Roland XP-50

Once the flagship workstation of the Roland XP series, this cryptic devices was Optimus Crime's primary instrument for the making of this album. Having come from the simplicity of the Yamaha PSR-500, which he found to be the best song writing keyboard ever, the XP-50 was the Sphinx of workstations to him. After repeatedly staring at the manual only to drift into daydreams of doomdsday devices, he decided to continue with his backwards approach to synths and focus on playing rather than patch editting.

Roland TD-7 Percussion Sound Module

The TD-7 was one of the first drum trigger "brains" that was actually worth making use of to get a live sound. While years behind the V-Drums that were to replace it as the darling of electronic drummers everywhere, it was a match made in heaven for a band that wanted to be able to add subtle effects on drums without going mic crazy. Broken Stitches was recorded with this module and patched into a delay to get the haunting beat you hear on Razorblade Fairytales. At the time, Hate In The Box was seeking to bridge the gap between live rock band and industrial studio act so this proved to be the perfect way to have humanistic drumming while still keeping the "fakeness"of drum sounds we love in electronic music .

Tascam 424 MK II

Razorblade Fairytales was in fact recorded in great part on this four track cassette machine. In this day of ProTools fanatics and people pirating software left and right to get their album made the clicky pointy way, it may seem bizarre to have chosen to do a lot of this album on cassette. Not tape, cassette! How else to retain a sense of us versus them, punk versus pop, raw versus polished? Hate In The Box set out to make a raw rock record. Knowing that the limitations of cassette recording forced so many great artists to focus on their songs, playing and creativity, they chose to put the same limitations on themselves. The results on Razorblade Fairytales show right they were to do that.

Yamaha PSR-500

Optimus Crime's primary writing tool for Hate In The Box's prior album, Broken Toys, he just couldn't keep himself from going back to it for a few songs, like Cannibal's Love Song. Sold as a consumer oriented keyboard for people wanting to learn piano or play for friends, it's a great keyboard for writing songs because of it's simple sequencing engine. Much, much simpler and zero features. You can record parts, and put them in order. That's it. No editting. Despite the lack of features, this keyboard still haunts the studio.