New England Digital Synclavier II

The Synclavier II system was released in 1982 by New England Digitial. It was a digital synthesizer, sampler and workstation, with 16-track memory. It was a competitor to the Fairlight CMI in the early sampling/workstation market.

Sting had acquired his own Synclavier system as early as around March 1984, shortly after finishing the Synchronicity tour. From then on, it became very instrumental to Sting in his composition process. He even commented it was like "having an orchestra at [his] fingertips", and liked the graphics screen with which he could edit individual notes in the score. However, the Synclavier II had the restriction to monophonic sampling. Sting later upgraded to the newer, improved PSMT system with polyphonic stereo sampling capabilities and 32-track digital memory.

Quotes on the Synclavier II
'It was a sort of dream of mine, when I first started to actually write music down on a stave - you know it's impossible to read after half an hour - that it would be great if everything you played on a keyboard immediately transmitted into notation. I was sure one day someone would invent it. And one day I was looking at some roadie's magazine in America - and there it was! The Synclavier did it. I was totally over the moon and it was only then that I got to find out about all the rest of the functions of this amazing machine. And its great fun, it really is. Now it's kind of taken over my life. It takes a lot of technical application which I think is fun, because its about learning something totally new, but there's no way you can use it the day you get it!' (New England Digital promotional interview, 1984)

Further info

 * Synclavier history
 * Electronics & Music Maker, March 1985 (PSMT - upgrade to 32-track memory from 16-track in Synclavier II)