"Someone stole my guitar
It was a Gibson Les Paul..."
The Instant Automatons - Lower Third

Technical Overview: The Old Equipment List by Protag There was nothing special about our equipment, except that, even for the time, it was incredibly primitive. In the bedroom studio near Scunthorpe we gathered, over a period of time, the items below. Mark had a reel-to-reel and a cassette deck too, as well as a guitar, some effects and a Realistic graphic equaliser. When he came to record in Scunthorpe I remember him mainly bringing his guitar (or, later, the saxophone). Sometimes I'd cycle to Keelby with as much stuff as I could fit in the rucksack - bass guitar sticking out of the top like a mast, drum machine and echo box within. As mentioned elsewhere on this site, as well as being a distribution medium cassettes first gave us the possibility to dabble with sound and examine the results post facto, so I have listed my cassette deck here first in this approximately chronological list. In fact by the time the Automatons got going I think I'd nearly wrecked it by trying to de-box it and make it into something smaller. Maybe I was trying to invent the Walkman or something. Anyhow, we recorded most of our stuff through various types of mixers onto the similar domestic reel-to-reel machines we had. 1. Philips Cassette Deck 2. Floorboard Bass 3. Old Valve Tape Recorder 4. Kitchen radio 5. Home made mixers 6. Columbus Jazz Bass 7. Drum Machines 8. Practical Electronics Fuzz Pedal 9. Pro-Kit/Seck 6-2 mixer 10. Melos Tape Echo 11. Akai reel-to-reel 12. Transcendent 2000 monosynth 13. Maplin bass pedals 14. The Old Green Chipboard PA System Afterword: The 8-stringed Woolworths Top Twenty guitar - by Mark