What was your favourite instrument of 1984?

"A tool I've used a lot in '84 and that I think is going to be very important in '85 and should be used a lot more is the AMS RMX15 stereo delay. At the moment it's way over-priced, but they're coming down in price slowly. It would be nice if it was more available to people who don't have a lot of money.

"The lock-in device on this AMS is staggering. What you can actually do with this thing, and the time you can save in the studio, is quite phenomenal. You can save yourself an awful lot of recording space. You could put in, say, some brass phrases, and then trigger it from a sequencer, maybe, or perhaps from an MC2 microcomposer as we've done, or from a 909 drum box, things like that. You can also do it 'by hand', of course. There's six-and-a-half seconds of sampling time in it, and you'd be amazed how much music you can get into that space.

"Last night I was doing some sax overdubs where we layered up a band called the Nightcatchers. We layered up five saxes — we didn't have five spare tracks, and we didn't even have the facility at this late stage to bounce those down, because the tracks just weren't there. So what we did was to go on to the end of the track and have just a pulse so we knew we were in tempo and a key note so that we knew were in tune. So we played the figure we wanted in time and in tune on five tracks, then shoved the lot, balanced and bounced, in stereo into the AMS. Then we spun it in all over the track where we needed it.

"The beauty of it is that with the editing facilities on the AMS you can actually pull out certain figures of a figure and sort of invent new things by using the two AMSs in series. And I understand they've developed a keyboard interface for it so that you can use it in conjunction with a keyboard of your choice, and play your samples back in any pitch, just like a Fairlight."

Have you found cheaper machines anywhere near the AMS?

"The Bel BD80 delay is a step closer, but there are quite a lot of important differences — the most obvious one, I suppose, is less bandwidth. The quality, in fact."

And what would you like to see in 1985?

"I'd like to see no other bass players come along in '85, so that I can eat this year."

Any basses you'd like to get your hands on?

"I'm looking forward to seeing what Rob Green will come up with — he makes the Status basses. He's building one that's all graphite, as opposed to the graphite-and-wood ones that he does at the moment. It'll be very interesting to play that. I've been using a graphite-and-wood one which I like, but I'm still stuck on my Jaydees."