The Reluctant Keyboardist

"Another Satellite" is a case in point. In a song full of obvious references to outer space, it would have been easy to clutter the arrangement with oddball electronic sounds. Instead, there's little beside a pair of ringing open fifths that modulate from chord to chord. "We wanted to create the impression of space," Gregory explains, "and the best way to do that, I guess, is to leave holes. There are just these big things drifting off into space," he says, describing the fifths, which have a distinctly guitarish sound. "That's Andy's guitar sampled into Todd's Fairlight. We just sampled one guitar chord and then I played the tune on the keyboard." The song ends gently with a single repeated note washed in reverb, like, as Gregory puts it, "a distant radio signal getting fainter and fainter."

Gregory did his first synthesizer programming during the recording of the English Settlement album, for which the band bought their Prophet-5. The sounds on that album resulted from collaborations between Gregory, Partridge, and producer Hugh Padgham, but he characterizes the process as having been "by the seat of our pants, really."

On Skylarking, Rundgren played a large part in the sound design as well as the drum machine programming, working with his own Fairlight ("his rather elderly Fairlight, it must be said," Gregory interjects), DX7, Emulator, and pre-midi LinnDrum. "The only instruments we took over [to America] were about eight guitars," Gregory says. "In fact, to be honest with you, the only keyboards that we actually own are a small synthesizer of mine, a Roland JX-3P. I bought the thing ages ago. We sold our Prophet because we kept going wrong and we needed the money."