Grammy-winning artist and producer Annie Clark - better known under the stage name St. Vincent - has invited Reverb into her studio space to show off some of her gear, discuss her recording ethos and witness a spontaneous jam session.
In the video, Clark describes how she went through a phase of “thrifting” gear on Reverb, deliberately seeking out unpopular pieces of equipment in the hopes of sticking it to the haters. “I had a period of time where I was [doing] the Reverb equivalent of thrifting,” Clark says. “I was like, ‘I know people think that these are terrible machines but I’m going to prove that they’re great!’”
The machine Clark is referring to is an MC-303, a Roland instrument released in the late ‘90s that was the first (and worst, according to some) to bear the name "groovebox". Equipped with a sample-based sound engine, the MC-303 was packed with classic Roland sounds but earned its fair share of criticism thanks to an unintuitive interface and limited sonic tweakability.
Clark admits that she ultimately came to the conclusion that the MC-303 actually “might be kind of terrible”, but that she still found a place for it on the track Big Time Nothing, from her 2024 album All Born Screaming, after spending hours scrolling through the machine’s presets. “I can’t show you [the sound] because it’s totally broken,” she says, “but it’s also not worth repairing”.
Another of Clark’s Reverb finds is a vintage Omnichord, the quirky chord-strumming Suzuki instrument released in the ‘80s. While the (also busted) Omnichord OM-37 shown in the video has no MIDI outputs, Clark says that she made use of a later, MIDI-equipped version of the instrument on several tracks from her 2009 album Actor, sending out “harp-like sweeps” via the Omnichord’s strum plate to trigger other synths in her studio.
Later in the video, Clark embarks on a spontaneous jam using some of her favourite synths and drum machines. Programming a pattern on her Arturia BeatStep Pro sequencer, Clark sends this out to the Vermona DRM1 MKIII drum machine and layers that with snare rolls produced by the Roland TR-8S, mixing the results live on a vintage Boss KM-60 mixer that Clark loves for its distortion.
Clark says that although she loves to jam as much as the rest of us, messing around in the studio can sometimes make her lose sight of her ultimate goal: writing songs. “Sometimes doing this stuff is a distraction from sitting down and writing the song I know I need to write,” she says. “My main passion is actually writing songs - that’s immensely harder than just dicking around in the studio all day”.
