“The funny part about that whole thing,” recounts Ogilvie, “was that we spent $5,000 on some gear including a 909. We'd been working with the TR-808. All of a sudden we had this brand-new gear which was state of the art at the time.”
He goes on to explain that while Roland had already been part of their sound, the 909 was a whole other animal. “At first we turned on the 909 and it was far too clean. We were like, ‘What have we got here?’ I struggled and was very stretched for ideas.” Inspiration came in the unlikely form of a PA system. “I was looking around the studio, found a PA crossover, and took the three outputs from the kick into the board. Now, I had three kinds of specific frequencies that I was able to mess around with.”
It was a eureka moment. “All of a sudden we were like, ‘Wait a minute. This sounds brilliant now.’”