The Office
Guitars (from left to right): Fernandes 'Sustainer' guitar Fernandes 'Les Paul', one of three custom built for Steve with their Sustainer system (usually only found on the Strat models). Steve's treasured 1957 Les Paul 'Gold Top'

Miking up a piano can be a tricky business!

Dark Matter Paul Ward from Sound On Sound talks to Steve about the making of DARKTOWN... Hackett Studio Info The Terpsichore of Twickenham By Chris Michie (Mix magazine) Hackett's Gear - Guitar Player Sept. '86

Mellotron MK II
"One problem facing all musicians at one time or another is the matter of artistic control and the ability to realize a sound without having the facility to play the instrument responsible for that sound. Multi-track recording gave a single musician the ability to manipulate time by overdubbing a performance to create a multi instrument piece of music but, he still was faced with learning and playing those instruments himself." "In 1946, a clever man named Harry Chamberlin saw a solution to this problem. One day, while playing his home organ, Harry got out a portable tape recorder to record his playing for some friends. After having made the recording, the BIG IDEA struck him. He thought, "if I can make a recording of myself playing, why not build a machine that plays recordings of these (and any other) sounds?". Harry had seen the first sampler..."
"The Mark II has two 35 note keyboards. The tape under each key has three tracks on 3/8 inch wide tape. Six different stations on the tape with three tracks each means that each key can play 18 different sounds. The left hand keyboard is further broken down into two sections. The left side is loaded with rhythms and the right side contains accompaniment and fills. The right hand keyboard has 18 different lead instrument sounds." Taken from the Mellotron website. For all things Mellotron, check out the The Mellotron website or the UK Mellotron Restoration Boys - "The nutters who managed to squeeze a MKII into Steve's underground bunker!!!". "At one point the Mellotron had been described as a Frankenstein keyboard, put together from disembodied parts. But it was definitely alive. It was alive in a very strange way. It had a spooky quality about it which I think modern samplers don't seem to have. Many things that were done on it were never actually recorded. Bits that I heard other people do at various times, and tried to talk them into. It sounds amazing. And what's unreliable about it is the technology so we did a sample of it. We got one in the studio and we sampled everything that it did... before it blew up". From A Conversation with Steve Hackett

The Optigan The Optigan was a kind of home organ made by the Optigan Corporation (a subsidiary of Mattel) in the early 70's. It was set up like most home organs of the period - a small keyboard with buttons on the left for various chords, accompaniments and rhythms. At the time, all organs produced their sounds electrically or electronically with tubes or transistors. The Optigan was different in that its sounds were read off of LP sized celluloid discs which contained the graphic waveforms of real instruments. These recordings were encoded in concentric looping rings using the same technology as film soundtracks.

As the film runs, a light is projected through the soundtrack and is picked up on the other side by a photoreceptor. The voltage is varied depending on how much light reaches the receptor, and after being amplified this voltage is converted into audible sound by the speakers. The word "Optigan" stands for "Optical Organ". Taken from the Optigan Website

Steve was very fond of the Optigan and in fact recorded a track around it entitled "Sentimental Instution". The machine saw active service around the world on many Hackett tours between 1977 and 1981 before retiring undefeated. He still has the machine he bought originally in the Seventies and he's even recently been threatening to use it on an album again!