - would generally fall asleep on the couch in front of the desk. When people would fall asleep, then they would be taken to the party, as we called it. In other words, you'd pile all kinds of things on top of them - cigarette packets, candy wrappers, beer bottles, anything - and then take their photograph or wait till they woke up just covered with all kinds of garbage they would have to scrape off. This year, we started taping people down, like mummies, so they couldn't get up. This one guy, Tam, has an incredible snore, and one night he nodded out and began to snore. We finally were just sitting there all snickering and giggling at this incredibly loud snore. Then we all got the same idea at once: we set up a mike right over his nose and put it into a flanger and a huge, deep echo and recorded it, putting it up terrifically loud. It was so loud, ear-shatteringly loud, that it finally woke him up. Later we slowed it down on tape, and got a really beautiful sound, just like the Loch Ness monster. I'm sure it can be put to good use somewhere. Afterwards, anybody who would attempt an overdub would eventually come to the end of playing or singing their part and say, "Well, how was that?" And there would be complete silence in the control room, and then the sound of loud snoring would fill the studio. Soundcheck Magic For a while now, we've been hoping to record a complete album of 50s songs, all the classics: "Summertime Blues," "Peggy Sue," "High Heeled Sneakers," Elvis stuff...You know, what you get in your teenage years, you just to on in a sense repeating for the rest of your life. It's really at the soundchecks that we get to play almost everything we know. Sting likes to do "Respect" a lot. We just play anything: rockabilly, Jimmy Smith stuff, R&B, jazz....We get into James Blood Ulmer, a lot of funk...and we'll also play some very far-out stuff as well sometimes. The soundchecks are fantastic - we really blow people away. When you're on a long tour and are playing the same tunes night after night, the soundcheck becomes very fresh. It's an important time in the day to try things out. Often nothing is ever said; we just get down and play, but we know what we're doing and things occur. And this is where the band is growing, hopefully. The Future I think most of the three of us always want to keep it at the barest, the bare bones. I like the three-piece sound. I think that's the classic Police sound. But I'm aware at the same time that it must grow and that one can't drag one's feet in the mud. Things have to move on. It's sometimes necessary to force change. The Wobbling Cloud Onstage I've been using the same set-up for about the last three years, which is two reworked, souped-up Marshall 100-watt tops, two 4x12 cabinets, (I'm not sure what the speakers are because my faithful roadie changes them all the time). I use them at about half-volume, with not a lot of presence. I also record occasionally with a Bolt amp. I also have a Peter Cornish custom-made pedalboard which contains an MXR Phase 90, an MXR analog delay, a Mutron III envelope follower, a fuzz, an Electro-Harmonix flanger and a Dyna-Comp compressor. I carry two echoplexes on tour, both of which are about fifteen years old. I combine the analog delay and the echoplex to get some double rhythm effects. The board has a master effects on and off button, so you can pre-program effects together without having any effects on, then just hit one button and have them all come on together. I use a '63 sunburst Telecaster Custom, which has a Gibson pickup on it, and an overdrive pot installed in it, and I use a '61 Strat, a Hamer, and the Roland guitar synthesizer. I have the GR-303 guitar synthesizer, which I like better than the 808 guitar. I recently got a Gibson Chet Atkins electric classical guitar and used it on the new album. On Ghost In The Machine I used a Gibson 335, a Les Paul and Strat most of the time. The 335 has a slightly warmer sound. On some pieces I started to get a good sound with a compressor. I'm gradually using heavier and heavier gauge strings all the time, probably because I spend a lot of time practicing on acoustic guitar, and electric guitar is just too light for me. I've gone over to using Dean Markley strings at the moment. The sizes are .010, .013, .017, .026, .036 and .048. Copyright 1983 Musician, all rights reserved (well, might as well put it in anyway).